Speaking A Foreign Language

Kari, Preston and Doug, early, 1972

My great-grandson, Rodney, is two years old today. I called Katrina to wish her a happy birth day and asked her to give Rodney a kiss for me and tell him Grandma said Happy Birthday. We chatted awhile and she said he has finally started saying Mama (Da-da came early, but not Ma-ma), along with a whole bunch of other words.
The conversation started me thinking about my kids, of course. Doug and Kari both developed language skills at appropriate ages. But Preston had a language all his own. It was like a foreign language to me. Oh, he had words I could understand okay. It was when he started talking in sentences that I had a problem understanding him. I would ask him to repeat what he was saying over and over until he became as frustrated as I was and gave up. The funny thing was that Kari and Doug understood him just fine. If I asked them what he was saying, they could tell me.




Preston's kindergarten picture - Age 5, 1976

 

When he was four years old, I enrolled Preston in a structured day care where the teachers said they would work with him on his speech skills. I don't remember the name of the preschool, but it was north of the intersection of Harding Road and Euclid Avenue. At the end of the school year, I needed daycare for Kari, too, and couldn't afford to have both of them enrolled there. So I answered an ad a woman had placed wanting to babysit in her own home. She had a little boy the same age as Preston. They would both begin Kindergarten in the fall.

In the meantime, I scheduled hourly sessions with a speech pathologist two or three times a week for Preston that summer. (In the way of small worlds, the young therapist was the sister of my secretary at the Osteopathic College where I worked.) I was worried that Preston might have to wait another year before starting school, but he passed his prekindergarten test. I remember how upset May, the babysitter, was that Preston got to go to school when, "he can't even talk", and her son had to wait another year. Obviously intelligence and maturity were more important than knowing a foreign language.