Monday, October 29, 2007

When hearing your kids argue is great ! - 10/29/2007

As most parents will agree, hearing your kids argue with each other can be quite exasperating. Last night, Nichole was up in her room doing homework. Her sister Corey was on the same floor, at the opposite corner of the house in her room, also doing homework. They were about 40 feet away, with a bit of a dog-leg left "jog" caused by the hallway and location of their desks (not direct line of site). I was in the kitchen straightening up after dinner, when I heard Nichole bellow at Corey to "stop that whistling, I am trying to do homework". Ok, whistling is high frequency, which Nichole never used to hear, let alone from 40 feet away. Hearing her frustration at the distraction, and her vociferous displeasure with her sister's whistling talents was pure music to my ears!

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Listening Therapy - 10/24/2007

I know it has been a long time since my last post. Sorry about that. We have scaled back Nichole's listening therapy to every three weeks. Yesterday, I took Nichole for her session. Dorothy (her therapist) did the normal Ling sound checks (still cool that Nichole can hear the "s" ans "sh" sounds with her CI, where as she can't with her Hearing Aid). One of the major exercises she did with Nichole was to read her one of Aesop's Fables (without visual queues) and Nichole had to repeat back each sentence verbatim. Nichole scored a 96% with just her CI !!!

Dorothy asked if we had been doing any exercises at home. I had to confess that we have not. The fact that Nichole has been doing so well (96% with her CI versus pre-implantation word recognition of 32%), has, for better or worse, made us relax a lot. I think the only area in which we really need to do more work is having Nichole listen to electronically produced speech. Time to put that on the "front burner" I guess.