So that’s it. We’re all done. Four home-based Cued Speech lessons later and we’re fully clued up (or should that be cued up?? Boom boom).

Last night was our final session with Catharine. Tremendous fun as ever and I must admit to a few nerves at the prospect of being ‘on our own’ now. That’s not to say that we wont/can’t have refresher courses, in addition to my level 1 cued speech exam which I hope to sit shortly. Apparently if I pass the level 3 exam I can teach cued speech, which given the current recession, may well be a sensible course of action.

Much of last night was spent being tested and practising some fairly complex phrases. We have all got to the stage now where we can pretty much cue anything we want to say (albeit rather slowly). Catharine decided last night would be a good time to cue the Lewis Carol poem ‘Jabberwocky’. For those of you who haven’t worked out what cued speech actually is, you can see someone cueing the very same poem on Youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5hiRL2ujM4

Now you see how far we have come.

So to Alice. The difficulty is keeping her attention when you are cueing to her. We are pretty confident that she has worked out ‘No’ (which we seem to say with monotonous regularity), but trying to engage her in anything more complex is proving a little tricky. Patience is certainly a virtue.

All this said, I am so very proud of my whole family for taking such a keen interest in helping Alice to communicate. It’s not easy (particularly for the olds, whose arthritic fingers struggle to get round some of the cues) but it is to everyone’s credit that they have come so far.

It would be remiss of me not to thank Catharine for her tremendous help, support and wise words these past couple of months. She has been an inspiration to us all and I was so proud of myself for correcting her on a misplaced cue last night.

Catharine, you are a star.