Milk and quack quack

Aidan lately has been saying milk. It sounds more like MEAL(but not much enunciation, if any, on L). And then when we point to the duck in his book he will attempt to say quack quack. He doesn't get the Q, or the CK, sounds like wha wha, but you can obviously tell that is what he is saying. Oh and he said Maah for Molly the dog the other day as well!

Big leaps

Aidan has done really well the last few days.
He had speech yesterday and he said a few words right after the therapist did. They were playing with playdough and cutting it with a knife, he said "I" and made the correct mouth placement for F, although he didn't sound it out, she said Ball and he said "Awl", she said dough, he said "oo" so pretty good when he usually only does a few sounds. Who knows if he will say them again or if it was a one time deal, but he is definitely making progress. Aidan has also been saying "Awt" for hot-pretty close but doesn't have the H sound just yet, he also said "yea" a few times right after Alex did, I'm not sure if he got the Y sound in there or not, probably not, but I was in the other room so heard him from there. We usually sign and sing the alphabet a few times a day and Aidan is trying to immitate that and he hums a sound at each one, so although he can't sing ABC he can vocalize with it. He is signing a lot lately, he can copy most of them, he is watching Signing Time right now and is signing along with it, he has done uncle, grumy, silly, etc in the span of just a few minutes. We really love this series and have almost all of them, I think we are just missing maybe 5-6 of them, which will be going on the Christmas list :)

Oh and news on the school front--our ST hasn't mentioned yet about Tech, we were talking about it yesterday but I forgot to actually ask her if they would take him. However next week after I drop Alex off at school, we are going to have therapy in town b/c the therapist has to see 3 babies before she has to be in a meeting and so we are meeting them in town. We are either meeting at the church or Tech(where Aidan will get extra therapy hopefully). She is calling them to see if they can spare a therapy room for us to use that way we can kind of get him in the door, let him meet him and then talk about them working with him a few times a week.

Aidan will be going to preschool in the fall and I voiced my concerns to our ST about what kind of environment he would be in. I had been worried that they would put him with very low functioning special needs kids and I wasn't sure that would be the best learning environment for him. So I asked the ST about that and she said most likely he will either be in a regular class with other 3 yr olds and leave for speech or he will be with other high functioning special needs kids--like milk down syndrome, high functioning autism, other deaf/non verbal kids, etc. So that made me feel a lot better. Not that there would be anything wrong with him being exposed to lower functioning kids, it's good for kids to be around higher needs kids but I worried that the teachers would be too busy working with them since they would have greater needs and Aidan could get shafted and not have the best learning environment.

Activation of the left ear

Aidan has his left ear activated on August 3, 2009. Went quite well. He cried for a few minutes, tried to rub his head on my shoulder to knock it off. But as of today, he is doing really well. Doesn't pull it off as much as he did with the first one. Of course he isn't hearing very much out of it yet-so small that it is immeasurable. But other the course of several months we will increase the volume and he will be at it's max volume in about 9-12 mths. Over the next 4 weeks we will increase his different programs a slight bit and then go back to New Orleans on September 9th to get 4 more programs that we will work through.