We Need to Talk

This morning, shortly after 5am, Tess was not pleased about the way things were going. She told me this. Using her teeth.

Yep, she gets bitey when she's annoyed, especially when hungry. For example, recently we were getting her ready for surgery, and she had to fast all morning, so no breakfast. Starving and furious, she eventually opened her jaws and helped herself to a chunk of a nurse's hand, and drew blood. Sure, the biting is an undesirable behavior, but it's also one of her big ways of communicating.

After all, when it comes to communication, Tess has very few words.  Her lexicon looks something like this:

Mom-mom-mom = Mom, but could also mean more
Muh-muh-muh = more, but could also mean Mom
Thicka-thicka-thicka = Entertain me, please.
Geh-geh-geh = The toys you've purchased for me have become tiresome.

Don't miss the subtleties of these utterances. Thicka-thicka expresses harmless boredom, but geh-geh means business. In other words, watch yourself--you might get bitten.

She has other sounds, but these are the most common. Once in a while, she calls to her brother Dana by saying "Na-na." Occasionally she makes a sound like the laugh of Roscoe P. Coltrane, the sheriff from the old Dukes of Hazzard TV show. (The meaning of that one is unclear; I hardly think she's aspiring to catch those Duke boys.)

We are constantly exposing her to more sounds. We talk to her all the time. I even still do that singsong narration thing of my entire day with her, like I did when she was an infant: "We're going to the sto-ore. Sto-ore, sto-ore." I do this in voices both low and high, and I don't think she's ever imitated me.

But it's complicated because we don't know what she hears. There are some anomalies, to be sure. Like if our family is in a room and someone slams the door, we all jump, except for her. She might not respond at all, or might turn toward the door several seconds later. How could she not hear the door slam? Or how could it take so long for her to hear it? We know that she has issues processing visual information--does she maybe also have an auditory processing disorder?

Unfortunately, we can't test her for auditory processing. It's an emerging field, so there don't seem to be any agreed-upon criteria for such testing at her age. Even if there were, we can't exactly stick her in an audiologist's booth and tell her to raise her hand when she hears the beep. Audiology tests for her (1) require two adults besides the audiologist, to keep her sitting still, (2) involve a lot of mouthing and chewing on the headphones, and thus (3) are mostly fruitless.

Luckily, aside from her sounds, she's also got some signs. She can sign "eat," "drink," "more," and sometimes "mine." Never are these more prevalent than at mealtime. And in a major breakthrough at her school, she has just begun regularly signing "more" in connection with non-eating activities. This is huge.

We've seen other sparks of insight from her, like in making choices. Thanks to hours of work by her rockstar speech pathologist, if you hold up two toys, one of which is her favorite, and ask her to pick one, she'll choose her favorite. Even better, you can hold up pictures of the two toys, and she can point to the picture of her preferred toy. Amazing. Her ability to use the pictures is crucial, because now it's possible that she could eventually use a communication book, with multiple pictures.

We don't know yet what she can do, but I dream of that day when she opens a book and points to a picture of the toilet, to tell me she needs to go to the bathroom, or to a swingset, to say let's go swinging.