Anyway, I thought i'd just write a few things that have been happening lately...
I had an interesting discussion with our Aus Hearing audiologist in January about Jarrah, who i had noticed was hearing ok but still not alway listening well, and certainly unable to answer any sort of questions. I noticed it particularly back in December when we went to visit the Kindy Jarrah is now going to - they offered him milk or water and he just looked at them as if they had spoken to him in Chinese. I observed him more closely over the following weeks, and noticed that requests requiring an action were ok, but anything requiring a verbal answer was not. It seemed he didn't understand that there was such a thing. Anyway, while discussing something quite different with the audiologist, i had a bit of a revelation about why there might be this problem with questions. It seems that Jarrah has a very good auditory memory, so has been learning words & phrases as distinct items, but not necessarily understanding that all words have meaning, and absorbing the meaning from sentences - he tends to latch onto one word that he knows and makes an assumption about how that word was used, rather than listening to the rest of the sentence and processing that.
I had wondered if his comprehension was really as good as i should have expected it to be by this stage (1 full year of hearing aids & speech lessons), and i was finding myself often frustrated by his apparent total lack of understanding of what seemed quite basic language. When we returned to speech lessons in Feb i asked our teacher about all this, wondering how i was sposed to teach J to process language, not just learn distinct sounds, and she decided that questions and turn-taking with language was something we should work on. By now J had taken to copying back the question instead of ignoring it altogether, so at least he was hearing it, but there was still no understanding (a) of what the question meant, and (b) that he was required to give a response. We've ended up doing lots of role-playing and lots of pointing at the person whose turn it is to speak, and he's beginning to get the idea. Now I at least get a "no thankyou" when i ask if he needs to go to the potty! :-)
Yes, in the middle of all this I decided it was time to go nuts with the potty. We'd been sitting J on it sometimes regularly (sometimes irregularly!) for months, and a couple of times he'd even woken in the middle of the night to use it! I figured that meant he was really able to train at least in the day time...and when i discovered that we had a clear calendar for a week or so, i thought we'd have a shot and see what happened. So, here we are 2 weeks later in undies :-) and today we had our first accident-free day; we managed to finish the day in the same pair of undies we started in - yay Jarrah!
Kindy began in January - i really felt it would be good for Jarrah to begin to learn to function in a fully hearing environment, without a lot of the help that he gets at home, and to learn to socialise more with kidlets his age, so i enrolled him in a local Kindy just one day a week. At first i wasn't sure how he would go in terms of language, i thought everyone might struggle (teachers included!) but he seems to have done fine...well, more than fine really, his language has come ahead in leaps and bounds, many of the songs he sings are now much clearer and actually have the right number of words in each phrase :-) Each Friday when he comes home he seems to use words more than just noise, which is wonderful - lots of little speaking people obviously helps! Hopefully this will continue, but at this point Kindy was the best thing we've done this year!
Kaelen is now comfortably sitting up and responding really well to sounds, both speech & general noises. At the moment we're trying to encourage him to attempt to copy some animal noises (moo, baa, etc.), mostly looking for different vowel sounds, and you know i reckon he's trying to say moo. It sounds like aahhhh, but it's the same aahhh each time, and has a very similar rise and fall to my moo...he did it a few times today, see if he'll do it again tomorrow...
My son's first word: moo :-)
Next appt: Wed 11th March, Aus Hearing checkup for Kaelen; first VROA (puppet test)
