Sometimes it comes out of nowhere

On Thursdays Patrick goes to basketball practice with the Sports for Exceptional Athletes group in San Diego. Practice starts before his bus gets home from TRACE so I pick him up and drive him to the rec center. It’s not terribly convenient, but he loves to play basketball. His skills have improved a lot in the few seasons he's been playing with them. Patrick really likes the coach. It’s a good thing.

This past Thursday I picked him up and we stopped at the bread store, as usual. The whole time he’s speaking in partial sentences. He has his usual exchange with the bread store employee, in partial sentences. On the drive he tells me about his day at work. He uses partial sentences until I prompt him to get to what he is trying to convey. As I walk into the rec center I’m wondering why we force full sentences on him He omits pronouns and drawls one or two word sentences (-1 in the sentence game). What does it really matter? The important word is usually there. He can get them out. He’s polite. Why do we force him to use complete sentences? He seems to get a long during the day without using them. Are we just looking for him to speak clearly so that he sounds smart? So everyone knows that he is smart and in turn that we are smart? Nonsense. Besides correcting him all the time is a huge amount of work. It is non stop and requires huge amounts of patience. Maybe we should give up and let him speak his own way.

Then 10 minutes later, he’s running in basketball practice – bursts of speed he calls it, trailing his arms behind himself. This is how he runs. Then during the last lap, out of no where, he pulls his arms in front of himself.. He doesn’t pump them, but they are purposefully in front of his body, his hands at his chest. I'm stunned. It must have just clicked for him. We haven’t been working on his gait for months and that attempt seemed futile. A natural swing isn’t intuitive to him. He tried but it was too difficult for him to think about two things at once, arms and legs. I couldn’t find a way to show him how to move more efficiently. I gave up, thinking I’d try again later. But there it was in the last lap, out of nowhere.

Maybe his sentences will come about the same way? We really are trying to get him to speak clearly and communicate his needs so that he can get himself a good job. If he can talk to people, maybe he can work doing something other than straightening items in the store with an aide/interpreter. He does want to be able to work by himself ultimately. He needs to communicate to work with other people. He wants to work with other people. It's not for our benefit. It is for his future. We’ll hope that eventually something will click, just like his gait and he will pick up better sentence structure.