J turned three in November, and we still can't really communicate with him. I know he understands us when we talk to him, and sometimes he'll perform a simple request, such as throwing something in the trash, but he's more likely to ignore us and refuse to make eye contact if we're asking him to do something, or speaking firmly. He can say at least 400 hundred words (I kept a list at one point), probably more, but he almost never uses them, and when he does it's almost always just as a single word. When he does put words together, it's usually just a phrase, something like "down the slide". The only declarative sentence I've heard him say is "It's a bug". When he does string words together, he does it in a very slurred way -- "can I have this?" always comes out as "kabbitz?". When he is thwarted in any way, he screams piercingly. Every time this happens, I try to say patiently, "can you tell me what's wrong using words?" No results yet.

I have no qualms about his intelligence -- I see him do all kinds of problem solving all the time. He is also very social (when he's not being told what he can't do). He loves being around people and part of groups, and is very affectionate and snuggly, and is actually a little bit too inclined to hug strangers and to attach himself to other families and try to leave the playground with them. The thought that he may be somewhere on the autistic spectrum has been floating in the back of my mind for the past year or so, but the fact that he is so tactile generally dispels this. But then he'll do something that makes me wonder again, like the other night when he got a hold of a bucket of wooden clothes pins and spent about 20 minutes carefully placing them next to each other, making a beautiful sunburst pattern with them. When I saw it, I thought "wow!", then hmm.

Some people in my family have unhelpfully suggested that his language delays may be due to him still nursing -- that he still thinks of himself as a baby. I don't know what to think. At his check up 5 months ago, his doctor said that his language skills were within the range of normal, but only just, and the progress since then is barely discernible. Part of me thinks he's just developing at his own pace, and another part wants to call in all the medical specialists out there. We live in NY state, where the cut off age for school is Dec 31, which that since he's turning 4 this calendar year, he's eligible to start pre-k in September, and I just can't visualize him being ready by then, when I can't even have a conversation with him. I know the obvious thing is just tell all my concerns to his doctor when I see her next month, and I will, but I just wanted to get this off my chest. Thanks for listening.