Blogging about life in Minnesota, raising our six kids with Down syndrome while battling Breast Cancer.

Be the kind of woman that when your feet hit the floor in the morning the devil says, "Oh shit! She's up!"

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Tears in Speech Therapy

Axel has speech therapy two days a week. I love his ST. Not only because she's fluent in ASL and Cued Speech, but because she's just plain a great person. And even more importantly, Axel loves her. He loves his OT too, but when we're getting ready to go he always asks, "Speech..."L"?"

One of the things Axel has been doing is choosing his activities at the beginning of the session by placing 1st, 2nd, 3rd...and now 4th cards on them. That's the order he gets to do his activities. The activity he picked first today was a sound discrimination computer game. (the name has escaped me at the moment. I'll come back and add it when it comes to me....because it will. LOL) So, Axel has to listen to a sound, then click on the picture that goes with the sound. A cow mooing, a helicopter, etc.

Then there was the sound of a cat meowing. Axel pointed to the picture of the cat and said, "mačka"  which is the Serbian word for cat.

And I was instantly in tears.

To my knowledge, Axel has never said Serbian words. My Serbian friends said there was nothing recognizable.   Today something was triggered that brought out a Serbian word. What other Serbian words has he said that I don't know? Oh, what a big thing this was. I don't want him to forget all of Serbia. I don't want him to forget all of his language, but we really had no idea how much of those language memories were left.

It's there. There are pieces left in there, and they're trying to come out. This is HUGE for Axel.

4 comments:

junglemama said...

How amazing is that? :) Axel is such a smart boy!

Cindy said...

Wow, so exciting! It will be fun to hear some of the other words he remembers. (Do they make a Serbian / English Dictionary?!) :)

Unknown said...

Actually... macska (pronounced more or less the same way as the Serbian equivalent) is also the word for cat in Hungarian, so pretty much it's been a word that has been constant with him throughout his life.

I keep wondering what else is hidden in your smart boy's brain!

Also, my captcha word on this comment is pigshed. Weird.

Tamara said...

This really made me smile this morning. Amazing little guy -