Darmok

My toddler, Cedar, is 30 months old now. He's been doing a couple of imitative things. One is the O-Re-O chorus from Wreck it Ralph, and "Uh-Oh." And I swear when he takes a little tumble he makes an utterance the general shape of "Are you OK." It's a little hard to check. But this is apparently part of how they operate, is not slicing language into constituent parts.

There's a Star Trek episode about an alien race that only communicates in stories. I was always bothered by this story since if they were incapable of using discrete words how would they tell the story? I don't know, maybe they had a complete language and something happened where the holists came to dominate the society. They had some technological superiority to the humans, they were interstellar travellers and could kidnap Captain Picard with a transporter that when around the Enterprises shields. So they apparently had well developed technical abilities. Maybe their day to day communication was sciencey and the mythological tropes were the best they could come up with for the diplomatic protocols prior humans had attempted.

Anyway, yesterday when his brother came home, Cedar smiled and turned around and walked backward to the gate in the doorway, apparently hoping to be picked up. That's what it's like. He doesn't see that if you want to be picked up, you hold your arms out to someone. Instead he assumes the posture that makes it easy for him to be picked up. We saw this kind of thing with spacepook (who was never diagnosed, but was a hand flapper) and Hekka will just kind of tackle me instead of asking in any conventional way for a hug. It's a kind of gestural hyperliteralism. How would he learn the gestures toddlers normally use?

He's the only toddler around here. He does go to a toddler class at church, but doesn't necessarily see them in interaction with their parents. He is finally going in without a fuss, which has been a big step for us.

Back to school

Today I start classes for Nursing prerequisites at SLCC. Nursing is something I've thought about doing since 2007, but then we relocated and I was working, and it always looked as though I had a couple of years of prerequisites ahead of me before I could even be a Nursing major. So I wound up taking a couple of semesters of GIS classes. If everything goes as I would wish, I would wind up being a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner, which at the U is a doctoral program.

So the chronology is that I was thinking about my life choices in late June. Not becoming a nurse is something I don't regret for my original bachelors, but regretting something that happened 20 years ago is different from not taking an opportunity now, apparently. Two most recent posts here explain more: http://vtisha.blogspot.com/ Of course I talk about MPH there, but I that is closely allied with my goals that involve Nursing.

I guess I was thinking a lot about the MPH program in May, and then I was thinking about the SLP program in July, and I got registered at the U but then talking to my daughter about collegey things and contemplating my schedule (with an autistic toddler) gave me cold feet. But I still felt I should explore my online options, and I found a couple of online classes at the U (for SLP prereqs) and then I felt I should look again at the nursing program. It turned out to be simpler than what I recalled from looking at it 5 years ago. They have a second bachelors program, though the soonest I could apply to that is January 2015 (to start Summer 2015).

And then I thought that if I was trying to go online, I should look at SLCC. They have a lot of classes online, and the ones that aren't online have sections at night. The soonest I could apply to that program, which is an AAS, would be June 2014 (to start January 2015). The second bachelors program at the U involves a couple more prereqs and they only take applications once a year.

Another consideration in all this is the relative cost, which is much less for SLCC.