88) A to zed

I’ve previously written about E, his speech, and how I think he’s a bit language delayed because of his chemotherapy. I realize that every child develops at their own pace, but he will be 3 in April, and he’s barely making 2 word sentences. Funnily enough, I did hear him speak 3 words the other day: he was struggling to remove the cap from a Crayola marker, so I helped him with it. When I took the marker out of his hands, he very distinctly uttered “Hey, that’s mine!”. I laughed, and laughed.

Most of his speech is still one word sentences, with some two word sentences thrown in. He’ll say “help” when there’s something he wants that’s out of reach, or if he wants out of his high chair. Often, he’ll get our attention by yelling “Da da da da da!”, or “Ma ma ma ma ma!” followed by the name of the thing he’s trying to get us to notice. Sometimes we’ll understand what he’s saying, other times not so much. In fact, he has a good vocabulary, he’s just not putting words together as much as I thought he would by this point. He babbles quite a bit, and maybe it makes sense to him, but I’m not hearing a whole lot of coherent words. The funny thing though, is he understands most of what we say to him. We can ask him to grab a specific stuffed animal, and he’ll pick out the correct one. We can ask him to find the red marker, and he’ll find the red marker. He can be pitching a fit when I’m trying to put him in his highchair and I’ll say “settle down, let me put you in your seat, and you can have a cookie”. Then he settles, and he gets a cookie once he’s harnessed in. Observing the struggles, and successes of his development is intriguing, and fascinating.

Delayed speech doesn’t mean stunted intelligence, and I know he’s a smart little guy. He has strength in areas other than language at the moment. Before Christmas, he became obsessed with numbers. If he was watching YouTube, it had to be numbers, if he was playing with toys, the toys would have numbers on them, or something to do with counting. At the supermarket, he could look at the signs and tell me what aisle number we were in. He can count to ten 100% of the time, and he knows most of the numbers from 11 – 20, he just doesn’t count them in order yet. Using flash cards, he can correctly identify everything up to 20.

Around Christmastime, and after, he became interested in the alphabet. He doesn’t pronounce all of the names of the letters properly, but he can mostly sing the alphabet song. He’ll miss a few letters here and there, but he’s got the tune, and most of the alphabet. Testing him with flash cards, he can correctly identify 90% of the letters. He has problems with P, Q, and I think one other letter. He grabs learning books meant for older kids, opens them, flips through the pages, and (correctly) points out random letters to us.

It’s quite amazing for me to watch him as he learns to recognize, identify, and repeat the names of our Arabic numerals, and Roman alphabet.