Happy (belated) 20th birthday to our lovely Delia! I will admit that the thought of writing this post is what inspired me to get back on the wagon with my birthday posts. I have such an incredible, miraculous update to share about this girl.

I went back and reread Delia’s birthday post from five years ago in preparation for writing this. Back in 2021, after describing the many therapies we’d tried and setbacks we’d endured, I wrote this:

“But occasionally… We get glimpses of the real Delia. She shows us that she understands way more than she lets on, and that there is a cheeky, funny, sensitive, sweet girl in there begging us to find a way to let her out. We see it when she laughs at a joke. We see it when she cries after someone makes an unkind remark about her that they didn’t expect her to hear or understand. We saw it… after her birthday movie, when she tenderly kissed Temple Grandin goodnight on our TV screen… And so we press on, trying every single thing we can think of, and trying it for longer than it makes sense to, just in case that breakthrough we long for might be right around the corner if only we persevere.”

When I read those words this past week and remembered the place we were in back then, it brought me to tears. If I had been trying to set the stage for this post when I wrote that one, I couldn’t have done it more perfectly.

Because guess what? That breakthrough that we’ve longed and prayed for for 12 years has finally come: Delia has finally found her voice!

In the spring of 2024, a dear old friend shared that her minimally verbal, autistic son was learning to communicate through spelling. How wonderful for Owen, I thought! But Owen already knew how to read. It hardly crossed my mind that my friend was suggesting we might try this method with Delia. Just a few months later, my friend was diagnosed with cancer, and I never got a chance to tell her what a gift Spelling to Communicate has been to our family.

That summer, as we were choosing curriculum and considering therapies for the coming school year, the Lord called spelling to mind. I did some googling and watched this documentary. I began to feel a hope rising in me that I had not felt in years.

In August 2024, Delia had her first Spelling to Communicate session. For the first time in her life, a professional spoke directly to her instead of to me. Like an adult. Like she understood every word. And she did. I am not exaggerating to say that after that first session, Delia smiled for a week!

Spelling-based communication begins with the assumption that individuals with autism and other special needs are fully cognitively competent with fully-developed language. Their problem lies in getting their body to cooperate in order to express that language. We already knew this to be true about Delia, but I had no idea of the extent to which I was still underestimating her.

The sessions consist of the practitioner reading aloud an age-appropriate text, then asking questions about the text. Delia responds by poking letters one by one with a pencil through a stencil letter board. At first, she responded with known single-word answers from the text, but eventually, after much practice, she was asked for longer and more open-ended responses. The questions are age-appropriate from the start though. In other words, from the earliest lessons, she was spelling words like “Kentucky” and “popularity”, not “cat” and “hat”. They were not teaching her to read or spell – she could already do that! – but rather coaching her body to get to the right letters so she could eventually to do it herself.

By about our third session, I could see that Delia was getting to some of the letters without prompting, too many of them for it to be coincidence. I knew from the beginning that this was going to work. The language was all in there, and she was spelling!

It took about a year and a half of weekly sessions and daily practice at home, but in February of this year, Delia spelled her first open-ended, prior knowledge question (not mentioned in the text): What was Neil Armstrong best known for? Delia spelled, “MOON WALKING”

Since then, the floodgates of communication have opened. Letter by letter, word by word, we are finally getting to know our daughter, and it’s been more wonderful than I ever could have imagined. Now, in addition to doing our daily lessons at home, we can also ask her about other things throughout our day. “What do you want for your birthday?” felt especially big, after years of guessing (badly) what might be of any interest to her. She spelled, I WOULD LIKE CUTE CLOTHES. I DON’T MIND TOO MUCH WHAT COLOR, BUT I WOULD LIKE SOLID-COLORED MORE THAN FLORAL PRINTS. This is what her closet of church clothes looks like, so you can see this was an important conversation to have. Oops!

With her permission, I will share just a sampling of the things she has told us in the past few months. I’ll give her answers in all caps, since that is how the stencil is set up, and that is the convention for spelled communication. Some of these were spelled with her practitioner, and some with me.

During a lesson about natural wonders:

Where would you most like to view the Northern Lights from? ICELAND. Why Iceland? BECAUSE IT IS MOST CENTRAL TO EDINBURGH. Why Edinburgh? BECAUSE IT’S THE BEST PLACE IN THE WORLD. (She’s not wrong!)

During a lesson on amusement parks:

What do you think of when you hear the word “amusement”? I THINK OF MY FAMILY. BECAUSE IT IS SO GIGANTIC, THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING ENTERTAINING HAPPENING.

From a lesson on hero stories:

What is a trouble in your life? IN MY LIFE THERE ARE MANY TROUBLES. I THINK NOT TALKING IS THE HARDEST, BECAUSE I NOTICE EVERYTHING.

From a lesson about songbirds that involved a section on inherited traits:

What is a trait you inherited from your family? (These can be tricky questions for adopted kids, so I prefaced it by saying she could answer it as creatively as she wanted to or she was also free to not answer.) This is how she responded: I DID NOT INHERIT ANYTHING FROM YOU AND DAD LIKE MY EYE COLOR, BUT I DID INHERIT MY LOVE OF GOD. I have no words for how this one hit me. It took my breath away.

She recently wrote a rhymed couplet as part of a lesson on sea shanties. Even as I was scribing it down for her, I was not sure how she was going to stick the landing to make it both make sense and rhyme, but she did! (I won’t share it here, for reasons that will soon become apparent.) I was so impressed that I was telling everyone about it for about a week after. Then one day I asked her if she wanted to work on it more, maybe compose a few more lines? I was expecting a yes or no answer. Instead, Delia spelled, STOP TALKING ABOUT MY SEA SHANTY. Why? I asked her. BECAUSE I DON’T LIKE MY SEA SHANTY! Fair enough! (But I thought it was very good!)

We are now getting almost daily meaningful communication from her. Just this week she spelled out a response to an email from her Gran in England who had inadvertently forgotten to send her birthday card. Delia spelled THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR NOTE. I FORGIVE YOU FOR FORGETTING TO SEND THE CARD. IT’S NO BIG DEAL, SO DON’T STRESS ABOUT IT.

She is just beginning to open up to us about some of her sensory struggles and why she does the things she does. Having this glimpse into her world feels like a gift.

There is so much more I could share. I have a whole notebook full of Delia’s communication now, when just two years ago I had no idea she even knew how to read. I have dreamt (literally) of Delia finding her voice for years, and now that we are here, it is even more magical than I could have imagined to be getting to know her. (I apologize in advance if you and I have a conversation about spelling in real life. I am struggling not to let this be my whole personality right now!)

We recently officially graduated Delia from our homeschool, but truly I feel that her life is just beginning now. I have no idea what her future might hold, but it suddenly feels like almost nothing is impossible for her.

Delia Mary, I would have loved you forever even if you had never spoken a word, but getting to know you in this new way changes everything. I can’t wait to see what the Lord will do in your life, and I feel so honored to have a front row seat to this miracle. Happy birthday!