Amelia Bedelia

AMENDED: BELOW, you'll read how I had an epiphany about Amelia Bedelia. I didn't by any means think it was an original thought -- I had a hunch that if I searched on Google, I'd find some funny but possibly obscure articles mentioning just the same thing I thought of, but it was nowhere near so subtle... practically ALL the kajillion hits diagnosed Amelia's ASD! So I'm late and learning as usual...patience, I beg of you...

I've had many people ask how yesterday's IEP meeting went, and it's all too big to process let alone describe just yet. Maybe I can compare it like being a soldier returning home, "So how did that war go?" Well, there were a lot of battles...

But here is the aha moment I had: I am thinking Amelia Bedelia must have been on the spectrum, and I never knew it. You remember Amelia Bedelia from your childhood; she was the little housekeeper who diligently followed your directions. You said dust the furniture, so she covered them with dust. I swear, I am going to put my Google skills to work when I finish this post to see if other parents realized that Amelia was on the spectrum after having their spectrum kid described to them by a speech language specialist.

So the speech person at our IEP seemed to adore and pity our rooster in a way that melted and terrified me. She gently told me that, because he was so charming, and she was rooting so hard for him to succeed, that she tried about nine ways to get him to successfully answer the receptive language part of her assessment. He wouldn't or couldn't but definitely didn't, and had no real interest in trying except for his desire to please the nice lady. But he was in an unfamiliar room filled with books and toys, and he had his own agenda, too. She asked him to keep his eye on the puzzle, and this is where he turned all Amelia, didn't you guess. Yep, he bent down, and he put his face -- no, his eye -- on the puzzle. For a minute. Then he was off on more tangents.

Oh, I know all about the tangents. I know about the made up words ("durst" is the most interesting, and I promise to post about durst later) and I know that despite having an age-appropriate vocabulary, it is an enormous struggle for the rooster to answer questions on topic, or have any kind of back and forth dialogue. But surely I should have noticed this literal aspect more. I guess it's true that when you are too close to something, you can lose your perspective.

This language person was trying to explain that our rooster has a significant -- in fact, I think she said huge -- gap between his expressive and receptive language scores, and that it's hard to tease all that apart from his distractability to know what is going on, but it definitely, clearly does not bode well for his auditory processing. Of course, they are not allowed to "diagnose" auditory processing. But this team really seemed skilled at diagnosing lots of things with the caveat that, "but we are not allowed to DIAGNOSE that, so we just use it as a DESCRIPTOR." Among things they liked to dangle at us, as they amitted having no clue exactly what to make of his unusual language, they threw in DESCRIPTORS such as aphasia-like, "sort of like a person with a brain lesion," and -- can you hear my fingers wince on the keyboard -- "schizophrenia-like." This last business was not from the language expert but from the school psychologist, who is no only not on my holiday card list, but looks like she and the grinch have the same hair dresser. Anyway, forget her. It was the speech person who seemed to best get the rooster and all his issues. She described him so well that there is no way her evaluation won't be useful as we schlep from -ist to -ist armed with the epic that is the rooster's file of documentation.

I felt a physical sensation of pain everytime she pityingly gushed, "He was clearly TRYING. Trying SO HARD. But his pragmatics just ARE NOT THERE."

Who would have thought I would have a child with, of all things, trouble expressing himself? (Self expression might be my only strength in life! And his dad writes for a living!) Most people see his BLONDE hair, take note of the THICKTHICK dark auburn tresses that make my husband and I look like we could be siblings if we weren't spouses, and say, "Where did you get this blonde boy?!" I don't know why he's blonde or why he has hundreds of vocabulary words that he struggles to put together in any meaningful way, but I am going to put every word in my dictionary to work for our family to seek out help for him. I will ask and listen and read and learn, and I will talk and explain and beg if I have to. And I don't mean I'll do this with just the experts or with the doctors and ists or with the blogosphere -- I'll do all this with my boy as well. He really truly does have a lot to tell me. I just have to keep my on him, so to speak. DURST!