As if any of us really needs to be reminded that there are indeed things more important than my little dusty and largely ignored corner of da Interweb.... F'rinstance, try walking a mile in Jeff Cooper's shoes. His two-year-old son Noah had been diagnosed with auditory neuropathy last year. Understandably, most of Jeff's energy of the past few months has been devoted to tending to Noah. Now, it appears that Noah's initial diagnosis has been retracted, but he is beginning to make progress. Slow progress to be sure, but every step forward certainly beats the alternative.
[B]y late April I was beginning to despair that he would ever talk. And then.
Early one May evening, Noah was watching a video while I checked my email on my iBook, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed that he was looking in my direction rather than at the television. I looked up, he met my gaze, and out it came: "a-puw." As my mind raced, he ran over to me, put his hand on the illuminated Apple logo on the back of my iBook's screen, and said it again: "a-pull."
That was the beginning. Since then, Noah has added two or three words per day--objects depicted in his picture books, animal sounds, foods, directions, the occasional verb, we never know what will come out next. One evening K and I were talking while Noah played, and we suddenly realized that he was singing the alphabet song (he made it up to G). Ten days later, by himself and without prompting, he counted to twelve (which was followed by eighteen). For month after month, we've been reading to him, narrating what we're doing with him, just generally talking to him, not knowing whether any of it was getting through. Now, we have an answer. We're stunned. The speech therapist is stunned. And Noah is immensely pleased and proud of himself.
We're not out of the woods yet. Noah is still, by most measures, more than a year behind. His enunciation isn't very good, and he doesn't put words together yet. There's reason to hope that it's just a matter of time, that he'll catch up, but we remain braced for the possibility that he won't. Still, things look enormously better than they did just two months ago. Noah has always been a sweet, happy boy. Now, he's a sweet, happy boy who talks. And, given what we've been through in the past year, that feels like a real wonder.
Being married to a speech therapist myself, I understand that progress such as this is often measured in small steps. Still, it IS progress, and if I had needed a reason to smile this morning, this would certainly be as good or better than anything I would have come up with on my own. Sometimes, wonder comes in small packages, eh?
