Wednesday, December 10, 2008

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.

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