We have spent the last 6 years teaching our daughter to talk. Actually, that’s an exaggeration: we spent 3 years wondering if our fae child would ever speak; 2 with various speech therapists, school teachers etc trying to get her to talk, encouraging her to talk and dealing with her frustration of not being able to talk; only for the penny to drop and her to start talking nonstop, and the world finally starting to become easier.
Then, in late October, she went through some sort of cognitive shift as happens with all children, and she started stimming significantly more. She also started to make verbalisations known as echolalia. The fae father wants it to be known that he isn’t convinced that she isn’t trying to use echolocation. It would not surprise me to find that this is true, as she spends an inordinate amount of time with her eyes shut walking around bumping into things. If it is echolocation, then she isn’t very good at it. Then again, she isn’t very good at walking around with her eyes open, either, and is often covered in mysterious bruises.
I digress. The point is, that since October she has used echolalia as one of her preferred ways of stimming, and since you can’t talk whilst sounding like an old school dial tone she has taken to using Makaton and sign language as her preferred communication method.
This has a few significant drawbacks. Firstly, not everyone knows sign language. In fact her own father and I only know a few signs between us, and most of those boil down to ‘no’, ‘stop’ and ‘sit down’; in fact, all the signs that she will want to ignore. Her grandparents don’t know any. More importantly, if it’s not in a Christmas song (specifically “Santa Claus is coming to town” or “Rudolph the Red nosed reindeer”) she doesn’t know them either – and I’m not too convinced by some of those either.
So, all in all, this genius idea of hers is leading to a lot of frustration on both sides, and she continually makes up signs and meanings (no, you can’t use the same sign for ‘daddy’ as you do for ‘fish’) and some interesting if completely wrong ideas. My suggestion that she went back to using her words and telling me what she wanted was met with a look of scorn normally reserved for when someone suggests we don’t watch the same TV show on repeat, that she has something other than porridge for breakfast, or something equally ridiculous.
I guess I’m taking a course in sign language.
Raising the Modern Fae 