Sunday, June 10, 2007

MIKEY: Gookies and Gilk

As most parents of a child know, a child’s language development and ability to communicate can be a frustrating experience but a wonderful one to witness. My wife and I still use words and phrases that my nieces used to use when they were toddlers trying to learn to communicate. In those cases it was cute and as they developed their skills we kind of almost missed them using those old words and phrases.

With autistic children, communicating is the hardest part. My son, Mikey, has been learning to use various ways of communication from his wonderful teachers. The first thing they taught him was how to point to indicate when he wanted something. When he first started doing this my wife and I were incredibly amazed and thought it was the most wonderful thing in the world. It then got to the point where he pointed so well and so appropriately that we kind of took it for granted and sometimes forgot to acknowledge it.

Verbally, Mikey seems to go back and forth with his ability to use language. He sometimes can say a word perfectly, sometimes he can say most of a word (such as gookies and gilk for cookies and milk), and sometimes he can just say sounds. But he also loses the ability to say a word from time to time, which is saddening for us and frustrating for him.

There are so many useless things in this world that people get excited about. But, for me, every sound that comes out of my son’s mouth is priceless. My favorite song in the world now is Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star when Mikey fills in the words "star" and "are." So, for now, I’m totally happy to break out the gookies and raise a glass of gilk to Mikey.

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