We have consonants!!

In the last few days, Kaelen has begun to make some consonant sounds, rather than all vowels! This is cause for great celebration, cos it's a sign that his speech is (a) developing, (b) developing normally, and (c) developing age-appropriately.

Last Sunday (Apr 5th), he discovered that rubbing his bottle in his mouth while saying "Aaah" made a pretty cool sound. He pretty soon found that the same effect could be achieved using his fist, or my shoulder, whichever was most convenient at the time. On Sunday night, he began to say "Mmmm", which was very encouraging. On Monday we got "Ummm" and "Umaa", and then on Thursday we got both "aba" and "ama", plus a few repetitions. This morning, Easter Sunday morning, we're getting lots of "abababa", which sometimes also sounds like "amamama", and we're hoping that from here on Kaelen's speech & language development will continue to progress 'normally'.

Kaelen was 9 months old on the 1st of April, so to have then beginnings of consonants at this age is well within 'normal' developmental ranges. Hooray!!!

Jarrah has Giraffes!

Mon 6th April 2009

Jarrah has been recruited to a longitudinal study being done by the National Acoustic Laboratory, which is the research arm of Australian Hearing. The study is called LOCHI, or Learning Outcomes of Children with Hearing Impairments, and aims to study exactly that.

Various things seem to happen as part of that study, and i can never quite tell what's coming next. The most recent thing to happen is the trial of a new hearing aid, and Jarrah has been chosen as part of the test group to receive these new hearing aids. They have amazing white-man-magic features, and it's going to be really interesting to see how he goes with them, but the most exciting thing is that we decided to depart from the traditional beige...and go for giraffe prints!

J knows he has giraffes on his ears, but i'm not sure that he's quite as excited about them as i am :-) They're bronze with white patterns, and i think they're really cute! At least i won't have to write the boys' initials on their units anymore... :-)

Kaelen's VROA (Puppet test) - 1st attempt

Wed 11th March 2009

This was Kaelen's next check-up at Australian Hearing. Because he's now 8 months old, it was decided that he might be ready for a VROA (Puppet test) so we gave it a go.

He got the idea of the game (when you hear a certain sound, turn and see a puppet dance as a visual reward), but was inconsistent in his responses once we got to below about 70db. We were pretty sure he could actually hear the sounds, just for some reason didn't think he had to turn around...

So, we have to re-schedule. For May 7th. Welcome to government departments. At least he'll be a couple of months older by then, and hopefully get the idea better...