Midweek Journal

The kids really love certain DVDs. Those DVDs get covered with scratches and finger prints. The Alladin DVD gets stuck during one song and plays the first couple of words over and over. Sometimes it becomes frozen on one frame. When that happens, I have to pop the DVD out, puff some air on it, rub it on my sweater, and put in again. Sometimes the hot air and the rubbing does the trick. Sometimes there are deep scratches on the DVD and we just have to fast forward past a scene in the DVD. It's still the same Alladin DVD, but it works differently.

I observed Ian in class yesterday and talked with his teachers about his progress. After two years of grief in an inadequate nursery school, we finally have Ian in a really good school that it is helping him overcome some of his problems. Ian's primary problem is speech. He has a good vocabulary. He knows what he wants to say. He has enormous problems weaving the words together to create sentences.

It's strange, because he actually loves words. He's fascinated by them. He used to love a Baby Einstein video that had people talking in French and Spanish and Japanese. He loved to recite the alphabet in Japanese along with the video. He loves reading words. The teacher knows to not sit him next to a bookshelf, because he'll be too distracted by the words on the spines of the book to hear what she has to say. If he's upset, he'll repeat back your last sentence and turn every word you said into its opposite. But getting out a common sentence effortlessly is difficult for him.

Two neighborhood girls walked by house yesterday on their way home from school. They saw Ian and I playing on the front lawn and shouted out, "Hi, Ian." Ian ran over to them and said, "I'm not your boyfriend," which is a line from a Chowder cartoon. I told him not to say that, because the girls looked freaked out. I told him to say, "How was your day?" He ran back to them and said, "How your day was?" The girls looked amused and said fine. Then he tried to tell them about his day and he said, "Bus.  School great." and then he said a bunch of stuff too fast and the girls looked at me with big amused question marks on their faces.

He's like a stroke victim fishing around for the right words and struggling to put together the words that come so effortless to my four year old niece. 

We're still trying to figure out the right way to teach Ian how to speak. Should he be memorizing key sentences with the hope that those sentences can multiply? Should we be putting him in naturalistic settings and having someone whisper the right things to say at the right time? The debate of the moment is whether or not we should begin to
mainstream him with a younger grade, so his lags in speech aren't so
apparent. His teacher is on the fence about that one, because she's
worried that he'll be bored with the academic work.

His speech continues to be his primary issue. He has other quirks, but all things considered, they are pretty minor. He's giving me a hard time about wearing jeans to school. He gags when watching Jonah eat, but a lot of kids do; Jonah is a pig. He is refusing to eat bread right now. He can't stand the smell of church, so heathen-boy doesn't go to church anymore. He insists on staying in a movie theater until the last credit leaves the screen. He won't go anywhere without his viking hat these days. I have to be very careful to avoid setting up any routines, because later deviations from the routines can cause distress. He is sometimes afraid of TVs. He loves picking at things; a crack in the front steps was turned into a cavern yesterday. I can't let him play outside alone, because he might not hear a car coming.

Maybe we've just gotten used to these quirks, but there's nothing we can't work around. He rarely gets time out now. He has no behavior plan at school.

He is incredibly good at some things. He was reading at three. At four, he was tested in the 99th percentile for reading and reading comprehension. He spent an hour yesterday using Steve's tools to put training wheel on his bike and then off his bike and then back on his bike. He can memorize his spelling words in under three minutes. He learned his times tables from watching Jonah practice on the computer.

Are these great tricks a feature of his disability or is he just a really smart kid? Ian can't be reduced to a disability. A lot of regular kids hate wearing jeans and are picky about their food. A lot of regular kids are very bright. He's a regular kid with a couple of scratches.

It's too easy for outsiders to get distracted by the scratches and not see the entire kid. But he's so much more than the scratches. He's a sweet kid who loved the paper airplane that Jonah made for him
so much that he insisted on putting it next to his pillow when he went
to sleep. He loves his cousins and
cries when they leave. He floats through the world and is delighted by
the simplest of things. I adore that kid.