I think we’ve always been aware that Hector is different to Chinese children. Chinese children have always seemed very passive while Hector has been incredibly active. It took quite some time before he could even be pacified with his favorite show Little Baby Bum. This never made journeys easy and when we got to our last big trip in January and he actually slept after 6 hours we counted ourselves lucky.
We always just accepted Hector for who he was in this. Yes, it was challenging. It even seemed normal in the UK where his behaviour would not really be considered atypical. He had always been this way. Even when he was a baby he needed to be moving constantly which I put down to how much walking I did when pregnant! It wasn’t until we got to China that the difference became more obvious but even then it wasn’t really a problem. He was always happy and at nursery things were flexible enough that it didn’t cause any problems.
When Hector started school is when things came to a head. I say school, really it was pre-school. Hector was not content to sit on the carpet. Or to follow directions. I won’t go into details but suffice to say he struggled to settle in. He just wanted to play by himself, although this at least seems to be changing
And then there is language. We had been aware for some time that his language was behind but hadn’t thought too much of it given the bilingual environment. He always seemed to be able to communicate what he wanted and was even very independent so we didn’t worry. School was something of a rude awakening and one that I think we would say we are grateful for.
We really missed the NHS at this point. But we got specialists in and had him observed. And got a very long report to show for it which we now can’t do much about it as it’s the holiday!
So I suppose this is just the starting point in our language journey and so it seemed worth documenting. We bought Hector everything we could think of to try and get him to talk.
We followed the advice in the recommended book and went with his interests. Although ours may have intersected slightly.
We took him to Disney and practiced the words up and down on the Carousel.
We also realized that, as long as cars and trains were involved, he could occupy himself for quite some time! We’d been told in his assessment he could only occupy himself for 30 seconds.
We may also have gone a bit mad with buying him books before realizing that we already owned the book he\loves the most. And we also realized that he would read a book, he just had to be interested in it.
And along the way I realized that my boy was already talking to me even if he wasn’t using words that everyone could understand. I knew what he was telling me. It is incredibly hard when everyone’s child around you is talking, even those that you know are younger. To not be able to hear exactly what he is thinking as all the cute videos on Facebook tell you you should. But over the past week I have tried really hard to listen and to interpret what he is saying. Often what Hector is saying is I love cars and trains. He asks me to sing Row Row again. He wants to share his food with me. He tells me that he loves me. I know that the words will come when he is ready. Until then we will diligently OWL (Observe Wait Listen)!
By Katy
The Hopkins of Hangzhou 