after school speech part 5

On Thursday, SJ had his speech session.  It was a fairly warm day, so SJ wasn't so thrilled to be going to speech.  We went home for a few minutes and then dropped off Bob's at a neighbor's house.  After about five minutes of complaining, SJ settled down and just started talking to me.  This is my favorite part of the after school speech.  Since the DS's are broken and no one has an IPod (yet!), they are more inclined to talk to me.  If Bob is in the car, SJ tends to talk to him.  I have come to treasure our alone time in the car.  He doesn't talk about anything significant, but the fact that he is conversing (instead of repeating dialogue from something he has watched) is mind-blowing to me.  He tells me about his special (art, gym, etc.).  He tells me about his teacher or classmates.  He tells me about recess.
Now if you are the parent of a typical child, you probably think "What is the big deal?"   But to the mother of child with PDD (or Asperger's or Autism), this is something that isn't a natural occurrence in your child's development.  I would have killed for this simple act a few years ago.  To get him to say anything was such a chore and now it is coming out of him so easily.  We had to practice, practice, practice!  If you are a parent of a child on the spectrum, keep at it.  Keep chipping away at the bubble that holds them in the Autism world.  Hopefully, you will be having one of these moments with your child.
When we got to the therapy place, there was a young child there.  SJ asked his mom what his name was.  She told him and then he replied, "I'm SJ."  The boy was much younger than SJ, so they both independently played.  Then, a sibling came in who is Bob's age.  SJ walked right up to him and said, "Sorry, Bob is not here today."  The kid replied, "That is okay."  Then SJ started to ask him some questions about the DS game that he was playing.  The kid kindly replied.  This went on until his therapist came out for him.  It made me so proud to see SJ trying to interact with both of these children.  Sure, he talked slowly and the words didn't naturally seem to fall from his lips.  It was still nice to see that he keeps trying to be social.
SJ had a good session with his therapist.  They again worked on making and explaining inferences.  She had him look at a picture of a situation.  There were some questions under the picture.  SJ did well with the "What" questions, but again had some trouble with the "How" questions.  His therapist had to prompt him a few times, but eventually he was able to answer the questions.  "How" questions are hard for SJ, since they are much more abstract.  He tends to do better when the solution would be more concrete.  Even though he had some difficulty, she felt he did well.  We will keep practicing the "How" questions at home and hopefully he will require less prompts.