The Positives of Echolalia

First the amusing story.
There are FIERCE winds today, and it sounds like a downpour but without rain. It's really loud. Kittyboy has been quite a hoot! During breakfast he kept saying "yittle pig, yittle pig" and we weren't sure what he was talking about, then he said "A huff an a puff an BOOOOOO da house down!!" He was talking about the Three Little Pigs! One of his favorite stories. We told him there was no wolf, just the wind, and everything's fine. Besides, our house is made of bricks. Then shortly after, there was a GREAT blast of wind, whereupon Kittyboy jumped to his feet and yelled excitedly, "YITTLE PIG, YITTLE PIG, I COMMY IN!!!" (the end of the story when the wolf gets up on the third little pig's roof to climb down the chimney). He was more excited than scared, fortunately. But all I would have had to do anyway is explain that we don't have a chimney. Problem solved.
He's been quoting a LOT of videos and books of late, but also forming a lot more sentences independently - so really awesome. And sometimes what he quotes is actually relevent in some way, now that we're paying attention to what he quotes from and when. We were discussing at lunch a friend of a friend of my dad's, who is in the hospital with very serious complications from H1N1 (pray for Resa Ellison!). I told Kittyboy that there was a lady named Resa who is very sick and we needed to ask God to take care of her and make her better. After we prayed, he said "Dadey Guy pay outside!" (Davey and Goliath, as in the claymation cartoon, play outside). I said yes, Davey and Goliath play outside a lot. "Dadey Guy yooky!" "They were looking at something?" "Airpay CASH!!!" (airplane crash). In "The Big Rescue", I think it is, Davey is at summer camp and the campers hear an airplane in trouble, and the plane crashes nearby. "Davey (something) singy!" The campers sang hymns while they walked through the forest so the people who crashed could hear them coming. He kept going on about the airplane crashing, and then I had an idea. I said, "Yes, and when the airplane crashed, the people were hurt, weren't they. And the pilot asked God to send help." And like an affirmation, ("Houston, we have contact!") Kittyboy said again, "Dadey singy!" "Yes, God sent help. God sent Davey and Goliath and their friends to help. The pilot PRAYED for help and God sent it! And we PRAYED for Him to take care of Resa, didn't we?"
The echolalia was irritating when it was the reason he repeated things in question form and called himself "you", but now that we're educated about the different forms it takes, we can sometimes have conversations we wouldn't otherwise. He didn't ask to watch Davey and Goliath, he didn't want to watch it, and he dropped the subject when the conversation changed, but right after I told him we were praying for Resa because she was sick and needed help, that was what he brought up. And after I remembered the pilot praying and talked about how THAT was what we had just done too, it was like we were having a back and forth conversation about prayer. I'm just sure that's what we were doing.


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