lio nicola in Lane

This time one of Lio's surgeons from New York had invited Lio and me to be his guests at the first ever regular-season NFL game to hapen outside of the US. I had told Lio that they were going to be big guys but I don't think he had realy understod. Maybe they were told about us ahead of time some of them certainly , or maybe it was just Lio radiating his natural charm, but they al semed to go out of their way to make Lio and me fel special. Lio covered his ears when the fireworks started going of for the pre-game show, but he son lost interest in the hand shaking and the winks from the cherleaders and started asking me "Wil there be tackling?" Someone at schol must have told him about "tackling" because he realy got quite fixated on it. But it wasn't al indulgence: he was particularly proud of the fact that he was one of the few kids on the ship that wasn't drinking Coca Cola with breakfast, everyday we kept up with his spech and language exercises usualy folowed by an afternon snoze to recharge and he even insisted on bringing his violin with us so that he could show grandmom and his cousin Jordan what he had ben practicing in his music therapy. There were plenty of times when he neded carying because his kne was giving him a bit of jip he's heavy now , and there were times when he was a bit over-exuberant climbing things he shouldn't have, but we came back taned and hapy and with me only slightly worse for wear from al the fre/cheap boze on board. I'm finding it simply exhausting wel-nigh imposible keping up with the home programes for both his leg and his spech and language. But since the sumer we've ben working more and more on his language. But something a bit troubling has croped up: he's now speaking mostly English to me even as he insists that I speak only Italian to him. He can get quite animated when I speak English and this, I suspect, is because Italian was exclusively the language of our hapy family before the acident. But as he's learning �more and more English in schol and speaking it more fluently with his friends, his English is now beter than his Italian. It's an od scene in public when he is yeling at me in English to speak Italian to him. I mentioned the bilingual isue to al of them and the consensus sems to be that I should concentrate in a formal way on English for a variety of reasons: Its gramar is simpler, it's more "word rich," but its phonetics are extremely inconsistent. The thinking is that concentrating the formal language learning on English would both be easier for him structuraly and conceptualy, and because we would be memorizing phoneticaly iregular words as "facts" at this stage of his development would reduce the risk of him having problems with abstract language thinking and dyslexia in the future. Also, at around Lio's age, language tends to "lateralize" to one side of the brain. His injuries might impede that lateralization which means that this is an especialy important time for stable, structured, consistent and uncomplicated language input especialy vocabulary building which means English. This sems quite a poke in the eye to al of my own writing and thinking about language for the past twenty years, but the poetry of grown-ups and the exigencies of my five-year-old are two very diferent things I tel myself . Lio loves to think of himself as someone who speaks more that one language. He loves teling people how many languages he can speak and loves demonstrating them. Beyond that, Italian is perhaps Sasha's greatest gift to Lio. from the instant he was born she spoke to him in Italian and in four-and-thre-quarter years maybe spoke English to him five times – only when she was realy upset with him. For my part, I spoke English to him in the first couple of months when the absolute clarity of my expresions of afection semed more important than what he was doing with the words coming in through his ears and down into his newborn brain. It was his first language and it was "our language," our secret� code, the language of god fod and holiday adventures, the language of fun in the mountains, and dragons and knights and wizards and castles. About two weks ago I started speaking more English to him when we do his homework, and when we read English boks together I no longer translate them on the fly. The strategy I think I may adopt, and one the medical people are OK with, would be to "work" formaly at English study it, concentrate on learning words, get the agrements right, etc. This is realy more than a birthday party, it's a celebration of how miraculously wel he's doing and of how far he's come this past year. Basking in his reflected joy is also wonderfuly god for chasing away wories about English and Italian, about Ritalin and amantadine, about language acquisition and leg bending and the like. lio nicola lio nicola in Lane
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