Jon’s been doing the announcements fairly often this year at school, as have some of the other boys in his class. At first they were telling jokes, but last month was Black History month, and Jon did two days: a two-paragraph presentation about Martin Luther King (with others joining in with other paragraphs about MLK) and one about Harriet Tubman.

This week, they returned to their vaudeville roots. Thursday was Jon’s turn to be funny man (he played straight man on Friday). His dear former teacher Tami was in the office as he did, and emailed us with this (used with her permission):

What a hoot! Jon put on quite the performance!

At the end of announcements came Jon’s big moment and he played it for all that it was worth. He told the entire school 3 or 4 good jokes using Ms. Placey, this year’s teacher, as his “straight man”. His “timing” was perfect, and his inflection, masterful! I especially loved it when he laughed at his own jokes.

I think the favourite one was about the attorney (he said attorney and Ms Placey said lawyer) where it went something like “What did the lady attorney call her daughter?” to which his teacher replied “I don’t know. What did the lawyer call her daughter?” With a huge grin, Jon said “Sue!” and then laughed out loud for a few seconds before snorting “Ha, Sue! That’s funny!” Then he sat up very straight in his chair, looked around at everyone with a beautiful smile on his face and declared “I did a very good job giving announcements today! Have a nice Day!”

My heart swelled and I got all “misty”. I couldn’t have been more proud of him if he was my own! Way to go Jon!

Thanks Tami!

[It’s a tricky thing keeping a blog about the development of your kid. Often it captures a moment in time, and is not necessarily perfectly written. (To paraphrase Pascal, it takes a lot more time to write a short concise description than a long scattershot blather.)

So, for posterity (and ignoring the cries of “revisionist” and “George-Lucas-face”, which admittedly was my nickname in junior high)…]

The past week has been a big thing. Many years after the milestones called for it, and countless misfires, lucky attempts and a huge amount of frustration, countless tears and an inability for anyone to be able to get a handle on the nature of the situation, in the space of one week, Jon is suddenly more-or-less toilet-trained.

The term “developmental delay” is a tricky concept. It reflects that when you have impairment in the brain, some functions progress normally, while others are delayed. Since many tasks/concepts require multiple functions, the lack of progress in one stops everything, and that can stack up in a traffic jam. Conversely, if the original block can be gotten around—somehow—later, then things can proceed apace, or catch up, though development may be permanently off-kilter.

It can be something as simple as lack of the sensory connections to, say, the lower end of the GI tract, that most folks have learned to pick up cues from. There are kids in Jon’s school who can’t sense GI issues at all—heck, there’s a whole variety of GI tract devices to aid people who can’t swallow or digest properly (after all, not all of your brain’s functions are conscious). Cerebral palsy is simply brain damage that interferes with the signals between the brain and its connections with the rest of the body, and everybody with CP has different damage.

Jon’s issues are relatively small potatoes, but over the years there’s been a lot of speculation by his doctors and teachers that he’s might be missing contact with some of the neural connections down there, maybe just enough to make learning this very difficult. Or impossible. Or, perhaps, the challenge for Jon is to tune in to a different cue down there. Somehow. It was all up to him.

It came down to the right time, and the right carrot to dangle.

Some time ago Jon found that YouTube featured not just clips from forecasts on the (U.S.) Weather Channel (which Jon has only seen live the two times we were visiting Grandma and Grandpa in Florida), but that people had actually posted old versions of the Local Forecast, Highway Conditions and other such programming from the (Canadian) Weather Network. One of the key details of this— appreciated especially by Jon—is that since they change the graphics and background music every year or two, those old forecasts are classics that are never repeated.

Jon was transfixed. We quickly had to limit his access to it to holidays and P.D. days only, lest we lose our son to hypnosis.

Then a week and a half ago, out of nowhere, Jon proposed it as a carrot for the milestone that had eluded him. I immediately accepted.

Jon thought he had a perfect plan, but I guess he had thought that a milestone that had eluded him for eight or nine year would be a snap to overcome. It wasn’t. It was not a pleasant time to be here. Jon had a great deal of frustration, and this channelled into preteen anger and tantrums. Poor guy, but lemme tell you, for that week and a half, poor us too.

I figured that at some point he would learn that there’s a symbiotic poetry* to this system.

But that took some time.

Then one day after school, Jon not only clicked into the way of the world, but he’s done it daily since, even on weekends with their change in routine. We’ve praised him highly, but after a day or two he played that down, and his excitement has turned into pure practicality (although he has taken to describing his triumph to his art class instructors or strangers on the street—eek! But that will pass). Now that it’s been a week, he seems to think that this is no big thing. In fact, to me he seems to almost think that there is no other way to do it.

I know there are still aspects to work out, and details that probably won’t be as easy as this past week. But all of the sudden this major milestone has zoomed past, as Jon remapped whatever neural paths he had to. He’s not looking back. Now Laura and I must make the same transition in household duties and even in ordering supplies. We’re the ones who are behind, who are caught in ways that were set close to a decade ago.

Probably as close to a best-of-all-worlds solution as you are going to get with a Developmental Delay situation.

symbiotic poetry: the dance between colonic need, and mental will. (f. Peter-ism) ↩