Language Acquisition

Watching Sean learn to communicate has been fascinating. I am not sure why it is so much more fascinating then watching Alex and AJ learn to speak. I know with Alex I was so busy dealing with Carter that I couldn’t sit back and enjoy either of their development. With A.J. I spent a lot of time worrying about how his speech was developing and if it was normal. I think because I am older, have more life experience and have learned to appreciate normal growth and development that I stand in awe at the miracle of speech development. Watching Sean learn to communicate also causes me to reflect on my father’s Alzheimer’s as I watched him lose the ability to communicate. As my dad lost his abilities I always thought how much it was like being a baby in reverse. One day you have a skill, the next day you don’t as opposed to one day you don’t have a skill, the next day you do.

Yesterday Sean got really mad at me because he wanted a bottle and I said no. He clinched his fist put them down by his side, turned red and yelled at me “NAA FIN.” He kept yelling it over and over. I said “Sean, I know you’re really mad but I don’t understand what you are saying.” He said even louder “NOT FEND!” Ah ha, I understood, he was telling me I was not his friend! The ultimate non four lettered insult given by his sisters. I was just amazed that he had the concept that when someone made you mad you could (hopefully) retaliate by telling them you were not their friend. How did he learn that? How did he learn that? I know he hears it from his sisters but that he can turn around and use it in an appropriate situation is awesome.

Carter at four

Speech just comes so easy to Sean. He can understand concepts such as, back in a minute, dads at work, let’s read a book, you are making me sad, or you are being naughty. These are not sentences involving nouns, they are verbs and adjectives. He loves to read books and he gets talked to a lot but we don't sit down and "teach" him to talk. I guess to some parents this is normal but I think back to Carter. Carter didn’t learn to communicate verbally until he was four plus years old. He had a few words as a toddler, mama, dada, baba. I remember hearing other kids talking and thinking they were all gifted and Carter was just normal. We read books to Carter, took him to the children't museum, did all the "good" parent things, surely we thought, he would be fine. The pediatrician never said anything and Carter was my first so I really didn’t think there was anything wrong and I certainly didn’t want to believe there was anything wrong. I knew he was hard to take care of and did things differently but everyone is a little different. Heck, if my doctor wasn’t going to tell me there was something wrong why look for trouble. I would tell the doctor that Carter didn't eat and had long tantrums but she never said much. After Alex was born and was talking better than Carter I could not deny that Carter had serious speech delay and was not developing normally. Carter had echolalia and by the time he was four he could repeat what people said but had no comprehension. I took Carter and had him tested at Duke and UNC. UNC diagnosed the autism and put him in a special preschool. Teaching Carter to communicate involved four hours of speech preschool three days a week, individual speech sessions two days a week and an hour of speech every afternoon at home. If I taught him the word shoe he could not apply it to anything other than the shoe I showed him so for every word I would have to have a virtual plethora of visual aids. If I wanted to teach him a word like tree, I would have to show him a tree, a picture of a tree, a toy tree. So it was for every noun. We had baskets full of toys and cards (and m&m’s for rewards). We had baskets of soft things, hard things, scratchy things, hot things, cold things….. Every single word or concept literally involved hours of teaching. It was exhausting.

When all this was happening we lived in an old mobile home in a trailer park in North Carolina. Now some people may say there are nice trailer parks. Well, this wasn’t one of them. There was a pack of pit bulls running around the park barking. My ex decided had had enough and went outside with a gun (yes, he had a gun, we were living in a trailer park what do you expect) and he shot into this pack of dogs. Holy crap, he shot one and killed it while Carter was watching. (We later saw a picture of the dog at a country store “Have you seen Skippy?” We felt bad so we drove by the address on the poster and were going to tell them their dog got hit, we weren’t going to say by what. The double wide where Skippy had lived had confederate flags for curtains and KKK spray painted on their mail box. We decided to just let the Skippy be MIA). At speech the next day they had Carter and another little boy named Eric playing a game. One would pull an item out of a box hold it up and the other child would say what the item was used for. I was standing outside the room behind a one way mirror with a couple of medical students observing. Eric pulled out a toy gun; Carter looked at it and said “shoot doggie.” The medical student said “what did he say?” I said, “I don’t know, I didn’t hear him.” His first correct response!

Carter can definitely communicate now but he still doesn’t get nuances, sarcasm or inflection. Those are really hard things to teach. Watching Sean just soak everything up like a sponge is fun. How can something be so incredibly hard for one person and easy for another? I remember asking a psychiatrist what he thought Carter’s future would hold and he said while he couldn’t predict the future we needed to understand that Carter would never be able to live on his own or have a regular job. Ha, ha doctor, you were wrong. When I get frustrated with Carter I have to take a step back and remember how far he comes. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if he had not gotten all the speech therapy and hours of work.

Kids are amazing!

These pictures have nothing to do with my blog. Sean had gymnastics today then we went to Chuck e Cheese with Catherine and her boys Sean had fun. Catherine and I both decided that one hour and 15 minutes at Chuck e Cheese seemed like a lot longer. That place is so noisy. The kids had fun and would have stayed longer.