Our youngest daughter developed an unexpected speech impediment several weeks ago; she became unable to say her sister’s name without stuttering on the first latter.
Without wanting to dwell too much on it and make her aware - or to let the others realise and tease her about it - we occasionally tested her out - asking about similar sounding words. They were all fine. It was just her sister’s name. When asked who had done something she would stumble over the first letter, and smile.
You could break the name down, and ask for each syllable. She could do that. Repeating the whole name afterwards resulted immediately in the stutter.
While getting ready for school this morning, her sister’s name cropped up in conversation, and she said it perfectly. I looked at W, wide eyed, and she looked back, similarly wide eyed.
“Who’s is that?”
She repeated it again. Perfectly.
Given that we know about as much about neuro-linguistic development as we do about rainfall patterns in the amazon basin, we’ve been busy concocting all manner of thoughts and explanations for her sudden leap.
It’s got to be some re-programming going on, hasn’t it. Somewhere deep inside her head, her brain is figuring out how to say things properly at last - and that seems to involve crossing wires from time to time. I sometimes wonder if we are watching and listening too closely to the children; if we should reserve any kind of judgement until their teachers express concern.
We often play counting games, recite nursery rhymes, tell stories, or sing with the children. Most conversations with the younger ones result in the odd re-spoken word, corrected grammar, or suggestion of a better word. We don’t always correct them - just now and again. Finding the balance between helping them learn and knocking their confidence is difficult, but given their enthusiasm just to spend time with us we can usually get away with all manner of cloaked learning activities.
It’s easy - being around the children day in, day out, to not see their development happening. The speech impediment was an obvious one, but the more subtle changes - being able to hold a conversation, to question, to understand - pass straight under the radar during a busy day.
I always smile when I shout down the hallway “kids, dinner time!”, and the 4 year old invariably shouts back “Daaad! - it’s Lunch! Not Dinner!”… you can’t get away with anything any more.