Andrew LOVES to watch YouTube on his iPad and we’ve caught on to the fact that it’s a great reinforcer when we want to get him to do  anything from finishing his vegetables to doing the laundry.

Okay. The laundry not so much but I can usually get him to eat an extra carrot or two by promising him some one-on-one time with his favorite videos.

The short clips also motivate him to try and mimic certain sounds, words or phrases which is great speech therapy in and of itself, though we aren’t always able to identify what he’s saying. His latest favorite phrase sounds something like YEW-R which he says all the time and which took us months to figure out. We finally realized he was saying “You are,” when we heard it on a video of Lightning McQueen and Mack the Truck.

Now, because of Andrew’s cognitive and developmental delays it’s also hard to always know just how much he understands when it comes to new vocabulary, especially when the words he’s using are pronouns and verbs rather than nouns (English lesson free of charge by the way).

But nonetheless, I was convinced he knew exactly what he was talking about after I shot this video of a recent conversation I had with my him, where it appears that he not only knows what “You are” means, he clearly uses it in the correct context:

I was thrilled. My son thinks I’m funny! I’m smart! I’m beautiful!

A few days later we were walking around one of our favorite places in our city when I saw a bus driving by:

“Andrew, look! It’s a big bus!”

“You are!”

“No honey, look. It’s a giant bus with a big rear bumper.”

“You are!”

“Andrew, we’re not talking about mommy right now. Do you see the bus? It’s HUGE and WIDE and obviously very heavy.”

“You are!”

So. Obviously I was wrong and he has no idea what he’s talking about when he says “You are” because otherwise that would mean that he thought I was as big as a city bus and was completely full of crap when he said all those nice things about me.

 

DAMMIT.

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