Thursday evenings are normally Max's voice lessons and Ben and Milo's speech therapy. Tonight wasn't any different except Max is run down from a cold and wasn't up to going to his lesson, so he brought his homework in and he and I sat in the observation room as the twins got to work with their respective therapists. Usually there's a small crowd of students--I think they're graduate students, but they might be juniors and seniors--observing the sessions through two-way mirrors.
Now lateley even I have been frustrated and unhappy about the twins' disfluencies, since they are numerous at home and no more than normal in therapy. It's a difficult thing, sometimes, to make the leap from what you know you can do in the therapy room and what you believe you can do outside of it. It only gets worse if Mom and Dad start to get impatient about it. So we have been at an impasse, and even I forgot some very important things I know about children in general and my children in particular.
On Monday I vented a bit to the supervisor, a gentleman working on his PhD in the communications department, and he said he would talk to folks this week and maybe get us a plan of what to do at home.
So only, maybe, ten minutes into the session a gentleman came into the room in a manner that implied both importance and intensity. The mike was on Ben and his therapist and the gentleman watched for a few minutes and then went into the room, pulled up a chair and began to talk to Ben.
And Ben was just being, you know, Ben. With all of his funny ways that make him seem like maybe he's a graduate student, too. A charming, ernest, thoughtful, graduate student with an intense interest in others and in Pokemon. And they talked for a good twenty minutes. About Dads and sons. About negotiations (Ben was negotiating, and well) and contracts (Ben responded to the man's question about whether or not he knew what a contract was with a fairly sophisticated definition, actually). And how the man's son is a lawyer in Hollywood who negotiates contracts for a variety of stars (but Ben could not be impressed because he does not really know who J. Lo and Michael Jordon are). But mostly about Ben's speech. Which was not disfluent. Ben bareley managed one part-word repetition the whole time. And when the man confessed that he was the head of the Communications department, a Dr. B, Ben was impressed, but not, you know, too impressed. But I think I got it.
We were being, not told, no, more shown, that the clinic has done all they can for Ben and Milo. That Ben and Milo have met the objectives of the therapy. In session, they recognize their disfluencies, name them, and choose the appropriate method for getting back on track. They are only slightly more disfluent than you and I, and maybe even a little less disfluent than one of my rock star professors, who, like Ben and Milo, does a LOT of thinking while he is talking. The Authority came in, observed, confirmed the reports of the supervisor and the therapist, and as The Authority, engaged Ben and Milo (separately--after talking to Ben, he left Ben's room and went over to Milo's and I listened again to the entire conversation) in a converation about their speech and opened their minds to the possibility that they might not have such big problems with their speech as they think. That maybe they have learned to control their disfluencies and that now, they need to take that control out of the "control room" and into the rest of their lives. And Ben was completely won over, because Dr. B. and he were kindred souls, and they liked each other fantastically, right from the start. And Milo was cautiously optimistic, because Milo can choose a wait-and-see approach, but perhaps most importantly, I suddenly saw their progress. That it was not that the boys were not bringing their disfluency into the room so that it could be worked on but rather that the boys were not bringing their fluency out of the room so it could be celebrated.
And that Chris and I have a role in that. We need to help them bring it home.
It felt, as things have on a regular basis since Chris made the decision to leave Honda, like the timing was more than accidentally perfect. The clinic was asking for 5 minutes of my time each day with each boy and I will have that soon and for a long summer. Implementing a short at-home fluency practice session is something I can do. They'll meet with us, Chris and I, soon and go over what they have in mind. The door at the clinic will be left open. The twins can come back any time they feel they need to--for at least the summer they'll check in every 4 to 6 weeks or so. I only have one weekend-class for the summer. Other than a load of reading I want to do, I have the time.
After Dr. B was done talking with Milo, he sat down with the speech supervisor, M, and I and we talked some more. He told me what great kids I have and I agreed--they are are great, and they were great with him. He marvelled at Ben's ability to express himself. I said, yes, I was listening and thinking, "Shoot, if I'd known they were going to meet this fellow, I'd have told Ben to push for the assistantship NOW!" He laughed and said Ben was certainly ready for graduate school, I said he was chanelling his great-grandfather, a professor in Speech and Hearing. "Oh," he asked politely, "Who was that? Was he here?" Or something along those lines and I said, "John Black, he was at Ohio State." "Oh! He said, Ohi-, wait."
Well, Dr. B. is a graduate of the Ohio State speech program. It's where he and his wife, also Dr. B, did their Masters work. And so to Dr. B, my grandfather was the legendary Dr. John Black. And we both laughed. Oh, yes, it's nice to say you lunched with Russell Crowe, but to say that Dr. Black told you Goldilocks and the Three Bears over and over and never the same way, twice--well, that's really living.
This man who I liked because he clearly genuinely fell for my kids, (that is a trait I really like in others), is very interested in things that my grandfather would have been interested in. He has a grant from the Department of Ed to study how to better provide speech therapy to English Langauge Learners. And so it was one of those small world moments. His wife is at a Speech and Hearing conference right now in Washington, D.C. and he couldn't wait to call her and tell her about his evening.
So it was funny direction the evening went in. Full of rabbit trails and a rather sudden and unexpected graduation from the program for the twins. We'll meet some more and plan the rest of the transition and leave the door open in case they need to go back, but I agree that the rest of the work now needs to be done at home and that Chris and I are just the people to do it. But I wonder for Ben and Milo--if this evening were a movie about their lives, that would have been the intro and we would cut next to Ben and Milo as speech pathology graduate students . . . or something. It just felt . . . well, I have a vivid imagination. so never mind. Unless they DO go into speech research. Then I'm totally claiming I called it first.
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