My Youngest

Ben doesn’t talk.

Sorry, I take that back. He does talk, but most of it sounds like this, “ching-gow-now-how-san-tiwan". Or something. Said loudly and often to me and/or anyone else he is addressing. And said with the two middle fingers of his left hand held backward in his mouth. (And, no, it isn’t just because of those two fingers that everything he says sounds like Chinese although they probably don’t help.)

Every once in a while a word or two will pop out, “Mama! MAAAAMMAAA!” or “go, go, go” and of course, “no, no, no”. And sometimes more pleasing words like shoe or sock. He seems to like words that start with “s”. I counted once and I think he can say about 17 or 18 words. The baby book says that he should have upwards of 50. So, not good. He can also do a few basic signs, but he gets them confused. He is almost two.

Anyway, I’ve been wondering what is wrong with him. He seems perfectly normal in every other way. He climbs on things. He can put puzzles together. He can go up and down stairs, stack blocks, kick a ball, walk, sit on the potty, and obey me on occasion. He can even toss a ball with some accuracy. And he knows no fear - except of battery operated robots. He just can’t "talk".

I admit it worries me.

He and I are together in a room on Sunday with nine of his peers and they are all talking. Oh, and the other thing he can’t or won’t do is point to an object and name it or name it when I point to it. (So I guess he is not normal in every other way.) Every once in a while, if the picture he is looking at is an animal, he will make the animal’s sound, but usually nothing. I have to admit that this problem worries me more than the not talking. Even if he never said a word, but could point to stuff I would be good because at least then I would know that he was processing information.

It is a little weird too because my other four all spoke in complete sentences by the time they were two. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but by the time they were two I had no doubt as to their verbal abilities and honestly one or two of them did use short phrases and simple sentences.

Today the prize for each correctly spelled word in our little family spelling bee was a Chocolate Skittle. How does that relate, you wonder? Well, as I was handing out Skittles Ben reached out his little hand for his share and it crossed my mind that maybe I could bribe words out of him or at least give him a yummy reason to try and say a few more. So I tried and ‘by golly’ it seemed to work. Soon the older children had him saying all the words he knew. He ended up getting quite a sugar high. You should have seen his smiles. He can be really cute when he tries.

So, that is my plan for now. I'm going to try bribery. I’ve never heard of bribery being part of speech therapy before, but who knows…

Chocolate is a force to recon with and I don’t know anything about speech therapy.