A word a day

You know how people talk about taking life and its little joys for granted? I guess I did not quite know what it could really mean till my little tyke came along. I spent the first year of his life in turn marveling and obsessing over his milestones. His flipping over, sitting up, crawling, walking.... I even got into that dreadful thing - comparing ( still do, though I've learned to catch myself just in time). All my conversations with the girls were dominated by 'your baby, my baby' sharing, and heartening though it was, I found myself regularly losing myself in it, forgetting to live the moment. So where R was having fun trying to catch his own shadow, I was fretting over how he had not perfected the pincer grasp that another baby had. I know you're probably shaking your heads in disapproval by now, I am too! ;)

Over the past year, I have taught myself to enjoy *every* one of his achievements, big or small. This attitude helps me particularly in our struggle with speech. Earlier, I let myself be led into hopes of R being a lazy child who will sprout sentences any day now, of him being an action-oriented rather than speech oriented little man, of him taking some late-talking relative's genes. I still hang on to those. But increasingly, I see his efforts to produce the sounds he hears and sees modelled and I know I could not just sit back on hope and let him deal with it.

While R has just about met most talking milestones, he has never shown much skill at it. This lack always strikes me more when I see or hear other toddlers, even those months younger, showing ease and even eloquence in their verbal expression. R's receptive skills are more than on par, and I can vouch for that. He floors us with stuff he picks up from the world around him. He can usually also communicate very well what he wants, using a combination of signs and sounds and a lot of gesturing from either side. But there are invariably instances where we misinterpret him and cause him, and us, some amount of frustration. I do need to translate his signs or words now and again for others. Add to that some well-meaning people popping that dreaded question, 'he's not talking yet?' I have had mini meltdowns, which I am ashamed to admit have often ended with me losing my cool with R, pressuring him to say something, or say it better.

Now we all know how badly that works, or backfires, more like. Toddlers have enough on their hands with their minds exploding with new information and emotions. They deserve a helping hand, right? Thankfully, I am getting better at dealing with my own lows in this regard. So apart from over-enthusiastic applause when he gets close enough to cracking a tough word, I try to find ways of making talking more interesting and fun, and certainly less of an expectation from his mad-hatter mommy. I hunt for different places and opportunties for words to pop up. I have great fun in the process, and look forward to our trips to the grocery store, book shop, garden, doctor, anywhere really!

I have great support from girlfriends in the matter - ideas, experiences or just lending a sympathetic ear. There's also a wealth of information out there about speech delay and I have been scouring the web (don't I always;) ) I've read blogs and medical sites and parenting sites and forums, and there's still so much I might never know. Whether or not R has a developmental delay, and even if he is just a late-talker, I am glad to be doing this research. Everyday I learn new ways of getting the best out of R, about help I could easily provide at home through routine activities. I read rambles of moms like me, about the strength of mothers who face real fears, about their kids who deal with struggles so bravely. Most importantly, I learn over and over to appreciate each new step, feel the thrill of every small achievement, irrespective of its importance to any one else.

All this was brought on by this - today, R and I were visiting our usual bookstore haunt - Crossword. He is a systematic little guy when it comes to books - what comes off the shelf, must go back there once done. After some amount of babbling, muttering odd words and turning pages, he tugged at me and pointed to the shelf out of his reach. Lost in checking out a book, I absent-mindedly asked him what he wanted. He gave me an exasperated look and said, "Put!" pointing to the shelf. Before I could process the new word, he pointed again and said "Put  (long pause)  boots" (his word for books). By now I'm sure I looked like a woman off her rockers, and R looked at me like similarly. Surely mommy would know to put the stuff back in place! Goodness, the things I need to tell her to do!

And that's how we're progressing, one word at a time :)

R has been down with another one of his seemingly endless illnesses - a chest infection this time round. I don't usually get too worked up about his umpteen cold and cough bouts, but this one had me a little worried, I must admit. His doc recommended an x-ray if he did not respond to his meds, and I had to get one done eventually when the fever would not subside. The report, scarily enough, diagnosed minimal bronchopneumonia. That's a medical term long and complicated enough to set off alarm bells in any mother's head. As it turned out, it was nothing to worry about (I so love pediatricians who make being sick sound routine;)) And as if to prove his doctor right, R bounced back in that amazing way toddlers have, literally waving away my fussing over his racking cough. He's on his way to a full recovery and will not tolerate being treated as a patient anymore.

There are enough little ones being unwell around me to feel like I have company. Season or not, toddlers seem to hunt out ways of catching that cold, or that tummy bug. But I cannot appreciate more our mothers (and fathers), sitting up through nights and going through that dreadful waiting at pediatricians' offices, all the while managing their own lives. There are days I feel I could not deal with the multitasking parenting requires, at all! Then again, we probably have some God given gene that helps us survive, battle scars and all.

It's a new year, one I hope brings more health, more happy squeals and certainly many more words from R, who has some serious catching up to do where his speech is concerned. I long to be bombarded with questions and endless chatter from this boy, and he's certainly going to do it his own way in his time. I must document his speech developments here to be an encouragement and resource for me later, if not anything else.