Busman's Holiday

For a change I will be on an IEP team and not have to do any of the paperwork.  Happy was assessed by the Minneapolis Public Schools birth to three team on Wednesday and yesterday and she does indeed qualify for special ed services.  The concerns are not huge, but enough to warrant a little extra help from a physical therapist and a teacher will help monitor her language, feeding, and other cognitive development.  Obviously I can handle the speech and language aspect but that is not the role I want to play with my own child, yet I find myself wanting to analyze and work on it anyway.

It will be awhile before we get the full report from the team, but basically Happy's adaptive, functional, social, and non verbal skills are developing just fine.  She is 1.4 standard deviations below the mean with her language development and further behind in her motor development (the teacher said 1st percentile but that can't be right because Charlotte wasn't that low and Happy is further than long than she was).  So we will have a teacher and physical therapist come to our house around once a month to monitor her progress and give us things to work on at home.

Regarding the motor aspect, Happy is personally focussed on walking and standing.  You can tell she wants to walk like her sister more than she wants to learn how to do anything else.  I would say 75% of her play is motor based: climbing, cruising furniture, crawling, moving, trying to stand.... So we might see some nice gains over the next few months.  Happy's IEP goal is to walk in a stable fashion.

In terms of feeding, her tolerance of textures is improving.  Emily has a good theory.  Happy's teeth emerged in an unusual order.  The top four teeth came in  months ago and the bottom two just came in over the last two weeks.  It seems like now that she has her lower teeth she is much more comfortable eating different textures besides puree.  But she still cannot drink from any kind of a cup.  The physical therapist said this is likely due to her low muscle tone.  Charlotte had the same problem with cups and her physical therapist said the same thing.  So we will have an IEP goal for Happy to drink from a cup independently.

For communication, we all want Happy to communicate with sign, gesture, and words.  Well, except Charlotte and Happy could care less about this.  They are quite content babbling back and forth to each other.  So Happy's motivation to talk is not as strong as her desire to walk.  Oftentimes a kid like Happy will appear to behind in many areas when really they are only behind in one.  This is because the kid is so busy working on the one thing she can't do that she will ignore the other things she could also be working on.  In other words, a little 14 month old brain can really only focus on one area of development.  And because motor development is slow-going, she has no cognitive resources left to work on her speech and language development at the same time so she lags in that area.

At the risk of going too far down the clinical path, this is the distinction between a disorder and a delay.  The gross motor is a disorder and Happy will not catch up to her peers without intervention from a specialist.  The communication issues are a delay and once Happy gets to working on it, she will take off on her own.  The teacher assessing Happy basically suggested this in not so many words.

Kind of an interesting distinction between Happy and Charlotte.  Charlotte's language skills and fine-motor skills are, frankly, well above average and always have been.  For the first 18 months of Charlotte's life she had little to no interest in walking or any gross motor.  She was quite content to sit in one place and look at books or play with one toy, or sit with us and look at books.  So of course her language and fine motor took off.  Meanwhile, Happy really wants to walk and is focussed on that.  Looking at books and playing with one toy gets in the way of her meeting that goal, so her language stands to develop more slowly.

But I also think that Happy just doesn't have the speech motor skills to imitate speech.  She will imitate all sort of non-speech sounds and babble away with Charlotte.  She will point Nacho Average Cat and say two sentences of nonsense.  So she can connect sounds but if you ask her to imitate just one sound and she knows it is attached to a word, she can't do it.  I tried to get her to make the /m/ sound yesterday and she pursed her lips and blew air out her nose.

Like I said upfront, I do not want to be her Speech Language Pathologist.  But it is clear to me that she will get to talking when she is ready and to push her to talk now is unfair to her.  In the meantime, we'll use sign and gestures to help Happy find ways to communicate and not be frustrated.  A Speech Language Pathologist ethically really can't even work with a kid like Happy until she is two or three years old because chances are good she will get caught up on her own over the next eight months.  The youngest non-autistic kid I saw at my old job was 20 months and it didn't feel right to me to be servicing that kid but that wasn't my call.  In general we didn't start seeing kids until they were over 24 months, unless autism or a significant cognitive disorder was suspected.

At the end of the day, her disposition and social skills, and engagement with her parents and sister exceed any expectations I could have for her.  She is going to be fine and time is on her side.  I am not worried but recognize that she needs a little more help than her mom and dad can give her.

And there is the overriding rule of child development: kindergarten in the great equalizer.  Kids take their own path in which skills they develop and ignore and then they all meet at roughly the same spot by age six or seven.  Happy has five or six years to figure it all out, and there is one final truth about her, it is that she likes to carve out her own path.

Therapy Upates

1. Charlotte has graduated from Physical Therapy but will be reassessed in six months.  She still has exercises to do each night to help her along but the physical therapist was extremely pleased with how Charlotte has progressed.  She said Charlotte will always be a bit behind in her gross motor skills but that fact that Charlotte has progressed as far as she has is amazing.  Good job Charlotte .  She worked hard in therapy and did her nightly exercises with us with minimal complaint (usually she asked to do them).  So the credit truly does go to her.

2. Now Charlotte is beginning Occupational Therapy, beginning tomorrow.  I am anticipating a short course, but have been in the business of kids long enough to know that such predictions are often proven wrong.   We are going to get some help for some issues she has with sensory integration.  About four months ago I began thinking, "If Charlotte were a kid I was seeing at my old job, I wold have referred her parents to an Occupational Therapist for a sensory integration assessment."  At that exact same time, Charlotte's physical therapist told Emily we may want to have Charlotte assessed by an Occupational Therapist for sensory integration issues because Charlotte was freaking out about environmental sounds most kids her age no longer worry about.

Also, Charlotte is pretty intolerant of any moisture and dirt on her.  So she will do some activities in Occupational Therapy to desensitize her reactions to this.  And then I need help on how to help Charlotte cope with her disdain for environmental noises like thunder and trucks.  I think we hit rock bottom a few months ago, in terms of how much it was bothering her and she is starting to self-regulate a little better.  But it is still bugging her to the point that it is impacting her quality of life.

And I need to know when to intervene and when to let her sort it out on her own.  The Occupational Therapist will help give us effective, clinically-based strategies.  My instinct is to let Charlotte learn to figure it out on her own, but few weeks ago there I was, at dinner time, feeding Charlotte like a baby so she could cover her ears without interruption because she heard distant thunder once over a 30 minute period.  That is no way for her or I to live.  There are obviously better solutions out there and Charlotte, like most kids, will be more receptive to learning about and using these better solutions if they come from an adult teacher/helper, rather than from a parent.

 3. Happy will be assessed by the Minneapolis Birth to Three Team (special ed) for low muscle tone.  She is not yet standing alone and the pediatrician identified low muscle tone at Happy's 12 month wellness check.  So she has low muscle tone like her sister, just not as bad.  I know she won't qualify for services and we received excellent recommendations from Charlotte's physical therapist on things to do at home (hence the crawling around on the air mattress video) to help the motor development.  But I wouldn't mind the birth to three team taking a comprehensive look at Happy and giving us their feedback and recommendations.  She is behind in feeding, talking, and gross motor.  I'm not at all concerned at this point but I'd rather have her on the radar than not, and would like to hear what recommendations they have.  A team of experts looking at your kid's development never hurts.

My hunch is Happy is going to be standing on her own and walking in the next one to three months.  In terms of speech and language, her language seems okay because she is using sign and is good, not great, with receptive language.  I think her speech motor skills need a little more time to develop before she gets more words.  So far she says, "Hi" and "night night" and maybe "Mama" and "Dada."  About two weeks ago at lunch stared right at me, held up a banana and said, "Yu....      me" (yummy, which I often say to her).  It took so much effort that I can see why she is not talking more at this point.  Meanwhile, her disposition, self-regulation, patience, social skills, and play skills are pretty awesome.

The World According To Charlotte, pt 8

Charlotte was getting dressed yesterday morning and kept on talking about "in-sleeve shirts" and "out-sleeve shirts."

It didn't take long for Emily and I to figure out that Charlotte was talking about long-sleeve and short-sleeve shirts.  Your arms are in your shirt when you wear an "in-sleeve shirt" and they are out when you wear an "out-sleeve shirt."

Makes sense to me.

Cute Kid Alert

Two and a half is such a fun age. Charlotte is exploring and learning about the world everyday and I love it when she shares her observations. Having a new baby sister has exposed her to many new things and she is always asking, "what's that?" She often comes up with her own names for things and phrasing,  including:

"cloth burp" = burp cloth
"office doctor" = doctor's office
"sound poop" = a fart
"bicycle" = tricycle, and she will correct you
"beep beep truck" = any maintenance or construction truck, which require her to wear her sunglasses for protection
"where it is?" = where is it?
"what I'm doing?"= what am I doing?
"I'm number two." = her answer when asked how old she is

and one more

"egg greens and ham"

And So It Begins

In the spirit of the Spurs pending finals matchup against the Miami Heat, this video seemed fitting.  It appears that Tim Duncan just discovered he has arms.  Well, Charlotte has made a similar powerful yet simple discovery: the combination of "what's" with "that" yields amazing influence over conversations and parents.  I am happy to indulge her, even if I know she knows the answer.

It's only fair.  Whenever we look at books, we both know I am often asking her wh- questions that I know she knows the answer to.  So it stands to reason that she can, in turn, ask me "what's that" questions, even if we both know that she knows the answer.

Wow there was a lot of theory of mind going on in that last paragraph.  I'm glad I'm not reading this post to Charlotte out loud because then she'd ask me "what's that" about theory of mind, and I'd feel obligated to explain it to her in a way she'd understand.  In the meantime, you can imagine what the bulk of our conversations have been like lately.  A lot of her asking me "what's that" and a lot of me trying to find a short honest answer.

I had no problem working around these questions when I was working with kids Charlotte's age.  Funny how the rules change when it's your own flesh and blood, in terms of what you let go and work around and what you don't.

Das Mystery Solved

Over the weekend Charlotte kept on saying "nein" for "no."  Emily and I were joking that she is becoming German and just figured it was a coincidence as Charlotte sometimes has her own way of saying things for a day or two and then things return back to normal.  But we were still not sure what the heck she was saying.

Well when Emily dropped Charlotte off at daycare today, Mr. Al was mid-lesson teaching the kids to count to ten... in German.  So it's safe to assume he has taught them "ja" and "nein" along the way.

Language Post

Warning: Boring

Over the past 48 hours, and yes, the window seems to be that specific Charlotte made this sudden jump with her use of personal pronouns.  She is finally sorting out how to use "me" vs. "you" and "my" vs. "your" and all the other first and second person pronouns that change according to who is talking.  

As an aside, a hallmark language sign in kids on the autism spectrum is an inability to ever sort this out. These kids will often use "I" for "you" and "you" for "I" for example, which makes sense, when you consider abstract thought and perspective taking is really hard for these kids.  So when their dad says, "It's my turn" they think "my" always means the other person, and never get that the meaning flips depending on if you are talking or listening.

But Charlotte does not have autism and she is outgrowing that error pattern.  She still says "carry you?" when she wants me to carry her up the stairs but other than that she is pretty adept at flipping the pronouns around, much more so than when the weekend started.

And then today we were taking Pancho for a walk and she was using "us" and "our" for the first ever.  She was telling me how Pancho was going to "walk with us" and how the snow shovel was "our snow shovel."  Kind of neat to see that just happen in a blink of an eye.  

I'm so used to having explicitly teach these concepts in creative and endless ways, so I continue to take note when it happens so organically and quickly, like it is supposed to.  So none of this is probably interesting to anyone but me, since I am describing language development in over 90% of all kids.  But to me it is noteworthy when I spend my workdays seeing the kids who are not in this 90% group.

Crappy Unimaginative Book Spark Imagination In Child

A few months ago the art teacher at work came by my office and asked me for some manila folders.  I don't know how life is for teachers in other schools, but we pretty much have to buy all of our own supplies aside from computers and paper for copying and printing.  So it is a bigger favor than you'd expect for me to give her a stack manila folders.  I gave her a stack in the name of a happy workplace and as a thank you, the next day, she gave me a stack of Hello Kitty books for Charlotte.  And by "gave me," I mean unloaded on me yet another stack of random crap she has and is trying to get rid of.  Pretty good trade: I'll give you the trash I was about to take out for those folders you'll eventually need and bought with your own time and money.

So I brought the books home and didn't think much of it until.... Charlotte found them and fell in love with them.... and Emily and I quickly hated them.  I can allow for the text in the book to be horrible because the books are meant for emerging readers.  Like Emily says, a computer probably wrote them.  But a computer also drew them.  It is the crappy artwork that drives me batty.  And the art teacher gave me the bleeping books.  Irony.













Alas, the books remain.  And Charlotte continues to loop back to them and want to look at them nonstop for two or three days straight before moving on to the next step in her book cycle.  This morning, Emily and Charlotte read the timeless classic Hide-and-Seek six times while I was out running.  It is probably no coincidence she has insisted on wearing her Hello Kitty boots for the rest of the day.

Later Charlotte and I went to Seward Co-op which is still her favorite place on earth.  When we got home, Pancho wanted to go outside and Charlotte did not want to come inside.  So I left the two of them out there while I put the groceries away.  Five minutes later, Pancho and Charlotte were on the deck together.  I wanted to show how one of them could self-entertain and the other was co-dependent. I had this whole post in mind about dogs, toddlers, and how seeing the two of them together made me miss Adria.  We used to debate at what age a toddler becomes smarter than Pancho.  Anytime one of her grandchildren would exhibit a new skill she would ask me in a very self-assured tone, "So, now who is smarter?"  And I'd always find a way to show how Pancho was still smarter.  To see Charlotte talking away, playing independently, and co-dependent Pancho doing nothing but starting at the door, I was going to give a tip of the hat to Adria.  I was going to use the video to acknowledge that it is clear that Charlotte has surpassed Pancho's intelligence across the board.  It's okay Pancho, you're still smarter than the cats.

But then around 20 seconds into the video, something kind of funny happened.  Charlotte had no idea I was filming her.  I could here her saying  "Hide and seek.  Hide and seek" (I am not sure if this is audible in the clip below) before poking her head from one side of the support beam on the deck to the other, as if it were a tree, and saying "It is me."  The close observer will note that this is exactly what the stupid dog (and all the other stupid Hello Kitty friends) is doing in Hide and Seek.  This is the first time I've seen her act out a scene from a book.

And so the Hello Kitty books remain in our library.

Cripes.

Conversation with Charlotte #59

Charlotte's book-of-the-moment for about two days was If You Give a Moose a Muffin. We read as part of her bedtime routine three nights ago and she asked for it in the morning.  She will often ask for the book we read the night before.

Once Charlotte was out of her crib she was milling about her room, still holding the book.  So we started talking about it.   We talked about how if you give a moose a muffin, he will indeed eat it.  And then at some point I told Charlotte "If you give a moose a muffin it will ask you to do a zillion things before finally doing the thing you wanted it to do in the first place.  Kind of like asking a two year old to do something.  What do you think?  If you give a Charlotte a muffin..."

So she just looked at me for a second or two, looked down at the the book, and said, "If give a moose a muffin.... eat it."

And that there is a language milestone.  Charlotte's first complex sentence.  She doesn't get full credit because, as we say in the industry, she required delayed imitation and open-ended sentence modeling to get there.  But I'll take it.  If you give a Charlotte an open-ended sentence, she'll give you a complex albeit telegraphic sentence.

Behind the Scenes

Charlotte has made another small jump outwardly in showing her view of all things remote and abstract.  As Emily blogged yesterday her representational play is taking off, which is always nice for a parent to see because it rules out the last round of cognitive and learning delays or disorders someone like me has to worry about for awhile.  She is talking about things from the past all the time.  Suze still lives in Texas and tonight we were looking at a Richard Scarry book, as per usual, and she pointed to the fox or pig or dog or whoever was piloting a plane and said, "Suze!"  That's right, my mom is some perpetually smiling zoo or farm animal that flies airplanes.  I wanted to scold Charlotte so being so off-base but I decided to let it go.

So seeing what nuggets Charlotte pulls from the past continues to be fun but here are some bigger, although not all that huge, leaps she's made.

1. Out of nowhere on Friday she started talking about the zoo and then finally said, "Go zoo?  Daddy go zoo?  Charlotte go zoo?  Mommy go zoo?"  Maybe they talked about the zoo in her new school/daycare (Edgecumbe Montessori).  I asked her what she wanted to see at the zoo and she said, "otters."  Sure enough last month with Suze we went to the zoo and Charlotte saw the otters.  I asked what she remembered about the otters and she said, "Otters funny.  Otters swimming in a water."

Damnit, she nailed it.  I had not choice but to oblige and yesterday we were at the zoo.  We had just arrived, were one minute into thawing out near the indoor exhibits, when she insisted we go see the otters first.

A few of you reading this know that one of the many rants I have about Facebook right now is all the people bragging about how they went running in the cold.  There is nothing easier to do outside in the winter than run.  You have high tech gear on, you're doing this for leisure, and you are moving the entire time.  It really is no big deal.  And A LOT of people do it.

You know what is a big deal?  You know what A LOT of people don't do?  Stand out in the single digits, not moving at all for fifteen minutes, in what is essentially a wind tunnel, watching someone else  watch otters.  That activity is three times colder than going for a stupid run.  Fifteen minutes we stood there.  Love is funny that way.  No one else could have made me agree to those fifteen minutes besides Charlotte and every minute was awesome (and she was plenty warm by the way... she got sick of my checking in on her).

2. She has also been talking about the museum (she only know the Children's Museum).  After Physical Therapy on Friday we got into the car and she said, "Museum?"  I don't know if that was a specific request so much as a comment that she really didn't want to go to her new daycare, because it's new, and man wouldn't it be nice if the two of us chilled at the Children's Museum.  Anyway, per Emily. she spent a good chunk of the morning today lining her toy animals up to go the zoo (bus man's holiday) and then to the Children's Museum.  So clearly that stayed with her or was always with her.

3. Tonight she randomly did something kind of cool.  As we were going upstairs to bed, with no context whatsoever, she said, "Balloon, balloon!" and then acted like she was blowing up a balloon.  The two of proceeded to mime blowing up balloons for five minutes or so and she thought it was hilarious.  I have no idea where this came from.  I assume she is picking up a few things from Montessori.  Either way, it is fun to see the little brain of hers in action.

Other news:

1. She did indeed start a new daycare.  She is now in a Montessori with a nice range of kids from infants on up to pre-schoolers.  As expected, Emily had to deal with a lot of Charlotte's tears at drop-off time (well day one was more screaming per Emily and then when I picked her up the teacher said it took Charlotte half an hour to calm down after Emily left).  She'll be fine.  She is adjusting as quickly as we figured she would.  She still talks about Paula (her previous day care provider)  and the kids she played with there, so I think she misses that.  But I predict by the end of the week she'll be all in with her new place.  Like I told Emily, Charlotte is going to forget all of this in a year.  We are the ones who remember it all.  And once she is loving her new school we can always go back and see Paula and the kids Charlotte will remember from there.

2. Charlotte's Physical Therapist arranged for a therapy dog to come and help out with our sessions.  So now Charlotte has a dog doing PT with her.  I forgot it's name... Sandy?  I keep asking Charlotte but she says something that could be Sandy but it could be ten other names.  Regardless, that dog has really made a difference but not how you'd expect.  Charlotte likes the dog, but is really so hung up with working through all the demands we are asking of her.  So it is hard for her to let go and interact with the dog the same way she does our pets.  The intent was for the dog was to relax the dynamic of "do this hard activity" and "do that activity you're uncertain about doing." But that hasn't played out.  Instead what the PT and I have ended up doing is using the dog as a decoy to play off of Charlotte's work avoidance.  So if Charlotte bulks at doing something, we just ignore Charlotte and have the dog do the thing we want Charlotte to do, heap attention and praise on the dog and all of a sudden Charlotte is doing it too.  It's the oldest trick in the book, but I never would have thought of using the dog for such manipulation.  I guess it's better than using a sibling.  Speaking of which... Charlotte could use a sister, no?

Conversation with Charlotte #6738218

As mentioned below, Charlotte and I dined at Smashburger today with a gift card Emily got Charlotte and me for Christmas.  Charlotte had a hot dog, French fries, and milk... and ate all of it except a few fries.  And this is the conversation carousel we were on:

Charlotte (after smiling for five seconds): Smashburgerrrrrrrrrr.

Me: Indeed.

Charlotte: Charlotte's bread (hot dog bun).  Charlotte's milk.  Charlotte's fries.  Charlotte's hot dog.  Daddy's hot dog (it was a hamburger).  Daddy's milk (it was Dr. Pepper).  Daddy's French fries."

Me: Yep.

Charlotte: Smashburgerrrrrrrr.

Then we eat quietly for five minutes and start all over again.  Repeat four times.

As an aside, the last two to three weeks have been a lot of fun because Charlotte has begun talking about remote topics or past events.  Of course the conversation above would suggest the exact opposite.  But she will now tell us what she did earlier in the day if we ask, with good accuracy.  Yesterday Emily went shopping with her cousin Cait (Oscar's mom... married to Zach).  Emily left right before Charlotte's nap time and told Charlotte she was going to see Oscar's mom.

About twenty minutes later Charlotte and I were in the last stage of her naptime routine, saying "night night" to all people and animals in the house.  We said our good nights to the animals and looked out the window where the garage could be seen and she said, "Bye bye mommy.  Mommy with Zach."

"Actually she is with Cait, but pretty close," I said.  And Charlotte said, "Mommy with Cake," which made me happy.

The novelty will wear off soon but for now it is a lot of fun to hear Charlotte talking about and see how much she has tied together, like the basic Keenan-Longley family tree, or to hear just what from the day  she can talk about.

Language Post

If I had to do it all over, I would probably keep my job as it is.  But if someone said I had to get a new job, I would get a job where I spend the bulk of my day outdoors.  If I had to stay in the realm of speech and langauge, maybe I would go all in on the linguistics front and studied normal child language and phonology acquistition and be an academic.  I love my job but even at the middle and high school level I don't really get to work with language as much as I want to, so much as fix language skills that aren't there, or teach kids how to work around the missing skills.  I do a hell of a lot more than that, but in terms of language that is what I do.  It's a totally different experience than watching a kid's language organically and uniquely evolve.  Not better or worse, just different.

So with Charlotte I am taking extra pleasure in watching her language develop and trying to find the deeper meaning to the simple things she says.  Since the toddlers I worked with had no language, all of this is extra fun.  One of my favorites is when she is ready to go home after an outing.  Her eyes show fatigue but her spirits are still up.  She doesn't use "I want" yet and she doesn't use the word "home."  What she will do instead is just rattle off what she wants (i.e. "hot cereral, blueberry, squash?").  And what she wants in this case is the quiet comfort of our home.  So to express that she will just rattle off the names of all of our pets.  "Nacho Pancho Toonces."  She says it as sweetly as possible but it is clear that more than anything else on earth she just wants to be chilling at home.

The other thing that is interesting is her understanding of my mom's visit here.  I think she understands it is a temporary visist.  I have no way of knowing this, but it is a hunch.  What is kind of cool is a week before Suze came, I said to Charlotte "Your Suze is coming" and mentioned that she would be coming in on an airplane.  Outside of a 100 First Words book and the Richard Scarry books, Charlotte has no exposure to airplanes.  The day before Suze's arrival (six days after I mentioned the plane) I told Charlotte Suze would be here the next day.  And she said, "Suze coming plane."  And then she did it again two days ago when we said Suze would be leaving in a few days.

Crazy.  What I really want to know is what in the hell does the word plane mean to her?  There is no way she understands what an airplane is, geography is, flight.... yet she has attached this word to the comings and goings of a very important visitor.  Who knows?  My best guess is she is attaching a person who is not permanant to her daily routine.  I have no clue other than it has some meaning of some sort.

Conversation with Charlotte #3890

Nothing brings out the back and forth in Charlotte like seeing the manger scene around the corner on 45th avenue (the same one I referenced before).  Charlotte and I took Pancho for a night walk last week and again we had to stop to talk about baby Jesus.

Charlotte: Stops and waves, "Hi baby Jesus."

Me: There is another Baby Jesus in town called Joe Mauer.

Charlotte: Joe Mauer.

Me: Okay we need to get going.

Charlotte: Night night baby Jesus.

Me: Night night baby Jesus.

Charlotte: Need a pacifier.

Me: A pacifier is going to be the least of his concerns.  Plus I don't think they had pacifiers in year zero,

Long pregnant, awkward pause.

Charlotte:  Night night baby Jesus.

Charlotte's Third Joke

Pretty simple formula.

1. Grab any object that is not a hat and put it on your head.

2. Say, "funny hat."

3. Smile.

END SCENE

Charlotte's First Joke

She's no Mitch Hedberg but Charlotte made her first joke last night.... with an assist from me.  Ever since Election Day I will periodically exclaim, "Barak Obama!!!" like a sports announcer, not so much because I'm into his cult of personality but more because Charlotte seems amused by it all.

So last night at dinner we started saying Barak Obama back and forth and then either Emily or I said "Barak O....Mama!" as "mama" is Charlotte's generic word for adult caretaker (it would help if I stopped responding eveytime she called me "mama" but I fear the horse has already left the barn on that  one).

Charlotte thought that was pretty funny and then I said, "Barak Odaddy?" and she said, "No...... Barak OCharlotte?  Barak ONacho?" and then she laughed and laughed.  In fact we all did.

And there you have it.  Not only her first dabbling in metalanguage but also her first joke.  Funny stuff.  See you Leno.

Pancho Aids In Language Development

Charlotte is beginning to use synonyms on a regular basis.  I can't remember all of them, but most are animal related.  However, there is at least one exception.  Charlotte has three different terms for this thing:





















trash
garbage
naughty dog

As you can guess, Pancho and I have teamed up to teach her that last term.  Pancho does his part by getting into the trash while we are all away.  I do my part by telling him he is a naughty dog as Charlotte and I clean up the mess he made when we get home.   Between Charlotte, Pancho, and me, only one of us finds this fun... or funny.

In fact Charlotte thinks this is so funny, she will start laughing and saying "Naughty dog. Naughty dog" while we are on the back deck approaching the house hoping that we have a mess to clean up.  Monday I told Charlotte, "Pancho is not a naughty dog.  He's  a good dog," feeling guilty that Pancho is getting labled and profiled.  But then I saw the trash all over the kitchen floor and told Charlotte, "Nope, you're right.  He's a naughty dog."  In Charlotte's world this is hilarity worthy of deep belly laughs.  Now whenever she passes the garbage can she will let me know it is either "trash" or "garbage" and tack on a "naughty dog" for good measure.

Boomtown

Charlotte is undergoing another little language growth spurt.  It's kind of neat.  Her expressive vocabulary is really exploding and every day I hear at least one new word out of her.  And today I heard her first four word phrase.  For the last week or so, when Charlotte is in the car, she will say "push button" or something to that effect right when we turn into the alley.  She is anticipating when I push the garage door opener.  So today she said, "Daddy push the button."

What's kind of interesting is while she is using three word phrases and all sorts of novel two word combinations, she has these little artifacts from almost a year ago when she was using single words exclusively.  For example, she still uses the word "table" to mean sitting in something that she needs help getting into, be it a seat at the table, a stroller, her Burley, or when she puts her doll into one of these things.  She has so many ways to explain this, including "chair," "help," "stroller," "sit," and the ability to combine these words.  Yet she doesn't need to.  "Table" is actually a much more efficient and specific to express this sentiment, so it makes sense that she is still doing it.   But I'm stlil kind of surprised to see her still using the word this way.

And on the gross motor front we were goofing around during our post-dinner walk and she walked backwards intentionally for the first time.  It was fun to see.

Summer Update

Summer II has begun for me and Charlotte and we are settling into a routine.  Life is good.  She enjoys being outside either in the backyard or at different green spots we jog to with Pancho along the Mississippi.  But her favorite thing still is looking at books, which I'm sure makes her Suze very proud.

Wait I forgot.  Eating.  Her favorite thing is eating.  And taking a long to time to eat.  She'll eat for 20 minutes or so and then say "all done." But really this initial "all done" just serves as a statement that she plans on being done eating sometime in the next five to 15 minutes.  She loves everything about food, even the shopping and cooking.  For an easygoing child, Charlotte gets really upset if I'm cooking and she can't watch.  So I either hold her while I cook or have her sit in a chair in the kitchen.

And no matter what when she sees food, no matter in what state it is, ingredients, trash, pictures....  she'll say, "mmm good."   Really Charlotte?  Onions frying in oil after only ten seconds deserves the "mmmm good" label.  Cripes, how about a little critical thinking?

Like I said, cooking and eating aside, her favorite thing is books.  Lately she has become very particular about what she wants to read.  Her favorite books right now are Mother Goose books, especially a Richard Scarry Mother Goose I got for her at Wild Rumpus (I never knew he made a Mother Goose book until I found it there).  But she is also fond of the Mother Goose editions her aunt (my sister Sarah) got her.  Part of our morning routine is to sit in her room and read together; I read my book and she reads hers.  Just last week she started asking me to read her books to her instead.  Usually that is something she only likes at bedtime.  So it's a pretty nice time.  And it's really cool because she is now often picking the book we read at bedtime the night before.

At work I use this website called Tarheel Reader for the students I work with who are emerging readers/writers or non-verbal.  I also use it with the autistic kids to get them to ask questions of each other and me and process the answers.  Anyway, here is one of many stories I wrote with the kids this year:

http://tarheelreader.org/2012/01/13/favorite-things-2/

These were two of my lower-level autistic students so they didn't get to the point to even do a project like this until April, when Charlotte was first getting into Richard Scarry's Mother Goose book.  Read it for page 13 only.  Jonah, one of the kids in the story, would come up to me the rest of the schoolyear and say, "Read Richard Scarry to your daughter" and then start quoting passages from What Do People Do All Day?  It was pretty awesome.  I miss a lot of my students but am enjoying the break.

In terms of other skills, her fine motor is as solid as ever and her language is chugging along.  Two word phrases are commonplace and I love getting insight into her lexicon.  Like "table" means "I want to sit in a seat and do an activity," be it sitting at the table to eat or read or sit in her stroller to look at flowers.  She also loves to scoot around the block in a foot scooter Emily got at Savers.  If you ever want to know the #1 reason why Charlotte doesn't walk, carve out 45 to 60 minutes in a day to take her around the block in her scooter and you'll see why.  The question "hey what is this in my hand?" is so much more interesting to her then "hey what's over there?"  If they did a toddler play about Christopher Columbus, the role of the person who spent twenty years at her table whittling a block of wood into a BEAUTIFUL steering wheel for the Santa Maria's would be played by Charlotte Nawrocki.

So i takes forever because she stops every thirty seconds to focus on each yard, house, blade of grass, sound.... She best appreciate being an only child with a daddy who is no hurry because most kids don't get the chance to take this long to go around a block and comment on each sound, say to every tree, and watch other people.

Kind of an interesting language aside: she uses the word "owl" to mean, well, an owl, but it also means every animal decal she can see from her changing table.  And "doggie" is still the catch-all phrase for four-legged animals but she will also name some of them by specific name.  She might even say, "doggie cow" when she sees a cow.  So I think she is getting semantic categories.  I never knew toddlers at this age can already express categories and use words in double-meanings as starkly and competently as Charlotte is.  Like I wrote in an earlier post, my surprise largely because I worked with toddlers who were on the other side of the language spectrum.  Charlotte's personal lexicon does lead for funny moments like when she saw a picture of a cat in a barn scene and pointed to it, assuming it was a cow and said, "Doggie moo."  Try again, my dear.

Gross motor is coming.  She'll be walking by the end of the summer and probably as soon as mid-July. She takes one or two steps a day but never out of purpose of moving from A to B; she's doing it more to experiment.  Well, until today.  We were at music class this morning and she took four whopping steps across the room.  It was the first class of the summer and we are going at a new time (summer hours for me!) so I didn't know anyone.  So when Charlotte took four full steps (and this time it WAS just for the purposes of locomotion), of course no one cared because they had no idea how big of a deal it was.  It was also the end of class so all the parents were busy getting their kids ready to go.  But I saw it and was so privately excited and wanted to clap and cheer but no one cared, including Charlotte.  This is partly because she took a decent spill after the fourth step and was too busy brushing off the fall to notice the gravity of the moment (pun fully intended).  But it was exciting for me and really somewhat bizarre to just sit there and quietly watch it happen.  Regardless, she is getting bolder and bolder with her gross motor each day.

So it's been a nice start to the summer.  If I get my act together maybe I'll take some pictures of it.

Language Update

Boring language post.  The post only a grandmother would love.  Consider it your early birthday present Suze.

We're still getting a new word or two a day.  Most words stick around and you hear them again, but some she only says in repetition.

And over the past week or so the two word phrases are really starting to take off which is fun for me.  Off the top of my head these are the ones I can think of (you will notice a food and music theme in this child's life):

more please
eat pancake (pronounced kaycake)
pancake please (she freaking loves pancakes.  The new Sunday routine is I make a double batch of pancakes and Emily and I freeze them.  Then Emily gives them to Charlotte for breakfast.  Charlotte wakes up saying "pancake" now).
mmmm good
mmmm yummy (these count as two word phrases because she also uses mmm, good, and yummy as single words)
more music
music aye-yi-yi (we have a CD of Mexican songs, two of which have a singer crooning the stereotypical "aye-yi-yi" in it, which she loves).
cat down (she is taking after her mom and trying to control that which cannot be controlled: cats.  She is also just as unsuccessful as her mom)
shoe/sock on
shoe/sock off
hi doggie

There are other examples but I can't remember them.  She says "thank you" more than she says "no" which is awesome for now.  But I want the opposite to happen when she is dealing with peers in her teenage years.

A few other language observations:

1. No colors.  She is good with mouth and nose, and says "eyes" for "ears."  She loves counting, especially when she climbs the stairs.  First she says "butt" for button, which is actually the light switch on the stairway she wants me to turn on.  Then she counts each stair.  Only she sucks at counting.  I mean she is really bad it.  Horrible.  Perhaps if she could give up her love for the number nine she wouldn't suck so much at this.  "One... nine.... two.... nine.... nine.... three.... nine" and then when finally get to the ninth step she says something else.  Come on Charlotte.  Get your act together.

2. She says "sorry" a lot.  Only in her language world, "Sorry" means "Mommy (or Daddy), move your feet, I want to sit there."  It is feet specific so far as I can tell.

3. Serious generalization with the word doggie.  Cats and cows are the only four legged mammals she sees that are not called doggies.  I spend my working hours with kids on the other side of the language spectrum.  At my previous job I worked quite a bit with non/limited verbal two to three year olds.  By the time the kid progressed to the point of being able to speak in two word phrases one of two things happened.  Either the kid was old enough to know the other words for animals, or I had to correct those errors right away because, well, that's my job.  So it is really fun to watch a child on Charlotte's side of the language bell curve develop her lexicon and sit back and relax and just let the natural errors take place.  And it is so much more awesome when it's my own kid.

Along those lines, it's just so exciting to have this independent personality come out in words now after only knowing Charlotte through outbursts (of all kinds, mostly happy ones), routines, instinct, and body expressions.  I am stunned by how profound that part has been for me, after having worked with hundreds of toddlers to get this point in the past.  Now I know why at my old job parents became so attached to our clinic or to me, once their kid started talking.  I was just doing my job and it's not all that special... but now I can see at a new level (a level that I can hardly articulate) why it was appreciated by the families.

The Language Explosion, part II



This mobile lives at the National Gallery of Art

The other night, Charlotte was  looking at a book of Calder mobiles and she said, "look at these!"   That's right, a three word phrase. And it made sense.