by Tim on January 10, 2009
They say that autistic kids have a hard time with ‘receptive language’ – basically their inability to understand what someone is saying and being able to respond appropriately – which I know is usually the case, but today I felt like telling all those experts to go jump in a lake.
C’mon son! If you’re going to display flashes of brilliant receptive language, don’t be a stinker about it!
J-Man: (pulling Velcro straps on shoes and trying to get them off even though it’s cold in the house and his feet were practically frozen five minutes before)
Me: Leave your shoes on, please!
J-Man: Nyeh-nyeh (which is ‘no, no’ and not the other, buzz-off kind of alternative meaning)
Me: Yes, that’s right. No, no.
J-Man: (resumes working to get shoes off, this time while looking me in the eye)
Me: (sensing a confrontation is about to start) What did I say?
J-Man: (pauses with the velcro strap in his hand, pauses a little more) Nyeh-nyeh.
Me: That’s right.
J-Man: (goes back to working to get shoes off, this time while looking me in the eye AND SMILING)
Me: LEAVE YOUR SHOES ON!
J-Man: (not bothering with ‘no, no’ anymore and deciding to go straight to laughter – but with good eye contact – and of course, all while continuing to try to get his shoes off)
Me: OK, it’s ‘time out’ for you!
J-Man: (shooting me a ‘yeah, whatever dude’ look worthy of a teenager)
Me: I told you ‘no’ and you didn’t listen so you’re going to time out.
And so begins a dilemma.
[click to continue…]
by Tim on January 3, 2009
As I described yesterday in the “One Syllable At a Time” post, we’re getting some great mileage out of breaking everything down into these syllable-by-syllable exchanges, going as far as dividing one syllable sounds into even smaller parts as needed.
So, much to our eternal and unending delight, the J-Man has two wonderful sentences he likes to say, provided you do the syllable exchange with him.
We have an “I Want” picture board where he can grab a food picture and stick it at the end of the “I Want ____” part (thanks to the velcro). Then we do:
J: “I”
Us: “I….”
J: “wuhhh-uh”
Us: “want….”
And then he tries to say whatever food it is he picked. It’s getting more common for him to put it together without us and say “I wuhhh-uh” before we have to chime in. Yay! When you think about it, you’ll realize what a fundamental part of our development it is to be able to ask for what we want.
But, of course, our favorite is this (said in a rather dramatic volume):
J: “I”
Me: “I”
J: “luhhhh”
Me: “luhhhh…”
J: “vvvvuuuuuhhhhh”
Me: “love….”
J: “yeeeehhh”
Me: “yeee….”
J: “eeee-oooo”
Me: “you!”
J: “Dah-deh”
Me: “Daddy!”
J: “ah”
Me: “and…”
J: “Ma-ma!”
Me: “Mama!”
Believe me, I’m choking back tears just writing this.
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by Tim on January 2, 2009
Since we’re still in a post-holiday funk around here and about as lively as the furniture, I’m doing a little content recycling today from a recent comment I made to at least get back to posting. I think all the endless eating and football-watching has killed off a bunch of my brain cells!
Over the last few days, we’ve learned some interesting insights into how to get the J-Man to use some more speech. He is more and more able to give us some idea of how much he understands us and is trying to communicate back to us using a combination of word and syllable approximations as part of what I’m calling ’syllable-by-syllable communication’.
‘Syllable-by-syllable communication’ (my made-up term) has turned into a real winner around here once we pushed him toward it. With this, he communicates one syllable of a word using his best approximation, then we repeat it back to him indicating that we heard and understood him, then he continues with his best approximation of the next syllable, and so on. Following this approach, we’ve gotten through entire sentences, stories, etc. But most of all, we’ve been able to differentiate many words for the first time.
For example, any word that started with ‘m’ used to be ‘muh-muh’ or ‘mo-mo’ or something like that, and he wouldn’t go any further, or we didn’t push him enough to fill in more of the syllables. Now, for example, ‘monkey’ goes like this:
[Note - he tends to get a smidge echolalic with syllables.]
J – “Muh-muh”
Me – “Mon”
J – “kee-kuh”
Me – “key!”
And ‘many’ might go like (with J-Man and I alternating): “Meh-muh”; “Meh”; “Nee-nee”; “Nee!”
[click to continue…]
I’m one of the first people to encourage other parents to chuck the milestones books out the window. The ones that tell you what your child should be doing at 75.34 weeks to me do little except make you increase your antacid budget every month. The obvious exception to this is that if you suspect that your child is very delayed in one or more areas, go figure that out both through reading and with your pediatrician and other professionals. There’s a big difference between being 1.8 weeks behind and 18 months behind.
This is probably a blinding flash of the obvious for parents of kids with delays, but after a few months in Early Intervention and therapies and whatnot, you completely lose touch with what ‘developmentally normal’ is. It really is a time warp. At this point, I would have a hard time telling you how far behind our son is. We’re doing things on J-Man Daylight Time and ignoring how most of the rest of the planet tells time. He’ll do it when he does it, has become our motto (at least on our good days).
With J-Man showing some exceptional skills in some areas in the midst of being very delayed on most everything else, we’ve felt the need to go back and figure out what ‘normal’ is for an almost-three-year-old. At a parenting level, I’m not sure how much I’m concerned about this at this point. Like I said, he’ll get there when he gets there, at least I keep telling myself that. However, for purposes of getting him into preschool and doing his IEP, we need to get some handle on where he is (that Present Levels of Performance thing – with the wonderful acronym PLOP).
It’s hard to find to milestones charts that translate well into autism-ese. The obvious problem is that your autistic toddler could easily be two or more years plus or minus what is developmentally ‘normal’ for a three-year-old on these charts. He or she will likely be scattered all over the chart. You have to transpose quite a bit with them, but after thinking through it a bit, I still could get a rough idea.
At the bottom of this post are some links I found to help us get started. Hopefully they’re useful to you as well. I can’t vouch for their complete accuracy or anything, but they’re consistent enough with each other for what I was looking for.
I did discover that J-Man’s letter identification is probably on par with a level of 4-5 years old (he’ll be 3 in a couple of months if you just got here), just minus the ability to say some of them. If he’s in a relaxed state, he can point to any letter you ask for. Lowercase still confuses him for a good half of the letters, but that’s understandable. He’s getting there with numbers and has consistently identified five colors (again, when he’s in a relaxed state). With colors, I usually give him three to choose from (solid-color, construction paper squares) and ask him to point to ‘red’ or whatever. If he goes 10/10, he’ll get the proverbial gold star and we’ll start trying to identify colors in other contexts.
[Worth nothing that if you say something like "point to the green frog" he just stares at the floor. Combining a color and an object - 'green frog' - is too much to sort through as he has to figure out what's green and what's a frog at the same time. So, we just do "point to green" at this point.]
The key is the ‘relaxed state’. If he’s calm, he can do this stuff one to two years beyond age level. Otherwise, it’s a lost cause. Hitting that sweet spot is hard, which is as much the battle as anything. This is totally a sensory processing issue, which we’re working on constantly.
OK, enough of my rambling on. Here are the links I stumbled on. These center on speech, language, and literacy milestones. If you know of others, let us know.
http://www.capitolent.net/speech-milestones.htm
http://www.horizonspeechcenter.com/milestones.html
http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/tnl/lilm/early_literacy/preschool/milestones3-5.html
http://www.childcarelounge.com/articles/xlearningleteracy.htm
