This morning, after imploring my daughter Anna for months and years to ask questions and periodically to teach/ tell me something I don't already know, she asked her first freely generated, fully unprompted and non-contextually demanded question about what a word meant - something that normal children are asking by toddler age - 2-3 years old, maybe 4 - I'm not a child development specialist: "What does 'fanfare' mean?" She asked this after hearing her phone text notification, called "fanfare". After I explained and acted out the word by acting like an emperor making an entrance and making up a fanfare-type series of sounds, she said, "See, I'm teaching you what the word 'fanfare' means!" Which is kind of backwards - I'm teaching her, but she's at least trying to learn a word for the first time in her life that I didn't cue up or prompt somehow. What a big deal!!
Also yesterday we were walking while doing duo Lingo chinese, and my daughter noticed a ladybug on the deck, something my son, daughter and I often do, which we then move off the deck on a leaf or my hand or other object so as not to crush them by accident, only to realize this on was already dead - someone had already stepped on it. I heard Anna quietly, almost under her breath, say "it got unlucky", I heard the word "unlucky" clear as a bell. This kind of summary statement or secondary comment/ rflection about something that has happened using uncommon or never-used words, particularly abstract adjectives or other words like "unlucky", has never in my knowledge happened in the three years we've done DuoLingo on the deck and elsewhere. I was shocked! It reminded me of another summary statement she made about her brother in a recent prior post, just out of nowhere announcing that she loves him because he is very helpful and nice to her, something that had never happened in her over 20 years of her life following when she should have - based on normal kids - been talking.
Why I think this new emergent language is happening in a way that other prior methods have not triggered: Our autistic daughter has been continuing to improve cognitively via taking citicoline (aka citicholine) and ginkgo supplements alone (with no other supplements, switching back to the Carlyle Ginkgo brand that was working prior to using the BioKrauter brand that didn't work) primarily. We are continuing to learn DuoLingo chinese (we just crossed the 3-yr mark) and are doing grade 1 & 2 math workbooks, but these were things we were doing prior to doing the supplements, while she was taking Citicoline and Ginkgo of that other brand that didn't work for the last month or so, so it's the supplements. I'm restarting her on fish oil gummies made by amazon that are inexpensive and have good amounts of DHA as well as testing Uracil (the deoxyribose-related compound supposedly helping in neurological regeneration) that i have yet to find in gummy form (please send me a link on this blog or otherwise if you have found it in a gummy). I'll be posting links to the supplements for people to buy in a future post so follow and check back.
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