Talk About

Micah is suddenly really into using his Voice. He uses it at school every day, and his teacher even lets him play with it sometimes when he should be doing something else. She knows that he's learning how to use it, and exploring his newfound speech, and she's just as thrilled about it as we are. Have I mentioned what a gem his teacher is?

At home we take it out of his backpack and set it on the counter so that it's always within reach should he have the overwhelming need to tell me that he loves me.

Wait. I've just realized that I Love You isn't programmed in. Well, you can bet I'll be remedying that when he gets his new lime green Voice. Silly me.

For the most part, that Voice sits there all evening and gets packed for school again the next morning with very little use. And that's okay. I do not want to ever force him to use it because we all know that's the quickest way to get kids to back off from something. He'll use it when he's ready, and we'll wait until then.

So you can imagine my excitement this past week when he started using his Voice frequently. That excitement quickly turned to frustration for both of us. Micah is into counting, apparently. Since he can't tell us what he does in school, or what his favorite subject is, or what he finds exciting, we are rather clueless on a lot of things like that with him. So he's been using his Voice to count. A lot. And I'm excited. (I'm a numbers geek, okay?) In fact, he set his plate of noodles aside at the Chinese restaurant last week just to practice counting. This is groundbreaking news because the boy inhales those noodles by the platefuls. We thoroughly enjoyed hearing him count, and found it funny that even though all he had to do was push button after button in sequence, he skipped a few and got them out of order just like any budding counter does.

Besides counting (a lot) he's been asking for food. This is where the frustrating part comes in. Being the stubbornly independent little man that he is, once he gets a notion in his head he won't let it go until he accomplishes it. Like the food thing. We know what he wants most of the time. He'll bring us cereal and we know he wants a bowl of cereal. We're intuitive that way. But that's not good enough for him now. Now he wants to tell us that he wants cereal. He scrolls through the food pages looking for cereal, only to him the mac-n-cheese looks like the cereal and it doesn't say CEREAL like he thinks it should. We show him the CEREAL button and he's hacked because 1) we showed him and he wanted to find it himself and 2) the button he wants it to be isn't cooperating with him. (Have I mentioned that he's stubbornly independent? Okay, just checking.) In the meantime we've poured the milk on his cereal and it's sitting there getting soggy in the bowl. He won't take it until he finds the button that he needs.

The other day he had complete and total meltdown because there was no button that said STRAWBERRIES. My bad.

I could reprogram things for him so that the mac-n-cheese icon says CEREAL instead, and add in STRAWBERRIES and all the other things that he seems to think should be happening on his orange Voice. But we're expecting his lime green Voice to show up on our doorstep one of these days. We're trying to hold out and just make that the one that has all his answers. Plus? That one has a larger screen so he'll be able to count higher than 20. That'll be nice, too. This one goes to 20 and the bottom row says 25, 50, 75, 100.

Poor kid. If his green Voice doesn't show up soon he'll grow up thinking that you get to 100 by counting 18, 19, 20, 25, 50, 75, 100. And I'll feel badly about that.