I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the fact that No*ah and Oli*ver are almost four. How does this happen? They are growing like weeds right now. We're doing an extended family party, and as requested, lots of balloons, one cake and one apple pie, and a potluck meal. J’s brother Mar*k will be in from Boston, and my mom will be with us too. She hasn't missed a birthday yet.
We had Ollie in for a speech evaluation yesterday, and will be starting speech therapy at the U of MN soon. They did a test where he described what he saw on a page, over 30 pages or so, and graphed all the speech sounds he made on a kind of chart. I realized as I was sitting there just how often he can’t be understood and how often I probably translate for him. Even his brother does this. He was such a sweetie during the whole thing, animatedly describing the scenes on the pages with some extra adjectives and a little narrative thrown in for good measure. He has real gifts with language, I think, and sometimes I wonder if he’ll have a gift for writing someday. It wouldn’t surprise us at all—his descriptions of things are so interesting and lovely, and he really has a sense for how a story is put together, though you wouldn't necessarily know that if you can't understand him. Indeed, the therapist said, “His expressive and receptive language skills are way, way above average.” She also did a physical exam of his face and the inside of his mouth, feeling the muscles, looking at his tongue and teeth while he said various words, etc. His problem, it turns out, is with low muscle tone in his face. Over time, he’s compensated for that low muscle tone by tensing his facial muscles and moving his tongue too forward in his mouth, which makes certain speech sounds difficult or impossible. She was very optimistic that she could help, because he was so responsive to her, and a lot of sounds are emerging right now. He has a slight occasion stutter that is accompanied by facial tensing and grimacing (and therefore not related to the common 3-year-old stutter that’s more related to needing additional processing time at that age). This is related to the muscle tone issue as well, and could become a real problem without some therapy. So, it will be about a month before his first weekly 1-hour appointment. Meanwhile, he’s supposed to drink with a straw (a hard one, not the silicon sippy cup kind we’d been using) and use his lips and not his teeth to do it, do some speech sound exercises with me focused on the S sound and the SH sound for now, and get plenty of time to finish his sentences. We feel good about things (though I won’t lie –I was still half-hoping they’d laugh us out of there). The therapist is truly wonderful, and that will help a lot. We can't wait for everyone to understand all the great things he has to tell you. If you want to help him out, don't talk too fast so he hears all the speech sounds you're modeling for him, and patiently let him finish his sentences. It's OK, even good, to gently ask him to repeat himself if you can't understand what he said. He’d grow out of his speech issues without therapy, but he’d miss a lot meanwhile, and that’s the real issue. He’ll miss being taken seriously by peers and adults alike, being able to ask a follow-up question with confidence, having any confidence in maintaining social interactions, and so on. A little of that is happening now. His therapist said that at age four and later, being poorly understood can become a real confidence/self-esteem issue. But he'll be fine - he's a quirky kid, but lovable and bright and one of the two lights of our lives. If you talked to him today, he'd tell you that pink is still his favorite color, and his favorite book is still "The Reader's Digest Guide To Home Improvement".
Ollie was a bit miffed at finding this “dead fishie” on the counter, but he loved the smoked-whitefish salad it made, the little hypocrite.
One of our calmer arsenic hour moments:
I’ve been making our own yogurt from milk this winter t save a little money. We can easily spend $9 or so a week on yogurt otherwise, and it's a lot less to make our own. I'll share the info here in case it interest anyone. We have a warmer, and it makes great yogurt overnight. Oli*ver in particular clearly prefers it over storebought, and tells me I make the "best yogurt in the world". It doesn’t take much time, though there are a million conflicting recipes, and you have to find what works for you. We use starter (but might switch to using yogurt soon), and I add a little gelatin powder because I like it a little thicker than I can otherwise get it. You can also use nonfat dry milk powder as a thickener. I heat the milk to between 109 and 112 degrees, then add the starter and gelatin. Some people boil the milk, but most seem to agree that pre-pasturized milk is already sterile enough. (Waiting around for the milk to cool back down to exactly 112 is a pain, too.) Then it goes, uncapped, into the warmer over night, and into the fridge the next morning for a few hours to set. It takes me less than 15 minutes or so to make a couple of quarts, and I just clean up the kitchen while the milk warms, so it's really less. Winter feels like a great time to learn a new indoor skill like that.
That below is my seed box. I think if our house caught on fire, I'd wake Jo*el, grab the boys, then the animals, then my seed box. In that order, of course. It's always so amazing to look over those seeds and think of all the life that will come from them to sustain us over the summer and beyond.
