Sunday 28 April 2013

Speech, questions, hope and jokes

People, friends and strangers alike, are always commenting on Nathan's wonderful smile. From a very young age he has had the ability to light up a room or the face and heart of a grumpy adult with no effort at all. Turning on the beam, they call it. And people call him 'smiler' wherever he goes. Whereas this smile is an expression of his very sunny nature, it also has a second function: Nathan struggles to speak with clarity and is well aware of that. He is bright and so knows that people who don't know him well will not easily understand him. So he uses his smile as his preferred means of communication: 'Hi, are you nice, I like people, I won't say much, but I will beam at you, because I am a very sociable person and I love making contact'. More recently he will confidently say his name to most people (pronounced  'Naynan', so in need of translation at times), add his age (five!!!!) and will say something about whatever toy he is clutching (usually a train or a car).

Speech is an essential part of our communication with each other, an important tool to get by in our society. It's therefore no surprise that Peter and I are more concerned about Nathan's trouble with speech than we are about his mobility problems. It is easy to underestimate Nathan if you judge him by what he is able to say. His speech problem is caused by unwilling muscles not getting the right signals from his damaged brain, it is not in any way linked to his understanding. It does also impact on his reading progress. Thankfully he is at a fantastic school where specialist teachers help him learn as much as possible despite the speech trouble, as well as work to improve his speech and other forms of communication. We thank God (and the wonderful Family Fund) for his iPad, with its specialist speech software - think Stephen Hawkin with pictures- that can also be used to practise reading and writing. And we rejoice in small things that others take for granted.

Every school holiday we are bowled over by the progress he has made with his vocabulary and clarity since the last one. This is because when he comes home after a long school day he has no speech energy left, so we get limited language. It means a step change for us every holiday, catching up with new words and sentences and the quirks in pronouncing them ('tooden twing' took a while until I saw the wooden swing he was referring to...).

To our great delight he has just started asking questions. I am not yet tired of 'mummy doing?' 'Daddy doing' and  'Andy doing?'.(It might yet come, after all I always said I would never lose the plot with 'Mummmyyyyyyymummymummymuuuuuuuuummy' after waiting for 2.5 extra years to hear the magic word and that didn't last..) It means that we have a whole new way of having conversations, and can bring in lots of new vocabulary. It's wonderful!

And our practical joker has started to crack verbal jokes. Maybe not very funny to the ordinary hearer, but amazing to us. Nathan sits all the way at the front of the school bus and when one of the teenagers in the back called him recently he yelled 'I'm not here!!!!' It is amazing to hear him use language for pure fun and nothing else.

And so we thank and praise God. And keep hope. And will him on. And do what we can to help him fulfil his full potential.