Talking yesterday about kids and language, I focused on children that have had a fairly easy time transitioning from one to another, or from one to many.

This has not always been my experience, however.

Our foster son, with us primarily from the ages of two to four, had a very difficult time learning to speak. Some reasons for this were hardwired, as he suffers from FAE and the learning problems that come with. Partly, though, he was just plain confused for too long.

T was born to a Thai mother and an American father. He spent his first year in Thailand where he heard almost nothing but Thai. When he came to Seychelles, he was put in the care of a Seychelloise nanny and spent a lot of his time with her family, hearing only Creole, interspersed with days of pure Thai ... but to make things even more confusing for the little guy, into the mix were days when everything was in English, some so heavily accented it was almost impossible for anyone to understand.

We began our interactions with him just before he was two, and although he appeared to understand some of what said, it was very difficult to establish just how much comprehension he had in any of the three languages as there was no consistent carer he could focus on, and no one seemed to know just what he knew and didn't know.

By the time he actually lived in our home, he communicated almost exclusively by barking, grunting or screaming. The barking, I learned, came from the fact that for a fairly long period in his short little life, he'd spent more time with ... and had more attention from ... dogs. (Yet another 'language' for him to process, I suppose.)

When he came to us, we decided it was important to pick one language, then stick with it until he could handle more than one 'flavor' of input. We spoke only English with him at home, put him in an English-only school and asked that the Seychellois kids he played with speak English with him. There certainly was a variety in the accents he heard, but the basics were always the same.

By his fourth birthday, his verbal skills were coming along, although Mark and I were about the only people who could really understand what he was saying. He struggled to communicate and was often sad and frustrated when not able to make a point or when others misunderstood his requests, but he really, really tried.

Shortly after this, he went back to Thailand.

So, some kids can slide into languages like into a new pair of Hush Puppies ... others, not.

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