ever-fixed mark

Yesterday just to mix up the training a bit, I went to the MIT track to do some speed work. Although the track is only blocks away from my office, I studied Google Maps for about fifteen minutes before venturing out to find it. In Cambridge, there is no “Point A to Point B,” even on foot. I had to run through two parking lots and down a path between two fences and across train tracks and through a construction zone to find the football stadium.

The track was a very high-quality springy material, and I was grateful for the cushioning. But MIT’s football stadium in scope and grandeur was on par with the one at our local middle school. There were a few bleachers on the “home” side, nothing at all for spectators from visiting Salve Regina or whomever else the Engineers face on the gridiron. (Click the link lest you think that’s a joke. Yeah, I thought Salve Regina was a girls’ school, too.)

The whole time I was running my intervals, there was a man hanging sitting on the field. He had work clothes and equipment, so he didn’t look like a loiterer, but he wasn’t actually doing any work. It reminded me of that ’70’s movie, One on One, in which Robbie Benson is a hot-shot college basketball star who is pampered by the university alumni with money, a car, a tutor to do his homework, etc. He has a work-study “job” turning on the athletic field sprinklers, which come on automatically. Strange the things that will course through your brain when you’re in oxygen debt.

It’s a testament to the gullibility of the 1970’s moviegoing public that we would ever accept Robbie Benson as a college-level athlete. Or, for that matter, a straight man.

Since I last wrote about Minor’s problems with enunciation, I have noticed that a bunch of sounds I thought were just baby-babble are, in fact, words, words that are so inarticulate Minor has had to repeat them over days before some contextual clue alerted me to the meaning. The “Me know who God is” sentence was kind of an eye-opener; I hadn’t realized he was using sentences of three words or more. Now that I’m listening more closely I’ve been able to identify a lot more sentences, although I can’t always discern the meanings. He hasn’t been making progress on some sounds, like k and t, that most two-year-olds can say, which really inhibits understanding. In other words, his language development seems to be on-target, but his speech production definitely isn’t. At his two-year physical, I asked the nurse practitioner if this might be an artefact of his original hearing loss, prior to the tubes, or if he could some residual loss. She said it might be hearing loss or low muscle tone, and suggested both a hearing test and an evaluation by a speech pathologist.

Last week we went to the audiologist. I was very careful not to use the word “doctor” when we went into the exam room. Minor wasn’t afraid, but he was rather overstimulated by the new environment, and of course he hated having his ears examined. I tried to pay attention to the audiologist while simultaneously wrangling the baby, never an easy feat. Then we were seated in a soundproof booth with a window. Minor sat quietly while he set up the test, and for a brief moment I got to enjoy absolute silence. It was so peaceful. I never realized before how much ambient noise there is. I wondered how much it would cost to install a soundproof booth in our house? Do they make invisible soundproof rooms? Perhaps one with a toilet?

The test is structured very cleverly to capture feedback from an unreliable subject. There are two speakers on either side of the booth. The tester plays tones on each side. If the subject turns his head toward the correct tone, he’s assumed to have heard it. To encourage a small child to stick with the program, the tester activates a light box with a moving toy inside after he does turn his head.

Minor was completely on board with the test, turning his head for most of the sounds and looking eagerly for the moving toys. When the tester played high-pitched tones, though, he never turned his head. I thought he might have just lost interest, but sometimes he was looking in one direction saying, “More, more” when tones were playing in the other side. The audiologist confirmed that Minor has some high-frequency hearing loss, which is not too debilitating in an adult but may affect a child’s ability to speak. He recommended follow-ups with both an ENT and a speech pathologist.

After we got home, I called Early Intervention to make an appointment to have Minor evaluated. They called me back within fifteen minutes and said, “We just had a cancellation. Would today work for you?” So I rearranged my work schedule and called the preschool to tell them I would be picking Minor up just before nap time.

I wanted to walk Dog before the visit, so he wouldn’t be crazily attacking the EI people. I took him to the pond and brought my ice skates with me. Aitch loves to ice skate, although he has a pair of double-bladed skates so dull and rusted that he practically walks. I’m a weak skater, and I have been wanting to practice on my own so I can keep up with him. There is no better place to build confidence than a deserted, glassy pond on a cold, windless, bright winter day.

At 1:00 on the dot the EI people pulled up: a speech pathologist, a motor development expert, a student, and an administrator. I suddenly realized that having four strangers grill Minor in lieu of his nap might not be a recipe for success. He had been up for a few hours the night before, and then I had to wake him up for the eight a.m. audiologist appointment, which was in itself a bit stressful for him. When they arrived I had just given him a cup of yogurt. He spilled it and made a huge mess. I gave him a napkin and asked him to clean it up, and he assiduously wiped it all over the table. The EI people wrote it down: “Cleans up on request.” Already, he was more developmentally advanced than his father.

From that point on, he did wonderfully. He built a tower with blocks on command, put pegs in a pegboard, folded a piece of paper, found a toy that was being moved from one place to another in a baby version of the shell game. (I told the EI people we were training him to be a mountebank, and they just stared at me.) He responded to commands, uttered three-word sentences, tried to repeat words. He jumped up and down, climbed up the stairs without holding the railing, and (with me standing in front of him) climbed down the stairs without holding the railing (my God, when did he learn that?). In fact, the evaluators were so excited about his performance (”We should tape this as a model evaluation!”) that I thought they would pronounce him a genius. In fact, he was just at age level in everything; like many people who work with developmentally delayed children, they were just enthusiastic about the novelty of meeting a “typical.”

Technically, Minor did not qualify for services in any area. As the speech pathologist explained to me, though, for the purposes of the assessment, speech and language were assessed as a single category. The fact that Minor was able to ask a spontaneous question (”Balloon pop, Mommy?”) offset his lack of t’s and k’s. But the speech pathologist confirmed that he was not as intelligible as he should be at his age, and said that with a history of hearing loss she would recommend therapy. The therapist will come once a week, and at the end of six months he will be re-evaluated to see if he still qualifies for services. The therapist will come to the house. We will pay about $40 a month. The idea is that by providing services early, before he enters the school system, the state will not have to provide them later, when it is more expensive and harder to integrate with his curriculum. What a wonderful program! Hooray for big government that’s willing to apply a small number of resources now to forestall a bigger societal cost down the road.

By the time they left, Minor was completely baked. I didn’t want to put him down for a nap, so I decided to put him in the stroller and take him and Dog for a long walk. This used to be part of our regular routine when he was a baby, but since he stopped napping twice a day, he has not had the patience for aimless strolling. This time he fell asleep within five minutes, as I had anticipated, and Dog and I enjoyed a quiet walk in his somnolent company. It had turned cold and a bit overcast, but with sunlight still filtering through the clouds, and the streets were deserted. It gave me some time to process the words “hearing impairment” and think how odd it was that this label should be attached to Minor, who seemed, with the exception of a few consonants, to be functioning so well.

“Minor, who’s this?”

“Daddy.”

“Who am I?”

“Mommy.”

“What’s his name?”

“Yaitch.”

“And what’s YOUR name?”

“Baby.”

“It’s not ‘baby,’ it’s ‘Minor.’ Say ‘Minor.’”

“No.”

How strange. I have one kid who who, until three and a half, referred to himself exclusively in the third person, and another who at two years old has never uttered his own name.

…and Minor’s first complete sentence was…?

“Me know who God is.”

He was mostly parroting back a question I had asked Aitch, but !!!

Minor, like many near-two-year-olds and the Old Testament God, smites people when angered. We have been working with him (Minor, not the Lord) on more appropriate expressions of anger, like using his words. Lately he has figured out another alternative on his own for showing displeasure: he spits. It’s not an offensive maneuver (in the military sense), but rather, a commentary.

For example, we are in the car and Minor spots the ubiquitous Dunkin’ Donuts logo.

Minor: Donuts!

Me: We are not stopping for donuts today.

Minor: [spitting noise] Thpit!

I especially love the explicit performative “Spit!” calling my attention to what he is doing, as if to say, “I spit on your refusal!”

We should probably coach him out of the spitting, but as a two-year-old he has so few socially acceptable options for showing anger that I’m reluctant to extinguish a non-violent one. I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that we just have to endure a little saliva. The Almighty made it rain for forty days and forty nights when He got mad.

Last week, while Minor was in school, I took Aitch to a coffeeshop for a little hot chocolate and some one-on-one bonding time. There was a large group of people holding a meeting in the center of the room while we were there. After about five minutes, Aitch said, “I don’t like those people! They’re mean!”

“Why are they mean?” I asked.

“They’re talking and laughing! They’re laughing at me! That’s not nice!”

This is something new for Aitch, who for the first four years of his life was so insensitive to slights physical and emotional that I worried that his nerve endings didn’t reach all the way to his epidermis. Now a strong wind pains him physically, and a sideways glance hurts his feelings. “They’re not laughing at you,” I said. “They’re just having fun, just like we are doing. See, we’re laughing, and we’re not being mean.”

But he didn’t want to be jollied out of his bad mood. “Don’t do that!” he said. “I want to be…mad face!”

“All right,” I said. “Show me your mad face.”

Then he turned his head to the side, like some Broadway hopeful getting himself in character for the big audition. Head averted, he arranged his face into a Mask of Fury and then turned it on me full force.

I burst into laughter because OH MY GOD WHERE DID HE LEARN THAT? Has he been sneaking downstairs at night to watch reruns of “Inside the Actor’s Studio”?

When I picked myself up off the floor, I asked him to do it again. Each time he performed the same head-turning trick before showing me the mad face. My little Method actor.

And…..scene.

Minor is talking a lot now. He has always been a pretty enthusiastic communicator, unlike Aitch. Aitch never hit any of those speech milestones on time, even the pre-verbal ones. He couldn’t be bothered with sign language. He wouldn’t even do those standard baby signs that every kid picks up — “so big,” hand clapping, bye-bye, and so forth. He did start talking at a typical age, but he was never that interested in it. If we said, “Say doggie!” he wouldn’t repeat it. (Don’t worry, though. He seems to have caught up. The other day, frustrated by a stuck zipper, he spontaneously exclaimed “Jesus Christ!” at the appropriate time. Imitation? Check.)

Minor was a delightful contrast. He caught on to signs right away and moved quickly to words. He seemed thrilled finally to have some method of communicating his many and nuanced demands. To our great shock, he learned words spontaneously, and when we specifically asked him to repeat words he thought it was a fun game. A few months ago, he started combining two words, a skill that eluded his brother until the two-year mark. The other day he pointed to the letter “S” on one of his brother’s trains and said, “Sssssss.” I realize that all of this is perfectly average, but after our experience with Aitch, Husband and I found it very precocious. The word “genius” was bandied about.

One thing that Minor doesn’t do well, though, is enunciate. Many words sound like some variation of “Buh,” even those that don’t start with B. “I love you” is “Buh boo,” and so on. This is also in contrast to Aitch, who may not have spoken early or often, but was always clear as a bell.

So when Minor repeats a word, it usually bears only a passing resemblance to its model. When he repeats a sound, though, he is spot on. If you sigh or groan or burp in front of him, you may be disconcerted to hear a tiny echo of your emission. He also imitates ambient noises, animals and machines and such. And when he walks backwards, he thoughtfully beeps like a truck — to alert the people behind him, I suppose, in case he can’t see us in his rear-view mirrors. I marvel that his mimicry skills are so poor with words and so great with other sounds. Maybe it’s the consonants, which are plentiful in the words but not so crucial in the sounds?

Tune in to Letterman in twenty years to see him demonstrating his prize-winning duck calls. Or, maybe, truck calls.