Talk To Me!

It's been one month since Tube Day.

I really feel that Miss Thing has been improving on her speech. She tries hard to use correct pronunciation. She tries to use more words and tries to put more of them together. That being said she still can be rather hard to understand. I know that she gets just as frustrated, if not more, than I do. I know that I say all the time how I'm so tired of repeating myself over and over and over. You get the idea. When I sit and think about it, though, I realized that she does the same thing. When she is trying so hard to tell me something she repeats the same undecipherable phrase over and over and over.

This happened the other day and for the life of me I couldn't figure out what she was trying to tell me. I kept asking her to show me, but it wasn't something she could show me. She just had to tell me. Finally at the height of her frustration she says, "Mom! Talk. To. Me!" I understood that plain as day. I tried hard not to laugh. Laughing at her when she is not laughing with you can be a really bad thing. It can get really messy.

I keep thinking about the whole encounter more and more. Sometimes I have the same reaction as my initial one. Then others I get just as frustrated as she most obviously was. Mostly frustrated at me. Me for not being able to understand her. And me for being the cause of her frustration. She gets a bit of a bad wrap with all the drama she flings around here. I wonder, though, if most of it stems from the fact that she spends much of her time repeating everything so someone, anyone, might pick up on what she's trying to get across.

I think the irrational side of me. The loudest side, and the side I try not to listen to too often. That side thought that once she had the tubes in her ears the next day she would be speaking in crystal clear sentences. That the charades we go to to understand her would all come to an end. Obviously this hasn't happened, yet. Someday it will, though, that's the beautiful thing. As frustrated as I know I can get at her I know that she won't be speaking her native tongue, Ruthese, forever. For now I'm trying to relish each little thing she tries to say with a little more clarity. We're closer than we've ever been!