My New Years Inspiration

My middle daughter (for those who do not know) was diagnosed with Autism right before she turned two. That was nearly twelve years ago. She is mostly non-verbal and does know some signs and can do verbal approximations of words for items that are common in her life. She is also a life long fan of Blue's Clues. She still watches the episodes on her iPod Touch. Trust me, there have been many times that I have wanted to ditch the dog and Steve/Joe for something more age appropriate ... but honestly, have you watched tween programming lately? Anyway, Sierra has learned many "scripts" from Blue's Clues. She has never been able to vocalize them, but she will often do the body motions that go with them. They are often amusing to watch and you can just see the pure joy in her face when she does them. So, on New Years Eve, I was sitting in the living room, playing on Pinterest (I am a Pinaholic) as she ran back and forth between her room and the living room. Suddenly, something caught my attention. She was talking! She was scripting - verbally! I watched in amazement as I saw her not only vocally script, but I was hearing her talk with more than one word at a time! She has never been able to do that. But here was several small sentences coming out of her mouth!

"Me. Ewe. Boo. Na Do, Uh Na Na, Uh Na Na Na Do." Okay, so there, it doesn't look like much. But what it represents is "Me, and you, and our friend Blue. We can do, anything, that we wanna do."

And this is huge, and I mean like TITANIC HUGE when you consider that normally her responses are one word answers. Even more huge when you think that just a few short years ago, this child couldn't say letter sounds, everything was a grunt or a cry! I had to record the next time she did it, which is the great thing about her scripting - she will do it several times over and over! So I grabbed my smartphone and recorded it to send to my husband who is currently away. 

So, I was sure that was going to be my New Year's miracle, just a few hours early. However, not so fast. 

Last night, as the day was winding down and I was about to get the girls to bed, Sierra comes bounding out of her room in typical Sierra fashion. She is side skipping around, holding her iPod in one hand and flapping her new scarf which was around her neck in the other. I turned around to tell her it was time for bed when I stopped. I head these words coming from her mouth - "Bye! Wuv Ewe!" OMG, did I hear that right? Blue's Clues never says love you. Not like that. OMG! I had to call my husband as her sister and I stood here, listening to her say it over and over. He got to hear it. We got to hear it. It was almost as sweet as the day last summer when out of the blue (no pun intended) she turned to me, pointed and called me Mom for the first - and so far only - time in her life. She was repeating something that I have been telling her all her life. Something I often wondered if she understood. While I can't say that she understands what she is saying necessarily, I can take hold of the fact that she has heard me - not just with her ears, but beyond that. She has heard me saying those words and she is able to repeat them. We have never worked with her on saying those words. We focus on functional words like "touch" (iPod), "TV", "eat", etc. We never went for words that couldn't have a picture attached to them. Yes, we have done emotions - she knows the difference between happy, mad and sad. But love is such a complicated emotion for those without special needs to understand, how could I teach this to a child who didn't want to have anything to do with "our" world for so long?

Well, I guess I taught it by example ...