Jon is into yet another preschool series, so why am I not pulling my hair out? He’s eleven years old, when is he going to take an interest in something a little more mature?

Jon’s TV history starts at age four with his early and continuing addiction to The Weather Network and Blue’s Clues. With Blue’s Clues, we spent a lot of time describing what was happening on the screen. Slowly, Jon began to recognize the animated characters.

I introduced him to Warner Brothers cartoons, first with the short Duck Rabbit Duck because of the high-contrast visual setting (black Daffy Duck on a white snow backdrop). He moved on to cartoons with more complicated backgrounds, but always with lots of descriptive help from us. Jon’s interest ebbed and flowed. He took a big interest in Arthur (those are more sophisticated social stories), then downgraded to Dora. Ah, Dora the @#$% Explorer. She shouts everything anti-socially (indoor voice, Dora!) in semi-rhetorical questions, ostensibly teaching a word or two of Spanish.

Preschooler TV shows ask a lot of questions to the audience. This is totally understandable: that’s very much how adults speak to preschoolers to get information out of them. But visually-impaired kids tend to take this structure to heart in their language skills, generally breaking out of the question phase around 5 or 6. Jon has developmental issues added to this mix and it’s taken a long time to get him to start to make statements, instead of phrasing all information in the form of a question. And when he does, often they’re in the past perfect tense, the tense often used in questions (“I was going to the library this morning”, instead of “I went to the library”).

But Dora is behind us now, for the most part. Five months ago, Jon suddenly became transfixed by Elmo and the Sesame Street reruns Play With Me Sesame (all those old classics of Ernie and Bert, and Grover victimizing that poor blue-headed guy). Jon could suddenly make out the Muppets! Furry, fuzzy muppets finally made some kind of visual sense!

And then on the heels of that came the Wonder Pets.

The Wonder Pets is a show featuring essentially modern cutout animation: actual photos of a guinea pig, duck and turtle are cut out and animated on computer, with a busy backdrop of a classroom. It’s very much the kind of thing that Jon has had a really hard time seeing. And, all of the sudden after 9 years of hard work, he can.

Yes, we have yet to move on from shows for preschoolers, but this one is a little better than most. The three main characters talk amongst each other socially in statements; the plots are easy for Jon to follow and the humour is right up his alley. And each adventure is basically an operetta written by some Broadway composers (catchy little earworms that can only be removed by trepanning. For instance, I have a song about a getting a Brown Cow Down in my head right now, Jon says he’s thinking about the Baby Sea Lion song and Laura is humming “A basket, a basket…” Please make it stop 🙂 )

But it’s the vision thing that makes this a triumph. This is the first show that Jon took to because he could see it on his own. He can see when they are flying, he can make out the characters against the backgrounds. We’re delighted.

Of course, this means he’s totally nuts over the WP’s and talks about the episodes incessently. He had us download the album from the iTunes store. (Actually, I was attempting to show him that such a thing did not exist, and lo and behold it there it was. Ka-ching!) But enthusiasm is something this world needs more of, and it’s another step on the road.

The fun of developmental delay is until you get enough pieces fitting together, certain areas can’t move forward. Jon will move at his own pace. He’ll start to take an interest in material for older kids when he can process it, when it speaks to him. We continue to expose him to new things, and he’ll be the one who determines when it’s time to move on.