It is a typical school night. Dinner is on the stove, the kids are reluctantly doing their homework, and the buzzer from the laundry washing machine is sounding repeatedly. I run upstairs to transfer the wet clothes into the dryer and the phone rings. I answer and find that I need to run downstairs to pull up the calendar on my computer to confirm the doctor's appointment I am being reminded about. I type in the appointment, check on dinner again, and on the way back up to the laundry room, acknowledge our dog. Bruce, now one, still likely does not have a handle on the flurry that is our household. Our old soul sits there, seemingly exhausted just by watching us, and wags his tail back at me. Declan, attempting to do his homework without my help, is losing focus as he listens to me talk to the dog. As I run back up the stairs, I hear him engage his furry companion. I will have to go help him get back on track I think. When Tova meets me in the upstairs hallway to ask me a question, we hear the ruckus of Declan's play downstairs. He is playing with Bruce, but I wonder if he is encouraging the wrong behaviors again. He has a tendency to get the dog all wound up by waving his hand around Bruce's mouth. "Don't do that Dec," we have explained in the past. "It will encourage Bruce to nip at us, and we don't want him to think that it's okay." Enthused by the initiative one time, Declan made a sign that read "No Biting," and hung it above the spot where Bruce likes to sit. When Bruce proceeded to eat the sign, Declan simply could not contain his laughter. The moment, it seemed, was the absolute height of humor for him. Since then, nipping and biting have been popular topics for him to mull over, and every once in a while, he will test whether Bruce will still take the bait. This time, he seemed to be doing just that, and predictably, we got the newsflash. As Tova and I spoke upstairs, we could hear Declan yelling something up to us. While we could tell from his tone that he was distressed in some way, we could not quite make out what he was saying. "What Dec?" Tova called after him, moving closer to the top of the stairs. Declan, meeting us half way up the stairs informed us with a very serious and concerned face, "Bruce is knitting again!"
Tova and I looked at each other, trying to hold in the smiles, both knowing right away that he was using the word "knitting" in place of "nipping." We know that Declan has difficulty processing the words that he hears and that often, his speech reflects it. In moments like these, it takes everything we have not to collapse into our own fits of laughter, as the image of our 90 lb newfie/lab mix secretly knitting scarves behind our backs is just too much to resist.
To learn more about auditory processing disorder, take a look at this excerpt from the website http://kidshealth.org/
Auditory processing disorder (APD),
also known as central auditory processing disorder (CAPD), is a complex problem
affecting about 5% of school-aged children. These kids can't process the
information they hear in the same way as others because their ears and brain
don't fully coordinate. Something adversely affects the way the brain
recognizes and interprets sounds, most notably the sounds composing speech. Kids with APD often do not
recognize subtle differences between sounds in words, even when the sounds are
loud and clear enough to be heard. These kinds of problems typically occur in
background noise, which is a natural listening environment. So kids with APD
have the basic difficulty of understanding any speech signal presented under
less than optimal conditions.