We Have a Talking Box

Long time, no blog.

Let's see. My son has a shiny new AAC. In less than a week of using it, he managed to reprogram the food page to show only the button for pizza. I'm thinking that was inadvertent, but it still makes for a funny story. Oh, and then his sister took it to the other room, where we heard the device repeatedly say, "I have diarrhea . I have cramps. I had a stroke. I have diarrhea."

Oh, and then my husband lost the cord and remembered throwing what he thought was an old phone charger away. Guess what he found after we spent $70 ordering a new one? Yeah.

Good times.

I do think his talker will do him some good, though. At the training session, they stressed that we should also push buttons to demonstrate how it can be used for communication instead of just as a noise-making toy. We did a couple of times, not a huge amount. We're still getting used to it ourselves, right?

Anyway, he still likes to stab randomly at it to see what all it says, but if you ask him if he'd like something to eat, he'll press the eat button or "eat" and then "it" or "eat" and then "food," or sometimes a specific food choice offered to him. Yeah, food really is the way to a boy's heart. Anyway, I think he's getting the hang of it. Hopefully by kindergarten we can get him a real method to communicate when words are failing him.

Speaking of words, we were downtown today, and someone had a Great Dane. My son loves dogs, so he wanted out of his stroller to go pet him. When we approach the owner, my son says, "Clifford!" Heh.

I can't believe she went there

No, it's not Jenny McCarthy. It's Sarah Palin. She went there.

And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Quit it. Just quit it.

A system where profit determines who gets health care and the sick, elderly, and disabled are denied services because they don't help the company bottom line is just evil. And when you act like a douchey cheerleader for their cause, you're not helping matters at all. I particularly love the implication that those of us who want greater health care regulation are not only unamerican, we're also pro-slaughter of the elderly and disabled. That's so sweet of you.