Lately, the Monster’s been on-and-off about being good using long, real sentences.

He can, when he wants, construct a good, normal request.  For instance, this evening, he asked me, “Can you to turn on Sesame Street, please?”  (Well, the ‘please’ was with coaxing, and ‘to turn on’ isn’t a great construction… but it’s head and shoulders from where he was last year.)

On the other hand, a lot of the time lately has been indistinct shrieking.

There’s obviously something that he’s trying to say – the sounds are distinctly syllables, but just indistinguishable from each other or from any others in any order.  It makes it hard to comply with a request or respond to his comments when we’re not sure of what he’s saying.  Context isn’t really useful in these situations, since he’s not necessarily asking for something that would flow organically from the moment – he may be asking for Sesame Street while sitting at the table and being prompted as to whether or not he’d like something to eat.

These seems to come and go in phases.  Last month, it was a very clear “No, thank you” and “yes!” when there were questions posed to him, and at least fifty percent of the time he was offering up requests that at least made sense, even if it then required us to coax him into using a proper format.  So, we know that he’s capable of it – we know that his teachers hear him using it all the time at school – and when he knows that he’s not going to get what he wants without using real words, he does actually use them.

I’m just getting a little tired sometimes of dealing with an almost five year old who seems to decide at times that he needs to speak less than the baby does.