Last time, I posted about some of the fun things A and I used to do together, all the things I had experienced as a child that I wanted to share with her. I actually remember shortly after the day we went sledding, telling her grandma about it, and her grandma said "Oh, wow, Katie, you're doing all these firsts with her!" I started to apologize, thinking perhaps I'd stepped on toes, but she interrupted me and said "No, we just can't always do those things with her, we're glad she has you to do new things with her." I was glad too. Last time, I talked about introducing her to my friends, family, classmates, teachers... and their amusing misconceptions... and how even over time she was still a mystery to me. A tough little egg that couldn't be cracked. I wrote about both the good times and the tough times, because that's what life is - a mix of some of each.
Today I want to talk a little about the improvements I saw in A over the first several months. If you recall, I said that the first day I watched her at her grandparents' house, she was completely nonverbal. Two months later, she proudly announced "Uno, Dos, Tres!" to my Spanish teacher - only she smushed it all together (more like "Unodostres"), because Dora ALWAYS says those three words together! I think she thought it was one word. For a long time when I'd talk to her in the car about what we were seeing, etc, she'd just be sitting back there in her car seat replying "Uno dos tres! Uno dos tres!" Funny, funny girl... always a mystery... lived her whole life in Ohio with family members who spoke only English, and her first words were in Spanish. I suppose we can thank Dora for that.
When her vocabulary started to grow (by leaps and bounds!) I started to wonder why she'd ever been so quiet to begin with. It was just another piece of the mystery. By Christmas she was saying all kinds of words, albeit in a rudimentary way. One of her favorites was "Kee-kee" (Kitty). She mastered "Tee-Whoas" (Cheerios), "Baaw" (Ball), "Pay" (Play), "Skoo" (School), and many more. I remember talking to my mom about why she'd been so quiet for so long, but was suddenly learning at a rapid pace. I'd researched and I knew that there had been cases of kids who seemingly chose not to speak for years and then started spouting full sentences... but that wasn't A. I knew there were cases where children had developmental disabilities, hearing or sensory input problems, and simply couldn't verbalize their thoughts, but I didn't think A was one of those kids either, because of how quickly she seemed to pick up new language after a while, and how well her perceptive hearing functioned. She could hear me and follow directions and understand what was going on, she just couldn't talk about it herself. So why... why no words until she was nearly three, and why on earth were her first words in Spanish?
My mom told me that what I had been doing with A was good for her - narrating what we were doing, naming items as we saw them, talking to her as much as possible. She said that when I was a baby, they encouraged parents to talk to their babies all the time even if they knew they didn't understand, because that was how they would learn to talk. She said that our first words are often the words we hear most often. (I believe mine was 'hot'. I had an affinity for playing in the kitchen, I guess). This made me think back to the conversation I'd had with A's grandmother about the 'situation' that led to A and her mother moving in with them... and to all A's other mysterious behaviors - and suddenly it clicked. A didn't speak because A hadn't been spoken to.
When she did finally start to speak, she mimicked the words she heard often from people who did speak to her... or, as the case may be, cartoon characters like Dora the Explorer. Well, I supposed, that closed the case of why A's speech was so delayed, and also gave me a prescription for exactly what to do about it (the same thing I'd already been doing - talk to her, narrate everything, name everything). It also made me sad, imagining times when there hadn't been someone to speak to her. Because I knew little about A's life before I met her, the only thing I could be sure of was that her grandparents had done their best when she was with them - but clearly, somewhere along the line, this aspect of her development had been neglected. A family member even acknowledged this to me at a later time. A had never been nonverbal because of a developmental disability or a choice not to talk as I first thought. All she needed was someone - no, a few someones, who took the time to talk to her.
After Christmas, A's vocabulary took off even more. She could finally convey to me what she wanted with little help from pointing and grunting. We spent a lot of time around other kids, in the nursery at church especially... at the playground... other children started to talk to her more too, as she became more aware of and interacted with her surroundings.
That January was also when I started watching M. M was six, going on seven, and I'd known her for years - she was the little girl that A reminded me of, that caused me to feel so drawn to A, that first day in the nursery. Her family called me, in dire need of a sitter, and I said yes. I took M on in addition to A on an ongoing basis. It became easier for me to watch both the girls at my home, so that's what I did. I restructured my bedroom so that it was childproof, there was a place for A to nap, if not with me, a toy box, children's DVDs... I bought a booster chair for the dinner table, a few other things, and after a slightly doubtful reception from several people (can you really handle this? Shouldn't you focus on school? What about your own life, your own future?), my friends and family grew to love the girls like I did. M and A were like sisters - people always asked me if they were. No, I'd tell them, but don't they look like it?
Over the next year, A pretty much knocked my socks off with her ability to learn. Some things, she still wasn't grasping. When I tried to introduce the concept of colors to her (in the spring, while we were planting flowers), I would point them all out, tell her the colors, day after day, tell her what color everything was, until finally I said one day on a walk around the neighborhood "A, look at the tree! What color is the tree?"
A's response? "BOO." ie. "blue". It was the only color she said consistantly. Yup. Trees were blue. They stayed blue for a long time, too. Even after she learned 'pik' and 'geen'. Until she went to head start. I'll have to do a whole seperate post on how far she came in head start!
It was also sometime shortly after she turned three that she started picking up more and more language - putting together simple, two word requests. But she shocked me completely one day, by saying a word she'd never said before (at least in my presence).
The first time she said it, we were in the car, taking her mom (who I had started seeing more often) to work. I don't remember exactly what context she said it in, but she said "Mommy!"... and it was clear that she was talking to me. I tried to brush it off for her mom's sake - kids often do that - all adult females are Mommy - but I can imagine it's still hard when you really are Mommy. So I said something like "No, silly girl, Mommy's not driving, Katie's driving! Mommy's over there." And her mom relaxed. Then we dropped her off, drove away, and she said it again. "Mommy, Moo-sik!" Ah. She wanted 'her songs' (Silly Songs from Veggie Tales) on. So she asked me to turn it on.
I started off patiently redirecting her - because, like I said, lots of kids do the 'all adult females are Mommy' thing. "No, sweetie, I'm not Mommy, I'm Katie! Mommy's back there, at work!" And she'd get mad. "MOMMY," she'd insist. I didn't argue with her after that - you didn't win a battle with this kid. I figured the behavior would fade like all other childhood behaviors do.
But as time went on, something became apparent. All adult females were not Mommy. Not my mom, not my friends, not other kids' moms, she even knew that her grandmother, another primary caregiver, was "MaMAW". Only me and her actual mother ever consistently got that designation. I still don't understand what exactly led her to associate the word with me... sure, I took care of her, but so did lots of other people. Her grandma, her grandpa, my mom, nursery workers at church... but no matter how hard I tried to convince her "No, silly, I'm Katie!"... it stuck.
Which left me in a couple of embarrassing situations. At school, at the grocery store, at the park, everywhere we went, I was a seventeen year old toting around a three year old who called me Mommy. I'm sure you can imagine the dirty looks that earned me. I didn't care though, I just laughed, because those people didn't know us or our lives, and I didn't feel I owed them an explanation.
Unfortunately, A didn't have much of a filter, and she used that word for me many more times in her mother's presence, until I started to feel like my explanations weren't really holding water for her anymore. I felt bad. It wasn't until she was four, after over a year of answering "No, I'm *Katie*!" that she amended her verbage to "Mommy Kai." Oh well. It was a step.
Since she was making so much progress, and she was already three, when I got out of school for the Summer I discussed potty training with her grandmother, and we agreed that we'd start working on it.
Haha. Hahahaha. Hahahahahahahahaha.
Easier said than done.
My mom always used to say "Just wait until they're three. It'll make potty training much easier and less stressful." I thought I was doing that. But A was delayed in all other areas - why didn't I expect her to be delayed in this too? It took me nearly the whole summer of sitting in the bathroom, in front of cartoons, reading books, doing whatever it took to get her to sit on the potty, until she actually peed on it. And then, of course, she didn't do it again for weeks. I read everything on potty training, asked everyone for advice... I got her books and videos from the library... one of which featured a song called "She is a Super Duper Pooper" which I will never, ever be able to un-hear... anyways, needless to say, it was not the 'summer project' I'd intended... more like a year and a half long commitment, and then some. Things just didn't come easily to A.
But through it all, that whole year... we played. Just played, had fun... tried to learn at the same time, but mostly we just played. As my senior year of high school approached, I was excited to take Spanish IV, until the school district threatened to remove it from the curriculum. A friend and I went to the school board to ask them to reconsider. I was quoted in the paper.
Then the news came out, that yes, there would be a Spanish IV, because of us. But it came on the heels of the news that students who had met graduation requirements only needed to take five classes, and could be dismissed as early as noon, so long as they didn't have a class 6th, 7th, or 8th period. You could get out earlier if you were looking into post-secondary options, which I was. The way my schedule had come together, I'd be dismissed at 11:40 each day. I was so excited to be able to spend those extra hours with A.
Then we found out that the only period Spanish IV would be offered was 8th period. I'd have to take three study halls in a row to take that class, get out at 3:20, and not have near as much time with A.
Most people would've told me that I still needed to put myself first - I was young, after all, and she wasn't my daughter... and that might've been what I did, if not for one experience I'd just had that broke my heart for A all over again.
I'd gone to her third birthday party... arms full of presents, smile on my face... excited to see her enjoy herself with all her favorite people. It was close to her mom's birthday so her friends were there too, even the ones without kids, which was fine... except that there was no one else with kids. It was a birthday party for a three year old, and there were no other children there. A cried more than once, after being scolded for touching the cake, opening presents too fast, not saying thank you, and then was scolded for crying. Family members argued. Myself and a couple other family members tried to distract A, intervene before she could get upset, but I left in tears. I could see, and I know a few others could see, that it hadn't gone the way it should. Some people in A's life, with whom I hadn't seen her interact much, didn't seem to know how to just let her be a kid... and it made me sad for her... so as I drove home crying, I vowed to do everything I could to just let A enjoy being a kid.
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| COSI Columbus! |
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| Mowing my lawn |
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| I love this one - like she's sure she can climb it if she tries hard enough. |
And I didn't sign up for Spanish IV. I decided I'd look into other options, because four hours of time with her every day just wasn't something I was willing to sacrifice.
I never regretted that decision. I still don't.
So Fall came...
Halloween came...
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| That Halloween sweatshirt used to be mine! |
Winter came...
And Christmas came...
And we just kept on having fun - from the moment her mom would drop her off to me, outside my last class at the art complex at 11:40, until we were all exhausted...
And it was the best year of my life.
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