Words

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!”

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We had our end-of-quarter Parent/Teacher Conference yesterday, and we all celebrated how great the J-Man is doing in school.

Since IEPs are all about annual, specific, measurable goals, these four-times-yearly conferences with the teacher are about seeing how he’s meeting the measurements established by those goals. This allows you to make mid-course corrections as needed, argue for more services if your child is way behind on meeting their goals, etc.

It also allows you dedicated time with the teacher to learn all the ways you can supplement your kid’s learning at home. Of course, we’re always working on that with the teacher, but since these meetings occur at the end of the quarter and in year-round school the end of the quarter means three weeks out of school, this is about coming up with strategies to keep the learning going during the break. Combined with the holiday, we actually have 5 1/2 weeks off starting Monday. Yikes!

The classroom he’s in is about way, way more than just the goals on the page, of course, but the IEP is both a good instrument for measuring progress and one of the most important ways of showing what sorts of services and classroom your child needs from year-to-year.

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To preview what Goosie Cards are, visit their web site at GoosieCards.com.

As we’ve chronicled in recent posts (see “My God, He IS Reading!”, “Roy G. Biv”), our son is all about his flash cards lately. They’re not going to displace the Sacred Wooden Letter Blocks of Steadfast Security and Comfort anytime soon, but flash cards are a cornerstone of many of his most important learning activities.

We recently discovered that – at age 3! – he can read many sight word cards (see above posts and “The $64,000 Question…” - and note that he’s trying to read people’s t-shirts now), so Mary and I are all about finding as many different kinds of cards as we can to build on these wonderful skills he’s suddenly developed.

So, in what proved to be a timely e-mail, I was contacted by Tom Stein, COO of Goosie Cards, who asked if I would be interested in trying out some of their cards and reviewing them. This was right up our alley and a great opportunity to try something new with the J-Man, so of course I agreed.

I looked at their web site before the cards arrived and was immediately intrigued (go look now if you haven’t already) but you can’t really appreciate what you’re getting until you hold a Goosie Card in your hand. Once you do, you know immediately that these are light-years beyond the flash cards you get at the store.

Goosie Card (left) next to other flash cards of two other brands.

The cards are practically bomb-proof. The card stock and lamination are of a quality, thickness, and durability unparalleled by anything I’ve ever seen. I think the only way to make them more durable would be to manufacture them out of slate or paving stone. While nothing is technically indestructible in the hands of a toddler, I don’t know whether anyone - child or adult - could put even a nick on them without using scissors or a hacksaw.

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[Note from me: I'm slowly writing a collection of essays and reflections that I hope to someday compile into a book. Over the last however long it's been, I've posted on this blog a few drafts of pieces I'm considering including in the book without actually calling any attention to them, but this time I will. This is a first, rough draft of one I wrote a few weeks ago. Feel free to comment, praise, pan, etc. My plan is at some point - hopefully early next year - to spin these off into a new web site, which will focus on the 'collection-in-progress' (still feels weird thinking of it as a 'book'). Anyway, more on that later. On with the show.]

“What if he never talks?”

This is a question that for a long time we could not bring ourselves to ponder, but it is one that used to follow us everywhere we went. J-Man could do a syllable here and a syllable there, at least enough for us to think he would really talk someday. But as he got older and his peers’ vocabulary exploded, we became disheartened. Then when children many months younger than him started really talking, we became depressed and often despaired.

The worst was seeing toddlers saying “I love you” to their mommies and daddies. We’ve never doubted that J-Man has always loved us without condition. But just as parents need to say it to each other every day, we’d love to hear our kid say it to us too. We became jealous of the other parents. We’d close our eyes and imagine what his sweet little voice would sound like if he could say it to us. And all of our imaginings left us in tears.

For months, everything was “kuh-kuh”, but at least those things had a name. Eventually there came “muh” and “nuh” and a few more. He made up his own versions of one or two-syllable words and we came to understand the piecemeal language he had created for himself. Near age three, he tested almost two-thirds of his life behind ‘typically-developing’ children - barely at a 12-month level - but he was communicating, little by little.

A few days ago, I was talking to a mom whose son is nearing five. He’s completely non-verbal. He has never uttered a single sound that wasn’t a moan or a shriek or some other shapeless noise. She said the following words, and as I type them I can still feel freezing water creeping through my blood as painfully as when I heard her say them.

“What if he never talks?”

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I have one absolute law about Christmas - absolutely no Christmas music until the day after Thanksgiving. I believe in doing one holiday at a time, doing that holiday well, and then moving on to the next one.

But once Thanksgiving is over, Christmas music plays several hours a day at our house. We’re totally into the holidays. If you celebrate other traditions this time of year, we’d be into yours too if we could learn the music.

We finally rolled out of the house today a little before noon to meet up for lunch with the family. On the way home, we were listening to Andy Williams and Bing Crosby, and J-Man seemed to be enjoying the Christmas carols from the back seat. Then he started sounding like he was trying to sing along a little. It was hysterical.

“I’m dreaming of a white…”

“Nee-nee!”

Yeah, we don’t know either, but he was serious about it and we busted out laughing.

“Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…”

“Guh-ul-eh-ssssss!” (J-Man-ese for “Let it snow” we supposed.)

“I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams…”

(Pause, pause, pause, pause.) “Sssssss-kuh-ssssssss” which we are pretty sure is “Christmas” given he said this a few times.

[Speech tidbit - it's not unusual for him when attempting to say two syllables to switch them. It's quite possible he meant to say "kuh-sssss" for Christmas, but he may very well have switched the two and then corrected himself. ]

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There is that in me - I do not know what it is - but I know it is in me.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

- Selections from “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman

Time and again, I’ve encouraged everyone whose child is significantly developmentally delayed to take all their “What Your Child Should be Doing at 142.234505 Weeks” books and chuck them out the window. Don’t even give them to other parents. If you feel guilty about this, recycle them and be good to the earth or something. Personally, I think it’s best to get an oil drum, throw all of them in along with pictures of Dr. Spock and Butthead Bettelheim, and set the whole damn thing on fire.

Still, with our revelation that J-Man is recognizing printed words (typing ‘reading’ is still hard to get used to!), it did get us wondering, Is it ‘normal’ for your average 3.3-year-old child to be doing this? His teacher gave a succinct reply, “Um, no.”

The thing is, I have absolutely no context for what ‘typically developing’ children do anymore.

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[Another event so good it requires two posts!]

We celebrate our 200th post with a monumental achievement by the J-Man. Even though we were quite skeptical before, he really IS reading words!!

We pulled out these ’sight words’ cards we have, which are basically just flash cards with one word per card and nothing else (no pictures, etc. that might give the kid hints). All we did was hold up the cards one at a time and say “What is this?” or “What word is this?” None of that “point to red” or similar kinds of exercises we’ve done before.

And by God, he read them - a lot of them.

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[Another event so good it requires two posts!]

So this morning, the J-man and I are hanging out downstairs, when he goes into the other room, and brings me a set of flashcards, still in the box. Yes, we have many sets of flashcards! On the front of the box was a representation of one of the cards - it had the word WHITE on it, and a picture of a white horse (yeah, I thought they could have come up with something better too).

J-man shows the box to me, then says, “whhhhhiii.”
Me: um, what?
J-man: “whhhhiii”

Me: thinking - did he just read that word?

I get out the actual flashcards, and they are pretty cool - the word on one side, and the picture on the other. I hold up the RED card.
J-man: “eerrrrr”
Me: that’s right! Red!
I hold up the BLUE card.
J-man: “mmmmmbbbbb” (which is as close to the B sound as he can get)
Me: that’s right! Blue!
I hold up the YELLOW card.
J-man: “yyeeehhh”
Me: that’s right! Yellow!
I hold up the GREEN card.
J-man: “gggeeee”
Me: that’s right! Green!

I pick up the little man, run him upstairs, and wake Tim with the news that his son can well and truly read.

He also knows brown, purple, and pink. I listened to him sound out “so” - sssss ooooo. He can read so many words, and we didn’t know!

My kid is brilliant!

Now I’ll be the first to admit that something this significant requires equally significant evidence to convince me this is really happening, but there’s at least something interesting going on here.

J-Man has a picture book - one of those baby-oriented ones with one picture per page. Over time, he’s enjoyed looking at these sorts of books off and on, though not much lately and not really taking any initiative to point out pictures and tell us about them. A couple of days ago, though, he picked up an old favorite that’s been ignored for many months and started telling us about the pictures, which of course we think is great. Then we noticed something he’s never done before.

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