My little dinosaur

If you stopped by for a visit these days, you'd think we had a cat. No, not because of the smell (at least I hope not!) but because of the sounds. Frances has conquered the dinosaur sound! It goes like this: "kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk" and it sounds like a cat coughing up a hairball.

We're all allergic to cats, so believe me there's no cat here. Just Frances practicing for her next speech lesson. And while we're not a cat-friendly family, we do love that coughing-up-a-hairball sound! We've been waiting a long time to hear her say "kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk".

Frances is our 3-year-old (she'll be 4 in February). She started speech lessons over a month ago. If you think that seems young for speech, you might be surprised that we were thinking of having her speech assessed even earlier. At 2 years, she hardly spoke a word. She understood everything, but she would not talk. Well, that's not entirely true: She would say "No", but only to tell you that she wasn't going to say whatever it is you asked her to say! Then all of a sudden, Frances started talking. So we figured the problem was that she couldn't get a word in edgewise with her chatty older sisters around. Or, as my wise mother often said, she was just waiting until she could get it right.

Now 3 years old, Frances is still a little hard to understand. She has that typical little-kid lisp. But she also says "T" instead of "K" (Did I mention her favorite book is Hello Kitty?), and "W" instead of "L". (Our Leah couldn't get her Ls either and called herself Wee-ah until she was about 4.) And she has some wacky consonant blends that even we can’t figure out. For example, when Frances says "baybing thuit" we know she means "bathing suit". And when she asks for a "fweet", she wants a treat. But when she says "pwy", we don't know if she's saying "dry" or "try" or "cry" or something else entirely. We just ask her to repeat it, or describe it, and eventually we figure it out.

Normally, Frances is good-natured about her speech, but then, we’ve always been around to interpret for others. When Frances started preschool this fall, 2 mornings a week, for the first time she was surrounded by kids and adults who weren't used to her speech...and no one around to interpret.

The first week of preschool, Frances came home and stated matter-of-factly, "My teacher doesn't understand me." I asked her what she does when that happens and she said that she says it again. That was all. She didn’t mention it after that first week.

By mid-September, the preschool teacher was telling me that Frances frequently gets frustrated in class when she is not understood. John and I agreed that maybe it was time to get Frances’ speech assessed. We didn’t want this overshadowing her preschool experience and interfering with her learning.

Frances and I met with the speech teacher at Emma's and Leah's elementary school, who said that most of Frances' pronunciation problems are normal for her age, but that some blends are so random that she was a candidate for speech therapy. We could let her grow out of it, but if her frustration was interfering with her enjoying preschool, why not give speech a try?

That next week Frances started speech lessons. They are first concentrating on correcting her T-for-K and D-for-G sounds, and she is supposed to practice making what they call the "dinosaur sound" ("kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk", remember, the cat hacking up a hairball?)

Frances had a great first lesson ("great" meaning that she made the requested sound once and played with the toys for the rest of the session) and a terrible second one, where she literally clamped her mouth shut and refused to cooperate. The teacher gave up and brought her back to me early, and we discussed whether she was really ready for speech. We agreed to give her another week and see how things went.

That was about 10 days ago. Frances was upset and I was upset for her. Then, the day after the uncooperative speech session, the preschool teacher told me that Frances had had a major meltdown in class. Apparently her teacher told her she couldn't understand what she said, and Frances threw herself down on the floor sobbing, "No one understands my words!" When I heard this, I burst into tears, right in front of the teacher, the kids, and all of the parents dropping off their kids. My poor little girl! 3 years old and already experiencing frustration on an almost-daily basis.

Somehow, I knew, this was my fault. (It all comes back to the mother anyway, doesn’t it?) This last year has been so crazy, and I’ve been through so many physical changes (did I ever mention that for months she called me her "new Mommy"? It was after my lumpectomy in February, and my hair had started to grow back. She had just turned 3 and really thought her old mommy went into the hospital and the new mommy came out)....and we’ve had so many family members and friends in and out of the house to help out, I think poor Frances is confused. She probably can’t quite put her little finger on it, but she feels a little ignored, too. Having a sick mother takes a lot of attention away from the children and replaces it with pressure. It’s unfair.

All I could think about for days was my poor girl sobbing "No one understands my words." I’m tearing up thinking about it now. For the first time I was absolutely furious at myself for having cancer. I had been so proud that we had survived the ordeal as a normal family. Did I need to pay more attention to her? What was I doing or not doing?

So I spent some extra time with her...Mommy-Frances time...and we had a lovely afternoon at home after her ballet class (her sisters were still at their classes and baby brother was napping). Jesse woke up, and we played with him. He made a funny noise, and I commented that he sounded like a dinosaur. And would you believe, Frances responded with a "kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk"!!! Just like that. I don’t know why she did it, but I praised her and jumped up and down and said, "Frances, you made the dinosaur sound! I knew you could do it!"

And so did she. She was just waiting until she could get it right. Frances is a dinosaur, and I couldn't be more thrilled!