Look Who's Talking!

MJ is....non-stop in fact. He repeats everything I say; he comes up with a dozen new words daily; he labels everything he sees over and over again (fire truck! red fire truck! big, red fire truck!!!!) and he's been stringing together mini-sentences for months now. In fact, with all of the chatter going on in our household, it's hard to believe that just a few months ago we were worried that MJ wasn't learning to talk.

It's worth mentioning that the wise women of my Mother's generation were never really worried. While my fellow Mommies have complicated charts, pediatric assessments,  and state Health Department questionnaires to track developmental milestones and an infant's progression through them (not to mention the nifty iPhone apps and helpful Babycenter.com weekly developmental emails), they had a much simpler way of gauging these things: "walking around one, talking by two."

But this was before the days of commonplace early intervention, developmental therapy, and language and learning assistance programs for toddlers and preschoolers. There is no doubt these advances are a good thing. Today's dyslexic child isn't labeled "slow" and has just as much chance to read Shakespeare as the next kid. And today's lisps are not a source for teasing, but something that can be remedied before the little one is old enough to become too self-conscious to speak up in class.

Yet, as the medical community has made significant strides in both understanding and treating developmental delays and disabilities, the quiet, patient wisdom of our mothers' generation has been lost. These days it's more in vogue to insist your child needs therapy because he's not gripping a crayon by a year old, when perhaps what he really needs is a little patience and time to grow.

On the developmental scale, being a "late" talker is one of the biggest bugaboos. Expressive and communicative delays can be a red flag for serious disorders that are mushrooming at an alarming rate, like autism. Since these issues seem to plague boys more than girls, pediatricians are constantly on guard for a male toddler who is slow to reach speech milestones.

So, when MJ wasn't saying "mama" or "dada" (or even trying) by age one, I knew they weren't going to just look the other way. The pediatrician asked me a few questions about it and told me he should have at least one word by this point, or names for Mommy and Daddy at a minimum. Because he didn't, she was "supposed" to refer me for an assessment by California Early Intervention programs. However, by the end of the exam, she observed MJ to be an otherwise socially engaged, bright, and "unusually curious" child - and decided he was just focused on learning other things. His lack of speech was no cause for concern...yet.

When I returned at 15 months and reported that MJ still had no words, not even Mama or Dada, she refrained from sounding the alarm bell, but was more cautious. She gave me the number for the Early Intervention program and encouraged me to call to have him screened, "just in case".

I didn't.

I wasn't worried. He seemed normal to me, his interactions with me were just fine, and he was a happy, bright, and focused toddler. He made plenty of sounds, just no words. No "Mommy", no "Daddy", no "baba" or any other baby talk.

Plus, he had spoken two words to me before. He walked into the kitchen one day, pointed to his eye and said "eye". The next day, he pointed to mine and said "eye". A few weeks later, he pointed to the vacuum and said "accuum". Despite my prompting and praise, he didn't repeat these words again. And he didn't add any more to his vocabulary of two.

By the time MJ's 18 month appointment came around, I began to get worried myself. Even the most conservative of charts indicated that a child who wasn't speaking a few words by 18 months was a cause for concern. Could I really go into his 18 month appointment with a toddler who had said two words twice in his life and not have even screened him for delays?

To be fair, MJ had started developing his own language. He had known his shapes by identification since about 13 months, but couldn't (or wouldn't) label them in speech. At about 16 months, I started noticing that he was always saying the same sound when he pointed to a triangle: "didee". Not long after he "named" all the shapes, with oval being the only one sounding even remotely like the real term. He also developed other words, such as "aye" for "hot" and "ougen" for water or outside, depending on the context.

In reality he was talking a bit, he just wasn't speaking our language.

I wasn't sure if this was normal. And, to be honest, I was a little annoyed. I'd done everything I was supposed to from day one to encourage proper speech development. I talked to him as an infant and I didn't use babytalk. I echoed his coos and baby sounds back to him. I sang to him. I read to him at every nap and bedtime since he was three months old. I didn't let him watch TV and we played plenty of rhyming and cause and effect speaking games. I'd done everything according to the book, but I had an 18-month old who was way behind according to the book. And now he was even making up his own words by the dozen.

I decided to make the call.

The intake nurse at the Early Intervention center asked me some questions about MJ. Did he point at objects and ask me to name them? Did he mimic me? When he wanted something, did he point at it and grunt or make other noises?

Nope, he didn't. And they wanted to see him, just in case.

While I was still fairly confident there wasn't anything deeply wrong with MJ, I decided to go forward with the exam. I had nothing to lose (the exam is free) and I figured it would give me additional insight into how my child was learning and growing. Besides, if there was something wrong, I would feel badly for not catching it as early as possible.

First came the speech evaluation. The therapist visited our home and asked me a variety of questions about MJ's ability and his communication patterns. Then, through a series of play exercises, she attempted to gauge his expressive capacity. First, she showed him a ball and tried to get him to say "ball" or "b, bbb" before she'd give it to him. Then, she showed him a certain way to play with a mechanical toy and asked him to do it. The purpose was to evaluate his receptive abilities - how well did he understand language and could he understand and follow one step commands?

All she was really asking MJ to do was play. But he did not play along.

I'll never forget what she said as she packed up the toys.

"He knows exactly what I'm asking him to do; he just doesn't want to do it. He wants to be the alpha and if he does it my way, he can't be in charge. He's very strong natured."

Yup, I smiled. That's my boy. :)

She wrote up a report that indicated he was at an appropriate or slightly lower age level in every area of communication except expressive communication. There, she rated him with a moderate to severely delayed capacity of a 6-9 month old (ouch) and recommended he have speech therapy.

Next came the general developmental assessment. Once again performed in our home (so convenient - your tax dollars at work!), the child development specialist asked me a series of questions about MJ's physical and mental abilities. Then, she brought out a variety of toys to test his fine and gross motor skills, cognitive abilities, reasoning, and spatial awareness.

He blew her away. He could stack 8 blocks, not 4 or 5 like he was supposed to be able to do. He started completing the shape puzzle before she even finished putting it down (calling out the self-appointed names he'd given them), and he figured out how to get the tiny beads out of the bottle (turn it upside, Mom!) within 2 seconds.

She rated MJ above age level by two to six months on all abilities except large gross motor skills - he wasn't jumping or kicking a ball yet (no surprise there, have you seen my athletic abilities?) In her opinion, MJ was sailing past his peers in all areas but speech. She wasn't concerned.

What to do?

The assessments confirmed what I already knew. MJ was exceptionally bright and exceptionally strong willed child. He appeared to have every capacity to learn and use language, he just didn't care to. He'd rather stack blocks like a 2 year old and solve puzzles that were six months too advanced for him.

I struggled with what came next. I knew I needed to make a call on whether or not to get MJ speech therapy. Our insurance would cover it and it would be offered in our home thanks to state funding; so it wasn't a matter of convenience or money. Up until this point, the majority of our parenting decisions had been based on those simple criteria. But this time, we needed to consider something greater: Was this the right choice for our child and his future?

We talked about it. We prayed about it. I consulted the Grandmas, other Mamas, and the collective wisdom that is Facebook. I discussed at length with our pediatrician and MJ's Aunt Anne Marie, who is a highly skilled pediatric speech pathologist herself. (Boy did I luck out with that one, huh?)

In the end, we opted to forgo the speech therapy. Not because I thought he didn't need it, not because I thought it wouldn't help, and not because I just wanted to be patient. Those all would have been good and valid reasons to turn the services down, but they weren't the real one.

We didn't move forward because of what I learned from his evaluations. No, not that he was behind on expressive communication or that he excelled at spatial awareness. I already knew that. And I had already known that he was a strong willed and independent child. But in watching him interact with the therapists, who were each very capable, kind, and skilled, I saw something very telling: MJ didn't want to be told how to learn.

He didn't want to play with the toy according to the instructions he'd been given, or even necessarily within the purpose that the manufacturer intended. He didn't care if he wasn't following directions or doing it "wrong"; he had a goal and he was set on achieving it. He didn't want to stop stacking blocks at five or six just because he'd completed the task; he wanted to go to 10. And when it all fell down, he wanted to try again, and again, and again until he was satisfied with his own progress - no matter how long it took.

It didn't matter to him that in one scenario, the assessor felt he wasn't succeeding; or that in the other she felt he already had and was ready to wrap it up long before MJ was. He wanted to decide that for himself, according to his own parameters.

It was clear. MJ wasn't ready for this kind of focused instruction, even if it was designed to help him. The fact is, a toddler has plenty of time to develop a learning style and embrace schooling - traditional or otherwise, but that time had not yet come for my son.

I couldn't see signing him up for what could have been weekly frustration. I couldn't see creating what he might perceive as an adversarial learning environment and risking that he develop a distaste for instruction before he'd even had a chance to set foot in preschool. And I couldn't see putting him through all that just to meet a milestone simply because it would make me feel better, when he'd given me absolutely no reason to suspect his delay was anything more than him just taking his own sweet time to reach it.

So, we decided to wait. If he wasn't talking by two, we'd do something about it.

Well, MJ turned two just a few weeks ago. I can't even tell you what his vocabulary is at these days; I've lost count. 100 words? 200? 500? I don't know; there's hardly a word he doesn't know, and if he doesn't know it, I tell it to him once and he's got it down. He speaks in mini-sentences, phrases, and uses adjectives and prepositions correctly (Well, almost correctly - he did say "under-the-neath" instead of "underneath" for a few weeks, which was adorable. Sadly, he has already outgrown this.)

He can count to 10, name all his shapes, colors, and letters. He knows the names of his family members and uses them all the time. (I love the fact that he actually thinks his cousin Becca's name is "Becca Boo", which is her nickname.) He sings. Just yesterday he sang "Twinkle, Twinkle, little star" without  cause. I nearly died it was so cute. He repeats anything I tell him, no matter how big the word.

And, just last night, MJ said his first true, big kid sentence. He had been begging for a Christmas tree (he's obsessed) and we finally got a stand for ours. We plugged in the tree and, upon seeing it light up, he said "Oh, I love it!"

I happen to believe that a child's first sentence says a lot about who they'll become. The first complete idea they express is a little window into their person hood, what matters to them, and how they view the world. My first sentence was "Don't do that me", which is fitting. I've never taken any crap from anyone and, to this day, I'm still a tough chick (just not outdoorsy, don't expect me to be tough in mud or without indoor plumbing.)

That's why MJ's first sentence makes me so happy. Sure, he shares my passion for Christmas and all things seasonal décor, which I love. But what gets me the most is the pure bliss and full-on wonder of that precious phrase. Throughout his life, MJ has been an intense and often serious child. To see him choose an expression of pure abandon and utter delight brings me immeasurable joy. There were plenty of times I wasn't sure I'd ever see that in him.

Yes, he will always been my serious little boy; he will probably always be intense; and he'll likely always be strong willed, independent and have his own ideas about things should be done. But, when I swallow my own Mommy pride and patiently let him come into his own, on his own terms and timeline, I give him freedom. And in that freedom he finds the courage and liberty to step outside of himself and be more full of more joy, abandon, and whimsy than I ever imagined.

I'm so glad I got to see it. It was worth the wait.