Nolan, sans aidsHe just had dinner, so this proclamation was rather random and unexpected. I questioned him about his request, and he repeated, "I want pizza! Purple pizza. Downstairs."
I assumed he was talking about pretend food in his play kitchen, so I finished my shower and came downstairs to a very impatient boy.
"My PIZZA! I need it!"
Nolan has been eating very well for the past few weeks, so I figured he had a hankering for some Little Caesar's. He's technically not allowed pizza because of his reflux diet, but we've cheated once or twice, so he knows what it is (and he likes it).
"Nolan, honey, we don't have any pizza."
He grabbed my hand and shouted, "RIGHT THERE!" and took me over to the fruit bowl. Which was full of peaches.
I repeated the word "peaches" several times, but he was sans aids and kept repeating "pizza."
He's completely below the speech banana without aids, so we have to do a lot of shouting or be very close to his ear for him to hear us unaided. I've always wondered how Nolan manages to "hear" without hearing aids, and now I'm starting to figure out his strategy. When he's presented with an unfamiliar word and doesn't have his hearing aids in, he fills in the "blank" with a word that sounds like the vague gibberish coming from our mouths. Hence, a peach is a pizza. It is a new word, sounds like one he knows, so he plugs the known word into the fuzzy blank.
We had this happen the other day at the creek, too. He asked where where we were going, and I told him we were going to the creek. "The beach! We going beach!" I must have repeated "creek" fifteen times before I dug the aids out of their waterproof box and put them in his ears. As soon as I did that, he said, "Oh, creek. We play at creek." He didn't know the word "creek," so he heard something like "ee" and filled it in with "beach" from the context of the sentence.
It's really rather clever. It explains why some of his vocabulary is a tad confused, however- why he confuses categories and labels for objects, etc.
On that note, Nolan yanked his hearing aids out this evening and hid them. I'm not sure what that is about, since he's been so attached to them lately that he'll howl when we take them out. It might have something to do with the excessive humidity lately, making them highly uncomfortable to wear. I'm off to do a hearing aid maintenance check just to be sure everything is in working order!
6 comments:
Oops.Pizza , peaches...:)
Funny , I used to do exactly the same , and I still do it.After all these years , I've honed up that so I can fill up the blank with the APPROPRIATE word , buuuut still mishaps.
As for humidity..D&S , and an air blower into his tubing will help.I used to have the same frustrations! Did you find these aids? :) where he hid them?
They were in the Lego bin. Hearing aids are surprisingly hard to find in a large bin full of Legos!
Perfect camouflage, yah?
He's a clever little guy! And the strategy makes sense. He found a word that made sense in the context, too.
You've got one smart cookie there, Leah!
And a creative one, too!
He is going to do so well in school. I can feel it.
Adding a little sign in there will help with those misunderstandings. And it will give him confidence in knowing he is understanding what is being said.
Ericka, I could do that for "peach" and "pizza," but since he didn't know the word for peach, it wouldn't have helped. I would have signed it, and he still wouldn't have known that it meant, "peach." We do use that method when he knows the word, though!
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