Bright, inquisitive, and sometimes hard to understand…

Yesterday Potamus was a part of an early intervention screening process at school daycare. It’s a part of a grant in the county, and I was happy to take part.

Today, I tried not to panic, when I got a phone call from the screener asking for a callback to discuss his results. She had told me originally that the results were going to be in the mail. Wuht?!

Turns out my kid is bright. Inquisitive. Does well with others. Answers questions with good sentence structure when asked.

And during times of ‘spontaneous language,’ when just observed by her, he has difficulty being understood. This observation is not something out of the blue for us. We’ve noticed. His teachers have noticed. Yes, our kid sometime speaks in a language that sounds like elvish, or Pentecostal tongues.

He’s also the youngest in his class. And when he does speak, he’s expressing complex ideas that, to my untrained child specialist brain, seem far advanced from a 3-almost-4 year old. Like a discussion the other day about how his friends M & J “don’t like things that are different,” when explaining why they “get really angry with me,” because he brings a My Little Pony to school. So while we are exploring the suggestion of, in a few months, having him screened again to see if it’s changed, and I’ve reached out to a speech language pathologist that I know and trust, we also are in the same boat where we feel like our little guy’s brain and mouth are in two developmental spots.

It seems to go in waves. There will be weeks where he’s clear as a bell, and then it seems like he goes through some sort of developmental leap (physical or emotional or even in language learning) where he speaks gibberish and is hard to understand (and is now able to express frustration at us, mostly through deep sighs and body language resembling a teenager), and then one day snaps out of it with an enhanced vocabulary that’s clear as a bell.

Googling hasn’t been helpful, or I’m not using the right search terms.

At any rate, it was nice that there were no big surprises in this screening. Nothing signalling that our parenting gut isn’t right on. And now we get to decide…how much intervention to explore, and how much to wait and see its natural course.

To be honest, I’d rather he see someone to break his picky eating habits…but that’s another entry…

The Power of Words

A few weeks ago Boof and I looked at each other and both proclaimed that we were worried. I think it was sparked by a BabyCenter email that said “your toddler at X months” and basically said that our kid was behind in language development. Which of course freaked us out. We’ve been mostly mellow parents thus far, but certain things hit my vulnerable spots (like gaining enough wait in the first 2 weeks). So we decided that if Potamus wasn’t talking by 2 we’d get him evaluated.

And yet, our speech language pathologist friend says that Potamus is really advanced in understanding complex instructions, and that she’s not worried about him. And clearly we shouldn’t be, either, since I realized that his “idont’reallyknow” noise he makes to say no is him repeating ME when I say “eh, I don’t really know” when I’m trying to say “No,” to Boof, but I don’t want to come outright and say No. And in the past two weeks he’s been saying ‘uh oh,’ “baa (for ball)’ and waa (water) and, shrugging his shoulders and making a noise like “wherediditgo?”

My kid is talking. Granted, he’s clearly not hearing the breaks between my words, since I do tend to speak fast and slur things together. He’s repeating my exact intonation, with phrases coming out like one big word. I’m no longer worried that he’s going to not be talking. In fact, I think he’ll probably be so chatty that I might need to wear earplugs. I swear he also said our dog’s name yesterday.

But Uh Oh is my favorite thing he says. It’s so sweet, especially when he drops something and looks at me with those big eyes. Precious. His language has been slow in coming, that I don’t even think I’ll be able to pinpoint it in his baby book.

In other news, he’s now developed a sweetly sick habit of kissing me…on the mouth…with his snotty nose dripping all over. He loves kissing me, the dog, his stuffed toys, his dolly. It’s so sweet, but also really really germy…..

 

What adorable things are your kids up to right now?

More Teeth

Yes, I can see them now…Potamus definitely has two white teeth buds trying to pop through his bottom gums. Come on babies, let’s do this!

And if having those creeptastic teeth dreams weren’t enough, here’s what a skull looks like with the baby teeth/adult teeth in it:

Now if THAT’s not enough to give you nightmares, I don’t know what is.

Pulling up

Just a few more days, I feel, before I will be chasing him all over the house! Mr. Almost-mobile