I brought Amos to his brother’s school. It was a very bucolic setting; with trees all around and sunlight coming through them. We were walking across the un-sheltered driveway when Amos looked up, spread his arms and exclaimed ‘Waaaoow!’
I saw what he saw. Amos was in absolute awe of the crisp, unobstructed, infinite blueness above us. It was one of the most beautiful cloudless skies I’ve seen in a long time.
‘Wow! Isn’t the sky beautiful, Amos?’ I said.
Amos, charged with exuberance, didn’t reply and instead made another grand gesture of opening his arms. Two birds streaked past the blue expanse and in reflex I asked, ‘Did you see the birds?’
He mimicked a beak with little snippy movements of his thumb and forefinger—the sign for ‘bird’, as his way of telling me he understood. Then, quite suddenly, this funny child with Down Syndrome did something we’ve never, ever taught him.
He danced!
Right in the middle of the empty driveway he began spontaneously rolling and swiping his arms to a grand tune audible only to him and expressing his awe for the marvels of the sky and nature—the wonders of God’s Creation.
‘Are you dancing?’ I asked.
No response.
‘Are you rolling?’
‘Woohlin’ he ventured a response, never abandoning his dance routine all this time.
As much as I would’ve loved to let it go on I simply couldn’t afford the time. I decided to whisk the dancing little bundle of joy to safer grounds, but my heart was leaping to the excitement of a revelation.
At that moment I knew we had done the right thing in developing Amos' communicative and expressive skills through signing. Our feelings then had been ambivalent; we didn’t know if signing was a good tool because there were others who thought it would impede language development.
You might have already known that Amos’ weak muscle tone, compounded by hearing loss and a smaller-than-normal oral cavity proved a huge challenge in his verbal communication abilities. It takes regular oral motor exercises to have his mouth-tongue, lips, jaw moving in the correct way in order to produce proper speech sounds. We had to attend multiple workshops to equip ourselves with the speech-training skills. Despite our efforts, Amos’ progress up to 3 years of age was achingly slow.
So how important and relevant is signing?
His desire to communicate and express himself is beyond bounds. Speech is slow, granted. But he desperately needs to make himself understood. So that day on the driveway Amos did something that could well be divinely-ingrained within every one of us.
He danced—and expressed something ineffable by signing it with his body.
Signing gave us an excellent platform from which speech could be developed with less anguish and frustration. Signing is a means to speech, and one that should be carefully assessed against the child’s physical and mental abilities in speech development. We believe that signing always accompanies speech, and we strive to put that into practice in our communication with Amos.
This episode has reminded me how far Amos has come in finding his voice in expressing himself, as with many individuals with and without Down Syndrome. Not only so, but he has also shown me, with his child-like intrigue, how much beauty in God’s creation we might have missed.
Something that day worked in Amos an overwhelming desire to articulate his feelings. And I'm glad he found a beautiful way to do so.
Image credit: Jeremy via Remodel