Jodi Speaks Her Mind

“Click” 9/18/2005

Adelina is really amazing! I am really excited to share with you how things are going with her. On one hand, we are getting incredibly tired of doing the exact same activities with her day after day after day. There is only so much to do on a small property, especially when you are not permitted access to all the toys and such. Still, we are beginning to see now why God orchestrated things for us to have this extra time with Adelina here with these limitations.

Adelina up to now has had very little language exposure. Because of her hearing aid, she has been exposed to some sound and speech, basically from any of 16+ caregivers, speaking Ukrainian or Russian in a number of voices and accents all with 14 other children making their crying, giggling, and other noises kids make. Mostly she just gets by because her life is so routine. She knows what is expected and is able to meet those expectations, however minimal they may be.

It had been emphasized to us that Adelina can hear and speak, so we spent the first couple of weeks encouraging her to vocalize and introducing her auditorily to as many words as possible. In particular, we have a Baby ABC book we have been sharing with her from the beginning, but she has never really shown much interest in it. All in all, the results were discouraging. She did not want to speak with us, and it is pretty clear now that her vocabulary truly is limited to maybe 2-3 words. The rest of her vocalizations are unintelligible baby-talk. So we decided to try signing, and the results speak for themselves.

We started with mommy, daddy, please, and thank you and then moved on to the activities she most enjoys - swing, slide, play; and the items most important to her, namely the little purse we bought for her and the few contents it has, each of which was a gift from us to her. At first she seemed reluctant and didn’t seem to want to bother with signs, but we kept at it, and eventually she was using them a bit more freely, though usually still requiring prompting (except for please). Lately, we have had the occasional visit where she seems much more “into” the signing. We made up a game where gets a tiny treat if she can sign the items in her purse. Then yesterday, we taught her some more signs and she was really enjoying them. She was starting to focus on getting her hands right, and we were really amazed! We also made up some flash cards with the names of items or activities and she is learning those pretty quickly.

Then, we pulled out the ABC book, and it happened: she started pointing to each thing in the book and looking at us expectantly, waiting for us to show her how to “say” that word. We were so excited we were nearly beside ourselves! Of course, we didn’t know many of the signs so we will soon be trying to learn the sign for every item in that little book, but it was the “light bulb” moment we had been waiting for. She is finally understanding that this is communication and that almost everything can have a sign.

The blessing in all of this is that we will be the first people she will truly communicate with besides pointing and babbling. What a joy it will be when she starts to sign of her own initiative. The challenge which lay before us is the need to learn this language ourselves as smoothly and quickly as possible, but it is clear that we would not be able to do this if we were home already. We simply would have too many other things demanding our attention, and Adelina would most likely give her first words and sentences to a sign language/preschool teacher.

So that is our latest on our amazing Adelina. We are now almost grateful for the repetition in the activities because it has made the communication that much more clear, and it has given us a limited range of words/signs to have to learn for starters. We will keep you updated on our progress as well as Adelina’s.