Since I last wrote about Minor’s problems with enunciation, I have noticed that a bunch of sounds I thought were just baby-babble are, in fact, words, words that are so inarticulate Minor has had to repeat them over days before some contextual clue alerted me to the meaning. The “Me know who God is” sentence was kind of an eye-opener; I hadn’t realized he was using sentences of three words or more. Now that I’m listening more closely I’ve been able to identify a lot more sentences, although I can’t always discern the meanings. He hasn’t been making progress on some sounds, like k and t, that most two-year-olds can say, which really inhibits understanding. In other words, his language development seems to be on-target, but his speech production definitely isn’t. At his two-year physical, I asked the nurse practitioner if this might be an artefact of his original hearing loss, prior to the tubes, or if he could some residual loss. She said it might be hearing loss or low muscle tone, and suggested both a hearing test and an evaluation by a speech pathologist.

Last week we went to the audiologist. I was very careful not to use the word “doctor” when we went into the exam room. Minor wasn’t afraid, but he was rather overstimulated by the new environment, and of course he hated having his ears examined. I tried to pay attention to the audiologist while simultaneously wrangling the baby, never an easy feat. Then we were seated in a soundproof booth with a window. Minor sat quietly while he set up the test, and for a brief moment I got to enjoy absolute silence. It was so peaceful. I never realized before how much ambient noise there is. I wondered how much it would cost to install a soundproof booth in our house? Do they make invisible soundproof rooms? Perhaps one with a toilet?

The test is structured very cleverly to capture feedback from an unreliable subject. There are two speakers on either side of the booth. The tester plays tones on each side. If the subject turns his head toward the correct tone, he’s assumed to have heard it. To encourage a small child to stick with the program, the tester activates a light box with a moving toy inside after he does turn his head.

Minor was completely on board with the test, turning his head for most of the sounds and looking eagerly for the moving toys. When the tester played high-pitched tones, though, he never turned his head. I thought he might have just lost interest, but sometimes he was looking in one direction saying, “More, more” when tones were playing in the other side. The audiologist confirmed that Minor has some high-frequency hearing loss, which is not too debilitating in an adult but may affect a child’s ability to speak. He recommended follow-ups with both an ENT and a speech pathologist.

After we got home, I called Early Intervention to make an appointment to have Minor evaluated. They called me back within fifteen minutes and said, “We just had a cancellation. Would today work for you?” So I rearranged my work schedule and called the preschool to tell them I would be picking Minor up just before nap time.

I wanted to walk Dog before the visit, so he wouldn’t be crazily attacking the EI people. I took him to the pond and brought my ice skates with me. Aitch loves to ice skate, although he has a pair of double-bladed skates so dull and rusted that he practically walks. I’m a weak skater, and I have been wanting to practice on my own so I can keep up with him. There is no better place to build confidence than a deserted, glassy pond on a cold, windless, bright winter day.

At 1:00 on the dot the EI people pulled up: a speech pathologist, a motor development expert, a student, and an administrator. I suddenly realized that having four strangers grill Minor in lieu of his nap might not be a recipe for success. He had been up for a few hours the night before, and then I had to wake him up for the eight a.m. audiologist appointment, which was in itself a bit stressful for him. When they arrived I had just given him a cup of yogurt. He spilled it and made a huge mess. I gave him a napkin and asked him to clean it up, and he assiduously wiped it all over the table. The EI people wrote it down: “Cleans up on request.” Already, he was more developmentally advanced than his father.

From that point on, he did wonderfully. He built a tower with blocks on command, put pegs in a pegboard, folded a piece of paper, found a toy that was being moved from one place to another in a baby version of the shell game. (I told the EI people we were training him to be a mountebank, and they just stared at me.) He responded to commands, uttered three-word sentences, tried to repeat words. He jumped up and down, climbed up the stairs without holding the railing, and (with me standing in front of him) climbed down the stairs without holding the railing (my God, when did he learn that?). In fact, the evaluators were so excited about his performance (”We should tape this as a model evaluation!”) that I thought they would pronounce him a genius. In fact, he was just at age level in everything; like many people who work with developmentally delayed children, they were just enthusiastic about the novelty of meeting a “typical.”

Technically, Minor did not qualify for services in any area. As the speech pathologist explained to me, though, for the purposes of the assessment, speech and language were assessed as a single category. The fact that Minor was able to ask a spontaneous question (”Balloon pop, Mommy?”) offset his lack of t’s and k’s. But the speech pathologist confirmed that he was not as intelligible as he should be at his age, and said that with a history of hearing loss she would recommend therapy. The therapist will come once a week, and at the end of six months he will be re-evaluated to see if he still qualifies for services. The therapist will come to the house. We will pay about $40 a month. The idea is that by providing services early, before he enters the school system, the state will not have to provide them later, when it is more expensive and harder to integrate with his curriculum. What a wonderful program! Hooray for big government that’s willing to apply a small number of resources now to forestall a bigger societal cost down the road.

By the time they left, Minor was completely baked. I didn’t want to put him down for a nap, so I decided to put him in the stroller and take him and Dog for a long walk. This used to be part of our regular routine when he was a baby, but since he stopped napping twice a day, he has not had the patience for aimless strolling. This time he fell asleep within five minutes, as I had anticipated, and Dog and I enjoyed a quiet walk in his somnolent company. It had turned cold and a bit overcast, but with sunlight still filtering through the clouds, and the streets were deserted. It gave me some time to process the words “hearing impairment” and think how odd it was that this label should be attached to Minor, who seemed, with the exception of a few consonants, to be functioning so well.