You can't push a string.

A had speech therapy for the first time this week. These are in-house visits, where the speech therapist comes to our house (which requires a certain amount of cleaning, of course) for an hour or so. (Of course, A turned over a glass of water on the couch, which required the couch being disassembled for the course of her visit.)

So she showed up, said, "Hi, I'm Janis," and in she came with a bag of toys, sat on the floor with A, and played with all the toys.

I sat nearby and watched and tried to stay out of the way. She played with him and talked to him in short, one or two word sentences about what they were doing. He was interested in the toys and didn't say much at all, like he normally is with new people.

I had to restrain myself from not translating when he did speak. He was funny. He would decide a toy was boring and sing a little bit of the clean-up song and put the toy away so he could move on to the next toy--what a fabulous little guy.

Janis desperately wanted A to play with a fishing set. This had: various small felt fishes, two fishing poles with strings that had a Velcro piece on the end.

A has a fishing set, a pole tipped in Velcro (no string) and some fish, so I guessed he would be pretty bored with her fishing set, and he was. She was firm in trying to redirect him to play with the fish, finally showing him how she fished. She put the string over a fish, pressed the Velcro piece into the fish, and picked it up by the pole. "Look, fish! Fish up!"

With a look I can only characterize as bemusement, he took the other fishing pole, pressed the Velcro to the fish with his hand, picked up the pole, and dumped it into her bag. Yes, this is how it works and this is the most efficient way to play with it instead of messing around with that string; next toy please.

So at the end of the session, I asked what I should be doing or if this was representative of how their sessions would go. She said she's using short sentences to urge him to imitate her and eventually she'll encourage me to use short sentences for periods of playtime throughout the day (though not obviously the whole day, since we can't live our lives in caveman-like grunts).

She said his receptive language is extremely high and she was surprised by his focus, because the report she read said he could be somewhat distracted.

He's two. Distracted is the name of the game. But A is a pretty focused kid.

So I'm not sure how it went, but I think he had fun and she left a toy here for him to play with, so it's all good.