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

About a week or two before Jaden started saying “Dada” he had walked around saying “baba…baba….baba” almost constantly. Well, it wasn’t constant, but it was so frequent that I could not for the life of me decipher what “baba” meant.

At first I thought he was referring to his bottle. I’d ask if he wanted milk. He’d flash me the ASL (American Sign Language) sign for “all done,” which is Jaden’s way of saying NO, usually vehemently. I thought, ‘maybe he doesn’t understand that I am offering him a bottle’? So I’d pull the bottle out of the refrigerator and show it to him – again I’d get the sign for “no” – this time with a furious look on his face as if wondering “what is wrong with you- didn’t I just tell you NO?!”

We had an idea that we might know what he was saying with ‘baba’ but we didn’t have it confirmed until tonight. Rick figured it out for sure. It seems that all this time Jaden was saying Mama. Yes, baba==Mama in Jaden speak. Evidently we must talk with a very nasal tone (haha – no one from LI is nasal, right?), or maybe the ‘b’ sound is just a common first attempt at the ‘m’ sound.

The thing that threw us off for so long is that there was one afternoon we had popped in the “Baby Signing Time” DVD #2 and they sign “mom”. Every time the woman on the DVD said “mom” Jaden repeated it. I guess it was just pure mimicking rather than actually knowing he was saying mom since he hasn’t done it since then, and when Neville points to me and says “who is that?” he says “Baba baba baba….” So there you have it. Baba and Dada are SO proud of their angel. First words are beautiful.

Everything else all done, ASL, baby signing, dad, first words, mom

Jaden is officially signing “more.” We’ve been watching a signing dvd together that Aunt Tina gave us, and it really has made a difference in his comprehension of the signs. Now we’re working on ‘change’ and ‘diaper’.

Everything else ASL, baby signs, more, signing