Jadens Journey

I guess I’m in a writing mood tonight. I realize I haven’t given much of an update on Jaden except for sick, sick, sick lately. So here goes – I apologize in advance if I’m repeating myself since I haven’t re-read any of my older posts tonight.

Signing: Jaden knows more signs than we do now. His teacher at school is fluent in sign language, and is teaching all of the kids in his class some basic signs, and that’s helped him immensely. He now gets frustrated with us because he’ll use a sign he thinks we should know but we can’t figure it out. There’s no “reverse sign language lookup” dictionary out there, that I know of, so it’s like a needle in a haystack. It took us ages to figure out that he was signing train (his sign is a variation of the ASL sign), another long while to figure out he was signing bus (which is also his sign for Thomas the Tank Engine), and now he has this new one that I just haven’t been able to decipher yet. I am amazed at how many signs he knows. If I ever tried to write them all down, I know there would be over 100 (we counted that far already) but I’m guessing the latest number is more like 200. I have to say signing has been a godsend for us since his speech is taking longer than we had expected, and during the terrible twos the last thing you want is to add communication problems to the mix.

Speaking: Jaden has quite a few “word approximations”– but there’s one word that he says loud and clear: “NO!” — yep, he learned that one perfectly. His pronunciation of “no” is always emphatic. It was cute when it started – I’ll leave it at that.

His real speech breakthrough started coming, believe it or not, after we put early intervention on hold. We put them on hold for a number of reasons, but the intent was not to shock Jaden into talking, yet that seems to be what has happened. I know while they were coming he was very stubborn about doing what they wanted him to do, and even now if you try to get him to say something he’ll only attempt it if he’s really in the mood to do it. Otherwise, forget it. No way Jose.

So he’s saying Buzz (Buzz Lightyear), and Woody (also Toy Story), and “nana” (banana). Of course he’s been saying “mama”, “dada”, and now for Grandpa he says “papa” and for Neville’s dad he says “pop-pop”. Sometimes those two sound very close, but usually we can tell the difference. He says “bus”, and “rain” which means train. He says “all done” which is very approximate, but I know when he’s saying it. Let’s see – there’s also “apple”, “eat”, “water”, “Gordon” (which sounds like water), “more” (which also sounds like water), and a few potty training type words I’ll save you from reading. He’s getting colors down: purple (that one is very clear), red, orange, green, blue, and yellow. He even signs the colors, which just baffles me since I don’t know them at all. We need Antina here more often for that. I’m sure there’s more I’m not thinking of but the point is that there’s been a tremendous breakthrough in the past few weeks to a month. The biggest difference I see is that he’s now willing to TRY to say words, whereas before he wouldn’t even make an attempt.

We’re looking into other options for speech therapy. In the meantime we’re very impressed with how much he’s progressed.

Everything else ASL, Buzz Lightyear, sign language, speech, Thomas the Tank Engine, Toy Story

Alas Jaden is sick again for the third time since January 10th. In the beginning of January it was some type of virus with high fever and all the cold symptoms to go along with it. Of course I caught it a few days after he did. At the end of January he had a stomach bug that he kindly shared with both me and Neville. Now he has a virus that seems very similar to the early January one. I think he’s made it to school (daycare) less than two days a week on average (out of the three he’s scheduled to attend) since the year started.

On Monday he is supposed to start his five days per week schedule at school, but who knows whether or not he’ll be well enough to attend yet. I certainly hope so. It has been very difficult to get any work done while he’s home, and since he’s been home so much, well – need I say more?

Of course I have my usual guilt over sending him. But then I tell myself we do send him to a “school” and not just a run-of-the-mill daycare, and he is getting a lot out of it. They teach him a lot – they’ve even started to try to potty train him (good luck with that! hahaha). I know it’s good that he has contact on a regular basis with other kids his age – since right now at home it’s just us, or my parents, or Neville’s parents, and Jaden just doesn’t have the patience yet to talk about the weather, or American Idol, or the latest sports results. A friend of mine once said to me that she thinks sending her daughter to daycare makes her a better mother. So that means now that Jaden will be going to school for 5 days instead of 3, I should be 66.67% better as a mom, right? It’s nice to think that way.

Everything else daycare, school, sick