Jon’s latest post denotes a lot of activity backstage.

As a wee tot, there were specific areas of imagination that we just could not get to germinate. His sense of humour developed, his musical sense bloomed, but even as his visual comprehension grew, Jon rarely showed any interest in imaginative play with toys, especially trucks or dolls, where one transfers some humanity into the object. In the past two years, the stuffed animals have taken on a position of interest and love—that’s partially a vision thing coming on-line—but still nothing for role-playing.

So we come to September, when he wrote a little story at school about a giraffe named Lady Cook. His teacher Tami had a true challenge in trying to get him to use his imagination to invent a name for the giraffe. If it wasn’t known and couldn’t be remembered, where was it supposed to come from? It took Jon 25 minutes of intellectual meltdown to get there.

A month later, Jon wrote another story, about Jake the Snake, based on a snake picture. With Tami’s help, the name took only 2-3 minutes.

Last week we had another Breakthough Day. Tami sat down with Jon initially to teach quotation marks, given that his current reading assignment is filled with them, and he doesn’t seem to be thrown off by them. But instead of doing the expected and quoting typical phrases of the people around him, Jon insisted on quoting animals. Tami upped the ante by insisting that any initial animal noise be given a real meaning. Instead of being stymied, Jon’s hands couldn’t keep up with his ideas of what the animals were saying, without any prompting. Tami just sat back and watched.

He got jammed twice. He couldn’t think of what bears say—he knew what they meant, in English, that much was obvious, but what’s their noise again?—and by the end of the list he was trying to finish and couldn’t come up with another animal, so Tami tossed in birds, and Jon, somewhat impatiently, knew what they would say, of course.

That was before lunch.

After lunch, Tami decided, given the way the ball was rolling, to “press her luck” and revisit names. Once again, he became distressed, “I don’t know! I don’t remember!”. Tami reminded Jon he didn’t have to know or remember, he could make them up. He started to giggle, and then set to work creating names within seconds, whipping off 6 sentences in less that five minutes. And with names like Jine, Gow and Lund, he put those folks at the IKEA catalogue to shame. Yay Jon!