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Thursday, May 22, 2008

"Practice" Conversations

Today was a slow day: Peter was sick; Sara was a little less sick; Tommy had a runny nose. So we called school off, and I attempted to work while also looking after the brood.

At one point during the day, I found myself standing at the bottom of the stairs, listening to Tommy who was invisible around a bend at the top of the stairs. He was "talking" two of his plastic pals, and they were chatting about our trip to Washington DC.

"So who did you meet?" asked one plastic pal.

"Oh, we met Kaiser."

"Who is that? Is that a boy or a girl?"

"That's a man. It's Lisa's cousin. He was staying a hotel in Washington DC."

"Did you like him?"

"Yes, he was very nice. We went out to lunch together."

What a very reasonable, civilized conversation! Of course, so far as I can recall Tom has never, ever had anything like that conversation in real life.

But I remember that Dr. Greenspan wrote something like "if a child can do a thing once, in one context, that means he can do it." That is, the fact that he can do it as a roleplay with his plastic pals means that Tommy, in fact, is capable of having just such a conversation with real people.

I'm looking forward to it.

1 comment:

danette said...

That is awesome! I can remember how excited I was when I noticed my twins' "play" conversations with their trains stopped being word-for-word recitations of Thomas stories and started being their own adaptations. Very cool.

Just wanted to add that I love, love, love your article about "top 10 terrific traits of people with autism" from autism.about.com. I posted about it recently on my blog :).