Tuesday, October 13, 2009

October goodness

Some new things we have as of today--Aidan says wawa and signs water! He does it appropriately as well. He doesn't have that first w sound down great, but it is there! He is saying "mo mo" for No No, even includes the finger wag :) He calls the dogs "Mah"-doesn't make sense to the ordinary person, but one of our dogs is Molly, so that is what he is calling both dogs, and he called the cat that today as well. "mi, mi"(sounds like hi but with m) he is saying this for night night. He says "one" as we are doing 1, 2, 3 Magic for discipline which incorporates counting to 3, so now he is trying to count with me. We are also working on letter recognition. This is just bonus, nothing too serious, but we are pointing out letters in his book and he will say "I", "A", and "Y" but those are the easy ones for him. Sometimes he will point to an A and say I, same for the other letters, but he doesn't have actual letter recognition yet, he's just guessing. Still working on "daddy" but today he actually tried, didn't get the "d" sound in there, but he got a similar sound that sounded like "ah e" You've all probably noticed by now that he's great with vowels, and things that start with m. That is because they are easier to say and we have to teach him how to move his tongue and mouth to make different sounds. Doesn't seem hard and it is ingrained in us, but it is quite hard for him. Good news on that front though is he has finally mastered blowing! It's a simple thing but so important. For one, blowing helps move the tongue into a different position-the position to use letters like "b and p" There is all kinds of other things--like he when someone says a word, he will babble the correct amount of syllables, he's getting a cadence to his voice--like before he would say mama with the same inflection. Now sometimes he increases the pitch so it sounds slightly different and not a monotone, which is great! He is doing really well for 1 year of hearing and I think in 2-3 yrs we won't notice much difference between him and his peers. Oh and I think we may try out the potty in about 6 mths. Starting to lay the foundation for him now, kind of hard when his comprehension isn't so high so relying on a lot of visual cues-mainly saying/signing potty when others go, letting him flush, trying to let him sit on the toilet a few times a day--which is a lot harder than one would think considerig Andrew screams at the bathroom to come in and if I let him in digs in the cats food/water/litterbox. But all in all, doing quite. Oh, he also goes to Louisiana Tech on October 26th for an evaluation by their team--basically from what I was told is he is in their program and they are going to gather info at this meeting to see where he is.