Happy day,
My wife's son experienced a delay in learning to speak. We brought in therapists and teachers and whomever, but he just wasn't interested. He'd make animal sounds, and do sign language, but that was about it. Then, when he was three, we took him to the National Zoo in Washington, DC. And if you've ever been a parent who thought going to the zoo with your toddler was a good idea, you know that zoos are filled with all sorts of other parents elbowing each other and poking each other with small pins to get people to move so that their special child can see the very tip of the tail of the lemur poking out from behind a rock. And depending on what Nickelodeon/Sony/Disney is feeding parents, the parents use the name of the character. "Look at that Shaqualen'doh, there's Treelo's tail from Bear and the Big Blue House!" Around that time little Shaqualen'doh would drop her cotton candy to be trodden upon by other luckless parents, who were obligated to make socially-inappropriate mutterings about other people's parenting skills.
And so it was that we went over to the reptile area and came down the gently sloping hill to my favorite reptile's pen. My wife's son experienced a most amazing transformation right at that moment, and said, "Oh look, a komodo dragon. Its big." Lest you be confused, the amazing transformation wasn't that those were his first words, but that he went from being my wife's son to mine. Because every father's son is, truly, a perfect reflection of himself. Just sort of the other way around.
My wife's son experienced a delay in learning to speak. We brought in therapists and teachers and whomever, but he just wasn't interested. He'd make animal sounds, and do sign language, but that was about it. Then, when he was three, we took him to the National Zoo in Washington, DC. And if you've ever been a parent who thought going to the zoo with your toddler was a good idea, you know that zoos are filled with all sorts of other parents elbowing each other and poking each other with small pins to get people to move so that their special child can see the very tip of the tail of the lemur poking out from behind a rock. And depending on what Nickelodeon/Sony/Disney is feeding parents, the parents use the name of the character. "Look at that Shaqualen'doh, there's Treelo's tail from Bear and the Big Blue House!" Around that time little Shaqualen'doh would drop her cotton candy to be trodden upon by other luckless parents, who were obligated to make socially-inappropriate mutterings about other people's parenting skills.
And so it was that we went over to the reptile area and came down the gently sloping hill to my favorite reptile's pen. My wife's son experienced a most amazing transformation right at that moment, and said, "Oh look, a komodo dragon. Its big." Lest you be confused, the amazing transformation wasn't that those were his first words, but that he went from being my wife's son to mine. Because every father's son is, truly, a perfect reflection of himself. Just sort of the other way around.
Anyone know anything about reptiles? I like leopard geckos.
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