Morgan "isms"

Morgan's language takes leaps forward at times and at other times leaves us totally puzzled. We are grateful that she seems to be continually making progress, though not without her challenges. Many children with autism are non-verbal, so we feel very fortunate that Morgan communicates as well as she does. Here are a few anecdotes from the lest few days.

On Tuesdays our neighbor's daughter spends some time with us while her mom works. One of her first requests that morning was to watch Tinker Bell. She knows we have all the DVDs and looks forward to watching it at our house. This request came as I was getting Morgan ready to go meet to school bus. I decided to pop the DVD in so the "little" girls had something to watch while I finished with Morgan. As I put the disk in the DVD player the machine told me "disk is dirty". I was in a hurry, so I was annoyed with this. I pulled the disk out to clean it and Morgan came over to me. She put her hand on my shoulder and said "Oh Mama, I know it's frustrated." Of course, she meant "frustrating", but the fact that she was trying to actually console me was amazing! She's never said anything like this, so I was pretty shocked. David was still home at this point and we looked at each other, thinking "Did she really just say that?!" I gave her a hug and thanked her for trying to make me feel better.

The same night we were eating dinner and Morgan had finished her meal and was restless to get down. She absentmindedly started poking at the divider in the leaf table with her (metal) fork. We told her to stop and she told us "No, it's yummy!" Huh? She then tried to lick, or possibly chew on the table and we again told her to stop and that we don't bite the table. Annoyed she looked at David and said "No Daddy, it's yummy and I want to eat your chair, too!" Huh?! (again) Eat the chair? We suspect she was trying to talk back somehow, but the language she used really made no sense. On one hand it's good she is showing these developmentally appropriate reactions, but she struggles with being able to connect that emotion with appropriate language. Hey, one step at a time, right? In the meantime it makes for some funny commentary. Since then, David and I have been using the phrase "It's yummy, I want to eat your chair, too!" just for the funny factor.

More Language Learning

Morgan has really come up with some interesting phrases lately. I'm not sure if this is scripted or spontaneous, but it's nice to hear anyway. It's funny, whenever Morgan says something new or interesting when both of us are in earshot, David and I look at each other as if to say "Did you hear what I heard?!" Then we laugh.

One thing she said last week was in response to me asking her to go upstairs to Quiet Time. She said "I want to stay down here for a little while." Ummm. "For a little while?" Really?

David told me a few days ago that he heard her say "actually" to begin a sentence. I hadn't heard this yet. Then we were at a friends' house this weekend...Morgan had just finished using the potty and said "Look, those are cars!" and pointed at their Cars (movie) shower curtain. Then she went up to the curtain, pointed at Lightning McQueen and said "Actually, this is a red car." People...do I say "actually" a lot? This has to be coming from somewhere.

Then finally, I got a message from her teacher today. I had called a few days ago to check in on how Morgan's been doing. She said Morgan's been doing great and seems really happy at school. Then she said yesterday Morgan came into her classroom, sat down at a table and said "I love this place!" OK, I wasn't there and I'm always skeptical of when I hear things like this through other people...but, why shouldn't I believe her? It's not a phrase I've ever heard coming out of Morgan's mouth, but I'll take it! I'm not sure if this jump in random language skills is due to anything in particular, but we like it!!