Diabolical!

First of all, we apologize for not posting in a while. We should have a Children's Hospital follow-up to post soon. For now, we have a story from John's school.


The wheels on the bus go round and round
Round and round
Round and round
The Wheels on the bus go round and round
All through the town

Everyone knows this song, right? After the wheels, you sing about the wipers going swish-swish-swish, the horn going beep-beep-beep, the driver saying "Move on back", and so on.

In John's preschool class, this is a common group activity. The kids all line up, and pick one part of the song. For instance, you might decide you wanted to be the horn, and so when it got to be your turn in line you'd do the horn part. The song goes down the line, with the kids singing their chosen verses.

One of John's best friends, Paul, is in his class. He is very similar to John - very. They have playdates together, where he comes over and plays or we meet at the local Chick-Fil-A, which has a really cool indoor slide and jungle gym that John and Paulie like to play on.

Well, when they do this song, Paulie always - and I mean ALWAYS - picks the door, which goes "Open and shut." This is his rock, his island of stability in the topsy-turvy world that is Wheels on the Bus. John has his own "rocks" too, but he's pretty flexible when it comes to this song.

One day recently, the class lined up to sing Wheels on the Bus. John was standing right next to Paul, and when it came John's turn to pick a verse he paused, looked over at Paulie, smiled, and said "I want to be the door." This sent poor Paulie into a total meltdown. John started laughing. The more Paul cried, the more John laughed.

Noted his teacher: "On one hand, I was so proud of John. That showed real cognitive thinking, predictive analysis, and so on. John knew he would get a rise out of Paul, and seemed truly pleased that he was able to figure that out. However, Paulie was just crying."

No hard feelings, though. Yesterday, during playtime, Paul was playing with the trains when another kid bumped into the tracks and broke them. John heard Paulie get upset, stopped what he was doing, and came over to help Paulie put them back together. He then left Paulie alone and returned to what he was doing. See, we're not completely bad parents!

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A week ago Friday, John went to Children's for his follow-up testing. He did quite well in several areas, including vocabulary. He also did well in many of the cognitive tests, which was a terrific thing to see. One especially interesting part involved a matching game.

In a standard matching game, you get a card with a picture on it and have to match it to another picture on either a card or a sheet of paper. The key here is that, somewhere on that page, is an identical image. This game was different. John was given a card with an image, and 4 choices on the page, however none of the images were an exact match. For example, he would have on his card a circle with 4 black dots, and on the page would be a triangle with 1 dot, a square with 4 dots, a square with 2 dots, and a triangle with 3 dots.

His initial reaction was to put the card over the square with 4 dots. However, almost as soon as he did this, he would get upset and complain that the card didn't match. As the game went on, he grew more and more frustrated. He's almost always get the correct answer right off the bat, but then get angry either because the game wasn't what he was expecting or because he didn't understand what was right. He would throw the cards, shout No!, or try to turn the pages in the book to see if another page had the right picture.

The doctor was impressed. She'd never seen a kid react quite like that before, and her guess was that we were witnessing what is called an "emerging" ability. He can do it, but doesn't know why he can do it yet. Again, when he'd make a guess, he was getting that guess right about 90% of the time, which meant that he knew the answer. But he clearly didn't like the answer, or didn't know why it was right.

We also have some pictures that I'll try to get posted soon.