Communication Breakdown

Our little guy has a bit of a speech delay. At a year old he began getting ear infections and they never went away. He lived on various forms of penicillin. Both ears were constantly infected, and my little guy spent much of his days isolating himself. Wil became very withdrawn and stopped responding to his name. Worse, my quiet little guy was becoming increasingly frustrated by is lack of ability to communicate.

When we finally got him into an ENT we discovered that he had no movement in his ear drums, which meant he could hear very little, if at all. He had to have surgery to stop the infections. Thankfully, he has not had an infection since the surgery, and his hearing has improved a great deal. His speech is coming along, but slower than we would like. At three years old, there is still a lot of gibberish, but he is putting sentences together, and seems to be understanding a lot more than he did even a month ago. More importantly, he is trying to make connections between the words he knows and the ideas he is trying to express.

The other night at the dinner table he passed gas. I looked at him expectantly, he knows he must say excuse me when he coughs or burps and I had assumed we covered the emissions from his bottom as well. He looked back at me, knowing I wanted something from him, but clearly unsure what that something was. So he said:

“I burp in my bum”. His face serious; searching mine. I tried not to laugh.
“No buddy that is a fart. Say excuse me.”
“Scuse me.”

Now I am sure someone is going to tell me I should not have taught him the word fart, I should have used the phrase “passed gas”. And I am not sure why I used the f word. All I know is, it is much better than “I burp in my bum”.