What is it like to not be able to communicate?

Often we may wonder things like, what is it like to have a broken foot?  What is it like to be invisible?  Or what is it like to not be able to communicate with the spoken word. 

Well Happy, has been experimenting with each of these the last several weeks much to the confusion of the staff at his school. 

Two weekends ago we had a pile of homework to do because Happy determined that he would be invisible.  Hence rendering all his work invisible too.  (I can't seem to understand why his curiosity about things always ends up causing me angst.)  However, we determined that this was not the best format for pretending and that while he enjoyed "not being seen" he really was causing his staff to have to do additional work, via emails to the house, the staff follow up and then falling behind in his work.  In the long run, he determined, on his own that invisibility was not his thing !

Prior to that, he drug his foot behind him for a day.  Insisting that the night before he had sustained an injury on the trampoline that we refused as his parents to address.  He talked the staff into propping up his foot on a chair and surprisingly skipping gym class.  He was a very convincing lame person.  However, when the truth of that pretend session came to light, the deal was that he forgot his locker combination for his gym locker and since his gym clothes were locked inside the locker, he knew he would otherwise get in trouble for a)not dressing for gym and b) having to ask multiple times for the combination that was alluding him, so the lame routine was his creative out.  Since then we have addressed the combination issue by placing it inside his main locker, on a paper in his backpack, on a paper in his gym bag, and in his communication log as well as taped to his desk... No more fake injuries to avoid gym class for Happy!

SO fast forward to yesterday.  He pretended all day that he had lost his voice.  His team leader even questioned if that was the case because he stuck to the silent routine consistently all day - writing notes to communicate with the staff at school.  Sadly, a challenge for all involved based on Happy's inability to spell correctly.  When the Prince addressed this with Happy at home last night, Happy thought long and hard about what had happened during that day.  He responded that his reason for the silent treatment was that he wanted to know what it would be like to not be able to communicate using his voice.  The Prince then asked him if he thought he would enjoy spending the day pretending that he was blind...opps on the Prince's part,  because of course Happy thought that would be a GREAT idea! 

In all this we have tried to express to Happy, that curiosity is wonderful, and we would like to encourage him to explore these types of things, but in that  it has to be done in a controlled enviornment.  NOT at school. 

Anxiously waiting for the day to end, so I can go home and see what antics the dwarf was up to today.  Or maybe not... Really, you can't make this stuff up!