Speak-Easy

I know that every parent experiences times of frustration when trying to figure out what in the world their child is telling them, but it seems like we have more than our fair share of them.  I have a constant headache these days from banging my head against the proverbial brick wall of Jack's reason.  The problem is, he has none.  Or maybe what's wrong is that his reasoning is so far removed from the norm that I just automatically turn towards the brick wall because it's more familiar than what he's offering.  He was speech delayed in his early development, and now it seems as though he's working overtime to make up for all the words he lost in being silent.  He throws words in our direction at a machine gun pace and in no particular order, then leaves us to decipher and construe them into meaningful conversations.

For instance, hours of my life were wasted the other morning while I tried to decode what "orange toes" meant.  He followed me in and out of every room in our house.  He even tracked me down to my closet where I was seeking solace by pretending to sort my shirts.  He stood outside the bathroom door as I was taking care of personal business.  He stood in front of me while I folded laundry and next to me as I swept the floor.  He was impossible to ignore and difficult to sidetrack.  This persistence was in the effort to obtain orange toes, and as the day progressed the want turned into a burning need.  I asked him to repeat the phrase countless times.  I asked him to draw what orange toes were.  Not surprisingly, I received a picture of oranges toe looking objects.   I even offered to color his own toes orange(this last one caused him pause while he had a brief internal struggle with himself), all to no avail.  It wasn't until around lunch time when I asked him what he wanted to eat that I figured it out.  He replied that he wanted a dead dog (this is translated into a hot dog in our world) and... ORANGE TOES!  My poor, tired brain flinched when the proverbial light bulb went on.  Granted, it was only a 20 watt bulb but that's plenty bright in a head that doesn't have much exposure.  It's more than enough to reveal cobwebs and startled things scurrying to hide from the glare.  What Jack had spent so much energy trying to get out of his dim-witted mother were Cheetos.  Are you groaning with the obvious simplicity of it all yet?  Just to be sure I had it right, I held up a bag of Fritos and asked him what they were, to which he answered with a haughty confidence that they were yellow toes.

I'm grateful that Jack at least tries to tell me what he wants however, because I also have Mitch to help through the day.  Bless his loving heart, but there are monkeys that communicate more effectively than he does.  He doesn't indicate that he wants any color of toes let alone what he wants to eat, he instead starts crying and I immediately begin a game of high stakes charades.  After I do an EMT assessment on his little body to make sure nothing is broken or bleeding, I start acting out his favorite scenarios to see if anything makes the crying stop.  Sometimes I'm sure he's stopped crying not because I've nailed down what he wants, but because I'm highly amusing pretending to ride a bike, dribble a ball and take a bath all at the same time.  You find out rather quickly that you don't have the ability to be embarrassed after you've had kids.

This is how I keep mentally fit.  There are scholars out in the world working in ancient or dead languages who don't tax their brains as much as I do on a daily basis just trying to survive the day.