Lift Up Your Hearts!

Jonathan is never cold. Our pool was a Florida-warm 77 degrees for his visit, but it didn’t take long for the rest of us to feel chilled when the sun was not shining. Not so Jonathan, who never flinched when entering the water, and was still happy after three hours’ immersion. This is the same child I watched run outside on a bitterly cold Pittsburgh winter day, shoeless and wearing only a diaper. His only unhappiness was with the killjoy adults who brought him back inside. Looking at Jonathan’s portly body, one might think his imperviousness to cold was related to excessive insulation. However, I have plenty of that and it doesn’t keep me warm in the pool. Infants, I have learned, are born with brown adipose tissue (“brown fat cells”), which unlike the white variety actually produce heat. This phenomenon is also seen in small mammals that live in cold environments, and in hibernating animals. I venture the claim that most of Jonathan’s plethora of fat cells are of the brown kind! Brown adipose tissue also helps protect against obesity, which may explain why so many mothers have told Heather stories of their own children, now grown and thin, who when young were as large as Jonathan.

There’s a special advantage to having visitors who are comfortable with your household arrangements and routines. Many guests who want to be helpful are stymied by the fear of doing more harm than good, and in truth it’s often easier to do something myself than to explain how someone else can help. During this visit, however, I was delighted to turn around and find chores done as if by one of those Scottish “broonies” that gave their name to the younger Girl Scouts. On the last morning of their visit, I, the grandmother, was able to enjoy swimming with Jonathan; when we finally climbed out of the pool, Heather had packed and loaded the car, put away all of the toys and books, washed the dishes, done a couple of loads of laundry!

Jonathan’s speech is very efficient. He generally speaks in two or three word phrases, eschewing for the most part pronouns, articles, prepositions, and verb tenses. “Fly a plane!” can mean, “We’re going to fly in an airplane,” “We flew in an airplane,” “I want to fly in an airplane,” etc. It would be a mistake, I believe, to think that because he does not use certain parts of speech he does not understand them, for his receptive vocabulary is tremendous and he is quick to pick up on subtleties. What’s more, it appears that what he actually speaks is not what he thinks he is saying. When trying to understand him, if you parrot back to him the syllables you have heard, he often appears confused, as if he’s sure that’s not what he uttered.

I had much less difficulty understanding Jonathan’s speech than I had expected, based on my experiences with hearing him over the telephone. Context helps a lot, as does learning the few words in his vocabulary that bear little resemblance to their English equivalents. I find it interesting that while most of his vocabulary is quite easy to understand, those words he has been using the longest retain their original form, such as “wye” for water. [Update: In the week after their return home, Jonathan suddenly started using prepositions and pronouns consistently.]

He picks up new words so quickly! There is a smear of something hard on one of our pool bricks; I don’t know exactly what it is, but I called it concrete when he asked. He neither repeated the word to me, nor showed any sign of taking it in— but he never forgot, and referred to it as concrete the next day and thereafter.