Boolerisms, 3 1/2

Charlotte is three and a half, and I was all ready to say what she's up to these days but first - can I just say, three looks SO MUCH BETTER on her than it did on her siblings? Three was awful with Nathan, awfuler with Anneliese, and last summer when Charlotte started showing signs of the dreaded Threenager, I was both dreading it and ready for it.

Dreading because it sucks, and ready because I'm a seasoned mom now, and I know two very important things about Age Three:

1.) It is a phase. Threeness is not an indicator of future good citizenship. She is not being ruined forever by my inability to parent her well, and anyway -

2.) IT'S HER, NOT ME. Whatever three is, it's on her. And it will pass.

Aside: my dad once told me that the best parenting advice he could really give to anyone, with kids at any age, it is this: JUST WAIT. Be patient. Almost everything passes. Even if hard things drag on for very long seasons, just keep loving them, don't give up on them or yourself, just wait. I have decided that's really good advice.) (He knows what he's talking about, he had some rough teenager years (side eye: a Certain Brother Who Shall Remain Nameless).

Anyway, after the whole IT'S HER, NOT ME mantra of dealing with little Charlotte Booler, my third three-year-old, well, it turns out... she's fine. All of those months of Brace For Impact were notsomuch needed.

I mean, she has her moments. She's had a few epic tantrums, usually when someone comes or goes out of our driveway and doesn't wave to her (side-eye: Daddy at 6am on the way to work). She is sometimes shrieky, and often slower than Christmas, both of which make me batty. But! She isn't nearly as three as the others were, or maybe she just isn't there yet, or maybe I just getting better at not internalizing threeness as a parenting failure. (I'M DOING IT. I'M BREEZY.) But whatever is happening, it's easier.

So besides being sunshine with a sometimes side of storms, the most important thing about Charlotte these days is that she is talking so much better. Speech therapy is a dream. She thinks it's fun and games, it's not social-worker-stressful for me, and it's working. She rarely stutters now, unless she's really frustrated. We no longer need to rank her days on a speech scale of 1-5, and she is full of cute opinions she can actually voice, and those adorable things that all three-year-olds say in their own funny three-year-old ways:

Instead of singing her ABC's, she sings the EFG song.
PJs are pee-tays.
Nightgowns are night downs.
Her window: my nindow!
When she has an opinion to declare: I pronounce you... not sharing!
When she's finished something she's proud of: ta-done!
When she needs something: can you help with me?
Her blanket is and remains bank-o-link.
When you ask her a question she isn't sure of: singsong voice i-ah know...?
Her life motto with two older siblings: wait fo me!
Her life fear, being left behind: don' weeve me!

She told me recently that she saw a bear in the backyard. A bear! (There is a Bumgarner family legend about my brother seeing a bear in the hall; it was a mouse.) I have no idea what Charlotte really saw. But she told me in all earnestness that it was a bear, and answered detailed questions about it, and opted to play inside after that in case it came back, and all I could do was clap proudly and say EXCELLENT TALKING, BABY BOOLER.

Speaking of imagination, she and I told a story today, doing that thing you do with your kids where you take turns telling one part at a time, making it up as we go. And it turned out to be about a mom who can climb trees, and in the backyard she found a house of fairy ballerinas in a tiny treetop house. Their favorite food is strawberry spaghetti, and their favorite thing to do is to dance on top of the water in the pool when no one is looking.

She should write a book, is what I'm saying.

She told me last week she was "beautiful like mommy" and then my heart
burst into a million tiny hearts and flew all around in a happy cloud, forever.

Here is Charlotte telling us she's three and a half.

She is eating a cupcake that we picked out at the grocery store for her. We decided if a Booler was ever made into a cartoon character, it might look something like that cupcake.

Stuttering, and a Poop Joke

So, this is a thing I haven't said much about on the internet, but Charlotte is having a rough time talking this fall. She went from being a perfectly appropriately-fluent three-year-old this August, to... barely being able to get a thought out in September. Over just a matter of weeks, truly.

Like, complete breakdown in communication. I know this sounds weird, with her being right here - but I missed her. I didn't know what she was thinking, and she was so easily frustrated that she basically broke down into tears any time she needed to communicate a thought beyond a few words.

It sucked, y'all.

And it only took a tiny bit of googling (and a few gently concerned questions from her teachers at school) to realize her stuttering falls into the "severe" category, which sounds, well... severe.

Anyway, we took her for a speech assessment through the early intervention people (well, not them, exactly, but the county people who do that for preschool-aged kids) and it turns out yep! she stutters! badly! and she qualifies for full speech therapy through the county! So, bad and good.

They sent me away with a stack of books and DVDs about stuttering and speech disorders and how to be a parent advocate, and paperwork to start up her IEP with the school system, and suddenly WHOA this is a whole new world for us.

Okay so here's the deal. She will be fine. Speech therapy is very effective for stuttering, and Charlotte is pretty textbook in how she struggles. There are 44 phonemes in the English language, and she gets stuck on about 20 of them (yikes). She does most of the classic severe-stutterer things, like: repeating sounds at the beginnings of words and syllables (not the words themselves, which is stammering, which is something different - a more normal disfluency that isn't actually a speech problem), explosions of sound at a high volume to force some of her sounds out, and dragging out some sounds (like mmmmmmommy).

Anyway, it's a really Known Thing, this problem and its treatment. Almost all stutterers can be therapied out of it, and we should have no worries about long-term fluency. So that's not the main concern, surprisingly enough.

The main concern, apparently, is the psychological stuff that comes with difficulty in communicating. This is especially true for young kids. Learning that it takes too much effort to talk, or you will be interrupted or your words inserted for you, or that people don't have the time to hear you, or might tease you, etc etc etc - that'll eff a kid right up, and can have effects into adulthood. (Not that surprising, right?)

So while the professional therapists will do the work with her of making sounds and teaching tricks and workarounds, our job is to make sure she is heard. Like, endless patience in letting her get her words out. No interrupting her, ever. No supplying words for her. In general, convincing her that whatever she has to say is something we want to listen to, and that it's always worth the effort for her to tell us what she's thinking. We have to be very aware of our body language and facial expressions and we all (even Nathan and Anneliese) do lots of turning and facing her and kneeling down to be close when she wants to tell us something.

And y'all. It has been sort of... well, humongously relationship-changing, this pattern of really intentional listening. I know, that shouldn't be shocking. But it makes such a difference.

Anything she wants to tell me these days, no matter how silly or inane, I care about it in a way I didn't used to. She will sometimes take a full ninety seconds to tell me something like how she put Sheepie under her blanket (still bank-o-link) because it's naptime, or how someday she would like to wear a hat (?) - but if those are the things she wants to tell me, then make no mistake: I WANT TO HEAR IT. It's no small thing, the effort and energy it takes her to talk! And she is using it on me! It's an honor to listen to it. It really is. And that's never how I've thought about preschool chattiness before. Um, to say the least. Ha.

Okay anyway that's not what I meant for this post to be about.

So, she's actually doing way better now. Ranking every day on a scale of 1 to 5 helps overall progress, and overall progress is good. And that's just with what we are doing at home which has seemed to improve her confidence, which  often means she talks more - which all counts as practice. When we get into the meat of the speech therapy over the next couple of months, I imagine it will get even better than the improvement she's already made.

There are some days that are still turrible, but there are some that are good -- so good that she talks like most any three-year-old would, like what we remember from this summer, and we get a little giddy at her sweet voice and happy easy chattiness.

All that to say, she was doing some great talking one night, and these days that means we bust out the phone to get it on video... and then she told a poop joke. Sigh.


(If you can't see the embedded video, click here to watch it on YouTube.)

(Still worth it for her tiny voice, telling me something! Anything! Worth it.)

(And, secretly bursting with pride anyway. Such! Good! Talking!)