Green Ball... Red Ball...

2 March 2010
Yesterday, R went to see his speech therapist. As soon as I say, “Let’s go see G,” he starts chanting one of her mantras: “Green ball… red ball… which one? You choose?” which she always asks him when they play with a ball maze. He still hasn’t quite mastered the choosing part, maybe because in all honesty nothing particularly different happens in the maze if you drop a green or a red ball in it. They all go down the maze the same way, so perhaps R can’t see the point in choosing.

At the NHS centre where speech therapy happens, he can’t wait to get through the gate, and without prompting asks G to open the door for him. So far so good. But then it turns out G has to do a test on him at the request of Dr L in preparation for his upcoming assessment, to see how good his comprehension is. She lays out a selection of eight toys – a teddy, a doll, a chair and table, and so on – along the table and asks him to do things like “sit teddy on the chair,” or “make dolly touch the table.” She asks me not to say anything to prompt him, and I sit there squirming, willing him to do well on his test, ever the helicopter mother.

Some requests he gets straight away, but then he starts to slow down. G, a cozy maternal middle-aged woman with a voice like golden syrup, starts putting dashes instead of ticks down on her form when he doesn’t respond. This isn’t going well. R gets bored and asks for her tractor. He doesn’t want to talk much today, and won’t respond when we feed him his lines like “Pull cord!” “Take off lid!” or “I want bubbles!”

We’d been doing really well with the “I want…” stuff before I went away on a business trip, getting him to express his desires with three words (“I want ham!”) instead of just saying “ham!” or “cheese!” or, worse still, grunting in frustration. G and I conjecture whether he’s been upset that I’ve been away, or upset that she’s been away for a couple of weeks. Trying to figure out what’s going on in R’s head is the number one occupation for everyone around him, like we’re all Kremlinologists during the Cold War, trying to divine what Brezhnev’s up to with troop movements on the NATO border. Will he invade? Is he just bluffing? Is he going to pull out of Afghanistan?
When we do get to the ball maze, he imitates G by almost dropping the red ball into the blue hole, then saying no and hovering it over the green hole, then saying no, and then again with the yellow hole before slamming it down the red hole with satisfaction, as if he’s set off a bomb. This is a good sign, G tells me. Kids who do that pretending to drop the ball imitation usually ended doing well. Hooray!

At bedtime, he doesn’t want me to stop reading stories. He lays his head on my shoulder and sits stock still while I read “Tatty McTat,” a new one he doesn’t know that well, as well as “Bear on a Bike,” an old favourite, in which a bear takes a variety of vehicles (bike, boat, carriage, rocket, etc.) to reach a series of exciting places (forest, island, the moon). His favourite is the rocket.