“Secondo will maintain a topic of conversation with a peer for 3 conversational turns in 4/5 observed opportunities over a two-month period.” 

The IEPs are tucked away in a drawer at home. We are far away at my mother’s in Costa Rica, so I’m not sure that’s how the text reads exactly, but that’s the general idea. The many IEP goals are formal, measurable, and easy to forget unless I dig the papers out and read them once in a while.

I’ve long maintained that autism, special education, IEPs and all, anything my two boys can do in English, they can do in Spanish. And as I mentioned, I don’t exactly keep their formal speech goals in mind every minute of every day — mostly, we just plod along as best we can. The conversational turn-taking goal, though, I always remember. It comes so naturally even to the shyest of us, even if the conversation is purely superficial. Hey, what’s up? Not much. You?

Although Primo and Secondo have made so much progress, this skill has been slow to develop. Often, by the time they’ve put a thought together, their peers have lost interest and moved on. (Their teachers give them “wait time.”) And when it comes to the ultimate exercise in conversational turn-taking, talking on the phone, well, forget it. We’ve tried to use Skype to connect with far-away family, and it always involves a fair amount of wrangling a boy who is trying his darndest to get as far from the computer as possible. They don’t even like talking to ME on the phone when I travel, I tell my relatives by way of explanation.

I had not, however, counted on my brother’s influence this year.

We spent a week with my brother and sister-in-law when we arrived. The boys and their tíos horsed around, went swimming, and played fútbol in the backyard. Tía provided them with an inexhaustible supply of snacks. In the evenings, they ate ice cream together and watched baseball on TV. Our days with the tíos left the boys — and the tíos — happy and exhausted.

When it was time to leave for my mother’s, my brother took them aside and gave them a slip of paper. It was his phone number, he explained, and he expected them to use it to call him. He would miss them and would want to know how they were, and if they called, they could tell him about all of the fun things they were doing. Good luck with that, was my reaction, though I don’t know if I said it out loud or kept it to myself.

Still, on our first day here I suggested they might want to call their tío. Primo still wants nothing to do with the phone. Secondo was willing to try — I think he was mainly intrigued by the novelty factor of actually dialing the phone number. The conversation was tentative, but it was a conversation. By the second day, he had the number memorized. By the third day, he was asking my brother if he could talk to his tía, too.

Now, a couple of weeks into it, Secondo calls the minute my brother gets home from work, and I get such joy from listening to his side of the conversations. There are descriptions of his day, of the pool, or what he had for lunch. I listen to him giggle as my sister-in-law tries to bribe him if he’ll eat his fruits and vegetables. On and on they talk, until Secondo is done, and sometimes until my brother cuts him off because he just won’t stop talking. The bonus is that all of it is in Spanish. Their tía is the closest member of our immediate family that doesn’t speak English, a fact I bring up when I explain to Primo and Secondo how important it is for them to speak Spanish. It occurred to me the other day that I don’t know if the boys even realize that their tío does, in fact, speak English.

We rely so much on high-tech tools for communicating with our families, and to make speaking other languages more fun or novel for our kids. And there’s no question that the iPad games and Skype are useful. But when I get home in a couple of weeks, I’m typing up a list. At the top will be the number and password for my international phone card. There will be a list of phone numbers — their Costa Rican relatives, their relatives in the Midwest, numbers for anyone else I can think of. I’ll post it next to the phone, and tell the boys they can use them whenever they want. And I hope to get to listen to many more one-sided conversations, in both English and Spanish, in the fall.

{Photo via eyeliam}

We all have such clear ideas about how we’ll raise our children, even before they’re born. Breast vs. bottle. Co-sleeping vs. crying it out. Homemade baby food. Screen time. And though in some areas I was able to stick to my guns, I was humbled by the fact that many things really didn’t work out the way I’d planned at all.

The same was true when it came to raising my children with two languages. I knew we’d probably use the one-parent, one-language method at home. And though I didn’t go so far as to research it when my boys were born, we live in a major metropolitan area. I knew there were Spanish immersion schools around, and I just figured I’d look into them when the time came.

Then came the early autism diagnoses for both of my boys, who fortunately thrived in a wonderful, full-time special education preschool—Primo was there for two years, Secondo for three. I trusted the teachers and staff there completely, and the idea of leaving the school and venturing into an LRE (Least Restrictive Environment) setting in a regular public school absolutely terrified me. When the time came to think about transitioning to kindergarten a year ago, it was a Very Big Deal.

And when that time came, one year ago, I thought again about looking into our local Spanish immersion schools, but it turned out our (monolingual) home school had an excellent reputation when it came to special education. And my priorities were completely shaken up, and I knew that there was absolutely no contest. I want my children to be bilingual, to be sure. But good special education services are crucial. Those services have made a world of difference in their lives, have helped them make such unbelievable progress early on, when it is so important.

I didn’t even look into the Spanish immersion schools.

This week, my boys will be done with kindergarten. Despite some significant challenges early on and a few adjustments, they have both done beautifully. At their last IEP (Individualized Education Program) meeting a couple of months ago, special education services for both of them were scaled back significantlly, and it was a move we all agreed with. I could not be happier with how well they’ve done in school, and though they face plenty of social challenges, they are in a good place, with good people and great support.

Where does this leave them when it comes to their Spanish? I am happy to say that even after a year in an all-English school (plus aftercare), they still easily default to speaking to me in Spanish. The day may come when they will rebel, but it hasn’t happened yet. I can tell that the gaps in their vocabulary in Spanish — about the solar system, the life cycle of a plant — are becoming more pronounced, due to all the English they get at school, but they constantly ask me how to say things in Spanish and we either look things up in the dictionary or find a book on the subject in Spanish. They go to a community Spanish school on Saturdays, and I teared up at the acto de clausura as they danced onstage to El condor pasa, a little lost in the choreography but willing to be led by the more tuned-in little girls in their class.

We received a survey from the school to fill out and return the other day. Primo, who leaves nothing unread, found it on the table. “What language is spoken in the home?” he read. Then he turned to me. Mama, ¡en casa hablamos inglés Y español! he proclaimed gleefully.

Proudly, I would say.

{Photo via: US Department of Education}

Photo credit: Johh-Morgan

It’s spring, which means it’s IEP season. My third one. Simply put, that means it’s time to get together with our special education team and discuss my children’s present level of performance in school, come up with annual goals for next year, and decide what special education services they will need. At the end of the process we will have an Individualized Education Program for each of them, a document that we will revisit periodically to check their progress.

This year is more complicated, and since I’m in the throes of it right now and it’s all I can think about, I’m posting about it here. This year, they will transition from preschool to kindergarten. Our previous IEP meetings have been relatively short, painless affairs with a few teachers and therapists we’ve gotten to know quite well after three years at the same school. At our meeting last week at the new kindergarten, there were no fewer than eight teachers and other professionals, only two of whom we knew. And it ended up being quite a marathon—we were there for three hours. On the one hand, it was wonderful meeting the people who will be working with our sons next year, and I’m honestly humbled that they all took so much time out of their day to hammer out the details of the IEP with us. On the other hand, it was also pretty intimidating.

Also, eligibility for special education services runs on a three-year cycle in our school district. So my boys have undergone a whole battery of tests and evaluations over the past month or two to determine their eligibility, and I’ve been collecting the reports as they come home and adding them to the pile. And obviously, the reports I awaited most eagerly, the ones I took out of their envelopes and read in the school parking lot before I even started the car, were the results of the bilingual speech and language evaluation.

Since my boys started attending a special education program, our lives have been full of tests and evaluations and results and percentiles. And though my boys’ strengths are outlined in their IEPs, they mostly address their “areas of need.” If you choose to dwell on those things, it can be dispiriting. So while the bilingual evaluation report included plenty of these, I hardly noticed them. Other phrases jumped out at me instead: Seemed to be equally bilingual in English and Spanish for receptive and expressive language. Was able to talk to this clinician in Spanish using complete, well-elaborated grammatical sentences. It was not necessary to use much English. There were a few informal language samples. It is so rare to get a professional’s objective opinion on their Spanish skills that I pored over every word. In the middle of such a stressful time, getting positive feedback about their Spanish was a nice boost.

My favorite part about the speech evaluation wasn’t included in the report, it was a story the wonderful Ms. E, Secondo’s speech therapist, shared with me later. She’s worked with him for two years now, and though she speaks some Spanish, she works with him exclusively in English. She was in the room while the bilingual speech pathologist was conducting the evaluation. At one point, a question was asked in Spanish and Secondo was silent. Ms. E gently prompted him by repeating the question, in Spanish.

“No,” my once severely speech-delayed son told her, looking her straight in the eye. “You. Speak. English.”

That is the story I keep coming back to when I’m overwhelmed by the percentiles and areas of need, when I need to remember how far my boys have come. It makes me smile even as I face that second IEP meeting tomorrow—even if it does last three hours.