This picture is over a year old (from Henry's 5th birthday), but I was browsing through some photos yesterday and it caught my eye. I just love the expression on his face and the Disney story book and puzzles on the table. (Just ignore the big trash bag in the background. I know, you probably wouldn't have even noticed it in the first place...)

MOM-NOS got me thinking with this post. Thinking about language development and that even though our kids might follow a different path to learn to communicate, they get there and they do have something to say.

Although much of Henry's scripting comes from movies and books, much of it also comes from things we have said. He attempts to generalize statements, to varying degrees of success. I guess it was about 2 years ago now, at his first preschool, that Henry started saying "You feel sick." "You feel cold." "You feel tired." He often didn't feel any of those things, but I believe he just felt unhappy or something was wrong- he was trying to find the right words to tell us, and was using little phrases that we had given him: "Do you feel tired?" "Do you feel sick?"

Interestingly, he eventually dropped most of those other phrases, but has held on to "you miss your mommy." He says this a lot, all day long. He uses it appropriately, saying it when I'm not with him. Sometimes, when we are together, he says "you miss your--" and then stops, looks around to see who's not there and then says "you miss your daddy." I'm still not sure that he TRULY is missing us when he says these things, or if it's a kind of verbal stim or a way to get a little affection from whoever he's saying it to. I think he says it more when he's being asked to do something difficult. Probably wishes I was there to bail him out.

Or maybe he truly does always feel something's missing when one of his family members is away from him. That's a far cry from the old stereotype of the autistic child who is disconnected from the people around him! Oh, this can make me too sad if I think about it too much- my son misses me all day long!

His teacher called one day earlier this fall to tell me Henry was sick. She was pretty excited to tell me that he even used his words to tell her "I feel cold." I opened my mouth to explain to her that he often says that but doesn't really mean it. And then I realized that actually he hasn't used that phrase in quite a long time, and that maybe he was really using it correctly.

He had a fever that day and when I picked him up he was sleeping in a bean bag chair, wrapped in a blanket. He was cold.