Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Say Again
My two boys started talking pretty late. For a couple of months after they came to the U.S. from Nicaragua, they didn’t even cry much. Mute little munchkins. Tip for adopters: if you adopt a child from an orphanage, they often don’t cry. This can trick you into thinking they’re so content they don’t need to cry but my theory is that they tried crying for a while and it wasn’t productive – as in nobody showed up to pick them up. Humans quit doing what doesn’t pay off, right? More theorizing — both had tons of ear infections in the orphanages. And so one school of thought was that they hadn’t heard enough language or not heard it well enough when they were babies to develop their speech properly.
Note: My little granddaughter didn’t utter a word to me until she was about 3 1/2 and I never thought twice about it, instead deciding that her silence was, in fact, a sign of her utter contentment in my care. 🙂
We were so worried about them not talking that we trucked them off to speech therapy- at UW-M, Curative, and St. Francis. Not sure what the rush was. At that point in our lives with our kids, we were all over issues like not talking, not walking, not picking things up with their little wee fingers. All of it. Everything had to be solved STAT!
Anyway, so when Joe, the younger of our two sons, finally started talking, he quickly developed the habit of repeating the last word in every sentence. Sentence. Yes, exactly like that. That. With a little pause in between. Between.
For a while, we weren’t sure we were hearing him right. But we were. Last word, every sentence. Twice.
Memory: In the car driving to Florida. It’s dark outside. The two boys are in the back playing with their little superhero action figures (remind me to tell you our little anti-sexism campaign…..Action figures are dolls. Dolls are action figures) and we pass a sign for a restaurant.
“We should go to Cracker Barrel. Barrel.”
We cured Joe of this little ticky thing (officially called echolia, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echolalia) before we were able to find a really good echolia therapist (thank God) by thinking it was so cute and funny that we all started talking that way.
Something in his little five-year consciousness decided that “Hey, that ain’t cool. They stole my thing.” It was as if he wouldn’t be caught dead talking the same way as his very uncool parents. So he stopped talking like that.
But we still do and I still think it’s hilarious. Hilarious.
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
Reblogged this on Red's Wrap and commented:
I went back in my inventory and found a post that NOBODY liked or commented on. Lonely, neglected, but adorable. Adorable.