Sport's Speech Therapy

When we were expecting our 7-year-old son, Sport, we were very aware of the risks of a second boy with Autism. I’ve never been a fan of prenatal testing of any type (not that it would have picked up autism anyway), so we were carefully watching his milestones. Sport was very verbal and social right from the beginning. The problem was that you couldn’t understand anything he said! Being the mom, I probably was the closest thing to an interpreter that he had. 

When he was three, he was asked to give his first talk at church. He got up there and said every word into the microphone. Sadly, because the kids couldn’t understand what he said, some of them laughed and we couldn’t get him to give another talk for a couple of years. He would accept the assignment, prepare, and then when the time came to actually say the words to the unappreciative crowd, he would clam up and I would end up giving the talk for him. By the time he was four, our doctor suggested we have him tested for a communications disorder, oh and while we were at it, how about testing him for autism as well?!  So we took him to the clinic and had several doctors test his hearing and his speech. Then finally he took the autism test. It took the last doctor about 2 minutes to determine that we were wasting his time. Our little Sport was not even a tiny bit autistic, he just had trouble speaking. 

Once again we were dealing with an IEP and speech therapists. Even though he hadn’t started kindergarten yet, we were sent to our neighborhood school for speech therapy twice a week. Summer was approaching and he only had three months before school started. His preschool teacher understood about half of what he said. I was at about 75% with his dad and siblings around 60%. He was incredibly bright but the words were garbled like he’d been sucking on marbles. We decided to put him in an extra day of private speech therapy as well. We practiced every day. He had a deck of cards with beginning sounds and we would drill and drill and drill. He had little green paper frogs that did backflips when he performed well and he worked really hard. 

Kindergarten started and some of the kids called him a baby and bullied him a little because he was rather unintelligible especially when he got excited and spoke fast. But eventually he found a few good kids who didn’t care and were willing to include him anyway. It took him until the first part of 2^nd grade before he was finally released from the IEP. He’s a terrific kid and he just made his debut in Swan Lake as the trumpeter. Not that his speech impediment would have mattered there, nobody speaks during a ballet…except my four-year-old grandson, Burrito. During a beautiful, quiet, girls-on-their-toes scene, he spotted Princess’s friend. "ABBY!" he yelled in his loudest voice. Bossy turned bright red, "Shhhh!" she whispered. But it was too late. Even Princess who was in the dressing room recognized his voice. Nope. He won’t need any speech therapy, it was LOUD and clear. 

Autism: Cluster 1st - 3rd grade

This is part five of this story.  If you are new and want to catch up click here.

That light never did turn on. I cried at the Kindergarten graduation. I wasn’t sure that any teacher could teach my little Dog Walker as much as "Miss Miotten." He was moved into a cluster class for 1^st grade. That meant that resource students in grades 1 through 3 were all in the same class. Many of them had communicative disorders like our son, but that was just a "catch all" for the ones who had yet to be labeled. 

 
First grade was hard! His teacher was in her last year before retirement and she was relentless. It was good for our little guy to learn to work hard. I wouldn’t necessarily throw us in the really bad parents’ category but we had not asked much of him other than learning to speak. We often gave in to his tantrums just to keep peace. We didn’t assign him chores like we did the other kids, and we rewarded him often for small achievements. His brother and sisters were not happy with this favoritism and it caused many conflicts and complaints at home. I can’t say I was sad to see that teacher go. 

His 2^nd grade teacher was younger and seemed more dedicated to the students. She insisted that it was time to test our sweet boy. The stacks of paperwork came home again. I spent hours poring over them, hoping that we would finally understand his diagnosis. As I read the tests this time, the light turned on…not for him…for me. I could clearly see where the tests were leading. His teacher must have known too, because she gave me several different tests I hadn’t seen before and they all pointed to one answer: Autism. 

My sweetie and I met with the teacher on a cold winter morning for Parent/Teacher Conferences. Our son was happy to play with the toys on the floor as we chatted. He had grown so much since he first started preschool! Now, at eight years old, he was finally starting to learn how to hold a real conversation. He still could not read facial expressions or understand simple instructions. He did not make eye contact; he looked at my mouth when I talked to him. 

As we sat in our meeting, my sweetie heard the Autism word for the first time. His first reaction was denial and I could see the anger building inside him. He did not want our son to wear a label for the rest of his life. I understood how he felt, but I could also see that just taking away the label didn’t make it not be true. We rode home in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts. I’m not exactly sure what he was thinking, but I was trying to figure out our next move. We really couldn’t afford a private school for Autism although there is a very good one right here in our valley. 

As it turned out, the answer was to leave him right where he was, in the cluster class. But the questions of what to do beyond that kept me awake at nights. All my hopes and dreams for my precious son were shattered…would he ever go to college? Or even graduate from high school? What about marriage, a family, a career? Were these things even possible for him? What next?  


Jump to part 6.

Autism: Kindergarten

My little Dog Walker spent the following summer laughing and playing and getting a nice dark tan (he is so not like me…I burn and peel, then burn and peel again all summer long). We signed him up for t-ball, but that was a disaster! He would lay down on the field and completely ignore the other kids. Sometimes he would chase after the ball and scream and cry if someone else got it first. We never made it through a whole game. 

We worried about his safety. He was totally oblivious to stranger danger or getting lost or hit by a car. We put chain locks high up on our outside doors to keep him inside where he was mostly safe. When fall came, he went back to the same preschool with the same teachers. His progress was amazing! We were hopeful that he would catch up soon. We were always led to believe that one day the light would just turn on and he would get it and all would be right with the world. The following school year he had the option to change schools. 

 We were told that his beloved preschool teacher would be moving to the new school and that’s where he wanted to be. So we changed schools and she had a falling-out with the administration and changed districts. Suddenly everything was unfamiliar to our little guy. He was in a new school with new kids and new teachers. And to make matters worse, his teacher was partially deaf and had a speech impediment, so the instructions he heard every day were not the kind of speech we were hoping he would learn. We tried to transfer him back to the other school, but if we did he would lose his busing privileges and we were not in a position to drive him. We took a giant step backwards. That school year was pretty much a total loss. 

The light never came on and he was still struggling to communicate. I quit my day job in April so I was only away from home a couple of evenings a week to teach classes. Unfortunately, the extra "mommy time" didn’t seem to help either. We had our seventh child that summer. Now I don’t want you to think that we were unhappy with our sweet little boy! He had an amazing habit of brightening a room. He had a cheerful disposition most of the time. For him, everything was either black or white. He would be angry and upset one minute and then smiling and playful the next. He didn’t hold grudges or pout. He simply saw the world as it was at that exact moment. 

The school district powers that be decided that Diagnostic Kindergarten was the next step. This school was much further away and through some twisted irony, its name was Bell View. We were nervous and hopeful at the same time. We didn’t want a year like we had just finished, but our first teacher had suggested mainstreaming at Kindergarten and we were still thinking that might happen. 

Kindergarten was a whole new experience for our little guy. He had to sit at a regular desk and learn to use a pencil. We spent hours just working on the proper grip (he still doesn’t hold it exactly the way he was taught, but it works). He got a bug bite on his nose that started out tiny, but worked itself into a giant scab because he just couldn’t leave it alone. **Editor's Note:  This is significant because his school pictures for the year have this giant scab.  It wouldn't go away because he kept playing with it.  

He did not know how to have a conversation. He could sing the "I Love You" song from Barney, but he had no idea what it meant. Oh how badly I wanted to hear those words from him with some real meaning in them! Certainly by the time they were six all of my older children had put their arms around my neck and told me they loved me, but not my Dog Walker. He was caught in his own little imaginative world and most of the time it did not include me. In January they gave him his first tests to determine diagnosis. We filled out stacks of paperwork about his birth, his siblings, his health. Almost anything you could imagine about his life to that point. Unfortunately, despite our efforts, these tests were inconclusive because he could not even understand the instructions well enough to take his part of them. We forged ahead, just waiting for that light to turn on…  Jump to part 5.