It's happening! He's beginning to "speak"!

I guess this must be kinda normal for most parents, but i have to confess to being rather excited today. Kaelen has begun to make some sounds that really have meaning and intent behind them, mostly in the last week or two - "ow" or "ag" for 'meow' when looking at a cat, "aaaah-aaaah" with dropping pitch for 'round and round' when looking at a fan, "bvvv!" for 'boo!' when playing peek-a-boo, "brrr" with raspberry for 'brrrooom, brrrooom!' when playing with a car - and today he just blew the top off my expectations and "said" 2 new "words" during his speech lesson! For the first time, he copied "woof woof" (including body movement!), and "Go!" as we were rolling a ball between us.

Later in the day, while J was sleeping, K & I played with a spiral car ramp we have - you set up 2 cars in bays at the top, then press a lever to tip them up and make them go down the spiral ramp. We've been doing "1, 2, 3, Go!" with that as a good listening exercise, cos he can press the lever easily. When we played with it today, after i said "1, 2, 3, Go!" Kaelen would make his own little "Go!" sound, and then press the lever! I'm just a bit amazed at how much understanding, purpose and intent there is behind these little sounds!

When i thought about it before speech this morning, as i was preparing to tell our teacher how wonderfully he'd been doing during the week, it occurred to me that by this age (11 months), Jarrah was profoundly deaf due to compounding colds and therefore fluid in his middle ears; think of being underwater permanently, except the water's more like glue. It would be another 5 months before Jarrah would hear anything with any sort of clarity (after insertion of grommets at 16 months), another month before he would make his first sound with intent/meaning, and yet another month before he got his first hearing aids (at 18 months old). Considering Kaelen got his first hearing aids at just 3 months old, it just goes to show the value and effectiveness of that early intervention!!

It does feel a little odd, having a baby who's not yet 12 months old beginning to "say" things, when our only experience has been having been one who doesn't say anything for another nearly 6 months. It's a bit hard to know what "normal" is at the moment...although if it's what we're experiencing now, we are most grateful!

Well, it's nearly the middle of the year, which means a few things: (1) Birthdays (Jarrah turns 3 on June 13, Kaelen turns 1 on July 1), and (2) Appointments! We have regular checkups with ENT & chiro & a few others, and at the moment they're all at approximately 6 month intervals...so July is checkup month! We'll have ENT for both boys, probably Paediatrician for Kaelen, 12 month vaccinations for Kaelen, and possibly chiropractic checks for both too. Think i'll just block out the first week of July on the calendar and call it Appointment Week! Will keep you all posted on any interesting developments...

Kaelen - Aus Hearing checkup May 2009

Thurs 7th May 2009 - today was Kaelen's repeat Aus Hearing checkup, nearly 2 months after the original appointment! He had a checkup scheduled for 11th March, but testing that day was pretty inconclusive - he didn't respond as well to the testing as we'd hoped, and he was only just old enough for VROA's (Puppet test) anyway, so we had to reschedule. Welcome to government departments, the next available appointment was today, 7th May, nearly 2 months later!

Kaelen was amazing today. He's been shuffling his morning sleep a bit later recently, closer to or a bit after 10am, and this morning's appointment was 9:15am. I was hoping he might sleep in a bit this morning and therefore be in good condition and able to be awake and happy at least til 10am. When i heard him awake at 6:30am, i didn't know what was going to happen - but there was nothing i could do about it then.

We began testing soon after 9:15am; did the Left ear...did the Right ear...did Bone Conduction - and by then it was 10:15am! Kaelen was still happy and responding well, so we actually got a full set of results which, according to the senior audiologist, would normally take 2 sessions to get from a 10-month-old baby. By the time the hearing aids were adjusted and re-fitted, it was after 10:30, and Kaelen still hadn't dissolved yet. Mind you, i put him down to sleep right away, and he was out to it by 10:45am :-)

So - yes, there's still a hearing loss, but the good news is that nothing appears to have changed since his very first tests at the Mater in 2008! Hooray!!! Stable hearing levels!!

We also took the time to put Jarrah's & Kaelen's audiograms side-by-side for a comparison, just for curiosity's sake really. Interestingly, they are about the same shape, but Jarrah's loss is just slightly worse than Kaelen's. Their right ears both have a fairly flat loss, between 50-70db across the 5 tested frequencies (250Hz, 500Hz, 1kHz, 2kHz, 4kHz); their left ears have a sloping loss, starting between 50-70db across the lower 3 frequencies and sloping up to 80-90db across the higher 2 frequencies. We haven't done any genetic testing as yet, but now seeing these audiograms side-by-side, i wouldn't be at all surprised if something shows up when the time comes...

Oh, and Kaelen's latest favourite game is Peek-a-boo...when he's particularly enjoying it, he says "Bvvv!"...meaning "Boo", of course, but it's just great that he's hearing and beginning to use some simple words/sounds. May it continue!

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...

Silence...of another kind!

Wow, it's been a while since i've written anything - mostly cos we haven't actually had an appointment for quite some time! A bit of an achievement for us...

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)

January appointments - ENT & chiro

Sorry, forgot to blog about these ones, they were reasonably inconsequential...

Tuesday 6th January - ENT checkup for Kaelen. Kaelen first saw our ENT when he was about 10wks old, and was far too tiny at that point for the ENT to see anything much in his ears, so we were advised to come back when he was about 6 months old. Since that happened on New Years Day, we duly went back and apparently the view was much easier, and there's no sign of any fluid behind his eardrums at all! This is very good, and it will now be interesting to see the results of Kaelen's first VROA (puppet test), due to be done in early March.

ENT had a look in Jarrah's ears too, while we were there, and they appear to be clear atm as well. They have been discharging in an alternating fashion over Christmas, but that appeared to be co-incidental with the arrival of certain 2-yr-old molars. Since the teeth have arrived, the ears appear to have righted themselves. We did purchase a small otoscope so we could keep an eye on things more closely ourselves, but hopefully we're over the worst of it, and if we can keep Kaelen well this winter, we may be able to avoid the middle-ear issues we've had with Jarrah. I believe his middle ear troubles really began in about May 2007 when he got a bad cold which lasted about 8wks...that was pretty much the beginning of the end!

We had a fun trip in and out of town on the train - it's the first time i've not had Jarrah in the stroller, so it was going to be interesting to see how well he coped with all the walking. We stopped at our local park for a quick play on the way to the train station (so Kaelen could go to sleep) and then walked the rest of the way. Unfortunately J fell during that walk, and something made walking uncomfortable for him, so he didn't walk much at all that day, he mostly perched on the front of the pram! He was very good and didn't wiggle about or cause any difficulty, and walked well when i needed him to. We boarded the train (which was unexpectedly packed!) and he found himself a seat right away, just near the door where we always sit atm. No help from me, he knew what to do...

Wednesday 7th Jan - Chiropractic check-ups for both boys. Dr checked them all over and said they're doing great. Just a few small adjustments, but generally fine. The advice is to go back every 3 or 4 months, but i must confess that Sandgate is quite a drive with 2 small kids, so we're just doing twice a year atm, especially since they seem to be doing fine and not needing major adjustments each time.

Next appt: Mon 19th Jan, K Paediatrician