The hearing world of Aidan

Aidan is in quite the mood lately. And not a good one. He had a checkup yesterday b/c I wanted to get his ears checked before Christmas. His ear infections are gone, thanfully. So that means his moodiness must be teeth. I don't blame him, they hurt. On the hearing front, he is doing pretty good. I don't know what he is hearing, but he definitely hears us. Occasionally he will turn when I say his name. I don't think he knows his name yet, he is just hearing me say it! I have noticed he turns a lot when I say words that start with A, maybe b/c I say his name a lot :) Today he was a bear and kept pulling off his processor. So I took it off and let him have a break. What do you know, he seemed to be even more irritable with it off. I put it on 1 hour later and he calmed down. So I think he is starting to recognize that sound is GOOD.

Aidan saw Santa

And he didn't care for it. I didn't take the other two boys since I didn't expect to see Santa. Hopefully soon they will all get to see him.

News on Aidan

We had Christy(ST) and Margaret here today working with Aidan. Margaret works with all the deaf kids in the local parishes, so hearing loss is what she knows. She gave Christy and I both some good ideas on what to do with Aidan. We are putting him in the highchair with 1 person in front of him to sign/talk/play with him and the 2nd person sits behind him and introduces sounds(from speech and toys) to see if he will turn to it. He turned to the sound quite a bit so he is hearing. But there were times he didn't turn and that was mainly when he was too engaged with something else. So we need to work on getting him to ackowledge sounds while being occupied.

We do notice him responding to some stimulus in the everyday world, but the environment needs to be pretty quiet and the stimulus needs to be loud. We are of course running into the problem of having 3 children in the house. Alex is always running back and forth, yelling, talking, whatever. Andrew is either being held, fed, rocked to sleep, or crying. So it is a very busy environment for Aidan to learn in, and that is a problem. Don't think it can be remedied, short of sending the kids to live somewhere else, which won't be happening. So, I do think it will take a bit longer for Aidan to learn, but maybe by the time he is 2 he will be old enough to realize that the implant helps him and won't take it off as much. Only time will tell.