Hero worship.

Alex is in her highchair. I am feeding her a tasty and nutritious breakfast of apple-plum puree and brown rice cereal.

Suddenly, there are footsteps overhead. She turns away from the spoon, cocking her head, listening alertly. Now the footsteps are on the stairs. She leans forward and throws her arms out, face creasing into a grin, as HE comes into view.

Papa! It's Papa! She flings herself forward in her chair with a high chattering laugh. Every muscle in her body strains towards him. She calls out to him, babbles, reaches for him as he comes over to greet her. She tosses me a quick glance, grinning, as if to say, "can you believe how cool this is, Mama?" But mostly her eyes are locked on the man in the grey suit. She follows his every motion as he puts on his coat and gathers his things. She laughs again, still reaching for him.

The front door closes. She stares at it for a long moment. The tension drains from her body with a little sigh. She turns back to me and the abandoned spoonful of cereal.

Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building.

Argh!

Last week, instead of going to story hour, Emily and I took the babies to "Development Days" at Kennedy Krieger, which is Johns Hopkins’ developmental disabilities institute. The ad for the event promised a fun day of games and play for moms and babies "under 24 months," and promised that we would each get individual feedback on our child’s development, from their screeners. Emily and I thought we might learn some new ways of playing with the girls, who – let’s face it – are slightly boring sometimes. And developmental feedback sounded like it might be interesting, although neither one of us has any concerns about delays.

Well, we got there and found that "games and play" meant that waaay too many kids were crammed into a playroom with toys and just let loose. Most of the kids were enough older than Alex and Zoe that we were constantly worrying about the girls getting stepped on or fallen on. There was no structured program, which was our first big disappointment. Then we learned that the whole thing was about language development only. The woman running the event gave a few very basic, elementary comments about when language develops and how to facilitate language learning. We discovered that the purpose of the event was to identify children who are a wee bit late starting to talk, and to include them in a research study.

So they gave out a standardized language development screening questionnaire. Emily’s baby was too young for her to even be handed a copy. They asked me "is your baby making sounds?" and then gave me one, but it was pretty manifestly inappropriate. They wanted to know which phrases my baby seemed to understand, and I was able to check some of those, but most of it was devoted to listing the words a baby might say. Our only developmental feedback, it turned out, was that they were going to score the standardized questionnaires and call us with the results. Emily and I left feeling irritated that they hadn’t specified a lower age limit for the event, and sorry we hadn’t gone to story hour.

They didn’t even call me. I got a grossly inappropriate form letter today which informs me that "you told us your child says 0 words…your child’s scores do fall just outside of the range that is expected for children that are a few months older than your child. Because your child is not yet 18 months, it is quite possible that they are just shy of the "typical" burst in his/her language."

Or maybe she’s well shy of the typical burst in language, given that she’s SEVEN MONTHS OLD.

They have no business sending out a form letter that totally sounds like they think Alex might have a language delay. If she’s outside the age range for the fucking test - and it would completely fail to surprise me to hear that she is - then they should have said so and refused to give her a score. Or they could have provided me with a score based on her receptive language (the words she understands), given that some of those questions I could answer. It looks like they didn’t score that part at all, probably because it wasn’t the topic of their study.

This is completely irresponsible. It violates the ethical standards for the use of psychological testing. I can’t imagine how scary this would be if I didn’t have a pretty firm grip on cognitive development. Jesus Christ.

I have called and left an irritated message. Hopefully this post will get the profanity out of my system before they call me back.