J had a speech delay and some problems with clarity of speech as a small child. He did speech therapy from age 2 - 3, but that stopped when we moved to Peru. What follows is a recounting of his efforts to communicate something to his parents when he was about 3 years and 2 months old:
Last night, J was trying to tell his dad something in the bathroom. Apparently, when Dad didn't understand, J said, "you no understand. We go tell Mom, Mom understand." But I didn't, right away, because he kept talking about something that sounded like 'tawrl'. So he said, "remember, that day, we go in the car, with the girls, the ladies, and we walking, that other day, and we go one tawrl, another one tawrl, another one tawrl? That other day? Remember that? With the one two ladies?" This went on for a good 5-10 minutes. And, eventually, I did remember that the day before we had gone in the car with the woman from the company and the nanny, and we had gone to three schools. And when I got it, he said, "yeah, that what I trying to tell you today in the van with the grandmas, remember that?" Because he had been trying to tell them about visiting the schools, and none of us understood what he was saying. So we worked a bit on his pronunciation of schools, but mostly I was just amazed at how patiently he explained and elaborated until we got what he was talking about.
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