V and the language

V - now 3 years and 2 months old.

It´s been a while since I wrote something about my son V. Lately, my blog has been mostly about collecting cars, not so much about life with a son with a brain disease.

Partly it´s due to those thrilling episodes about Flash, a real exciting couple of weeks for us Disney Cars diecast fans. And partly it´s because I don´t have the need to write about V so much right now.

When we got the word about his shortage of myelin, his disability and the brain scan - we went into shock. The time after that was a mix of grief, adaptation to this new life we were presented to and acceptance of the new facts of life.

Now things are much less dramatic. Thus I find less things to write about when it comes to V and his life.

But one big change has come to us recently. V has begun to sign. 

He can express himself and he has learned sevral words only during the three weeks of our ongoing vacation (one last week left).

• Eat 
• Hungry
• Wait
• Sour milk
• Sandwich
• Berry
• Apple
• Banana
• Cake
• (Cinnamon) bun
• Grandpa / Grandma
• Play
• Sit
• Fish
• Potato

Yes, it´s a lot of words regarding food, but hey - the boy likes to eat! :)

It was a small revolution when he did his first sign by himself. Now he´s already doing three word sentences like "eat - potato - fish".

As I understand this, we now know that he understands words, he can express words, even combine words.

And the fact that V has better motor skills in his hand than in his mouth (very delicate motor skills needs to be learned to monitor our muths) combined with the fact that both me and my wife and the people that work at V´s daycare center have learned to sign now makes it possible for V to communicate much earlier than if he had to wait for those motor skills to develop in his mouth.

Signing is also seen as a way to motivate speech so we hope that this will help V to learn how to talk faster.

V likes to ape and imitate everything big brother A does (who´s diecast name is ape, how about that?)

Another thing about V is that he now interacts more with his bigger brother A. A is 4,5 years now and they play with toy cars that they sit on and races on all through our house. Laughing out loud. Very loud. Hide and Seek is also something they like to do but V has difficulities to tell who´s looking and who´s hiding...