Abigail Turns One

Happy birthday to our dear little princess!

It's hard to imagine that you're one today--it seems just like yesterday that we welcomed you into our family. While it doesn't seem like we've already been blessed with you for an entire year, it has been a long journey. We will remember forever the first time we saw you, your first tear, your first smile, your first laugh, your first kiss. We will remember forever the first time we learned that you had a hearing loss--the fears that we had, the tears that were shed, the many questions that would follow. We've come a long way as a family and your smiles have given us all the strength to keep going. We hope that you will one day understand the decisions we have made and know that we are working as hard as we can to make sure you have every tool possible to succeed and be happy
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Can I get a mmmmmm.

We have been working diligently to encourage Abigail to increase the kinds of sounds that she is making, but still have not heard any of the typical consonant sounds that you hear from a baby her age. One of the first sounds that you can expect is the "b" sound, perhaps in the form of "ba" to refer to her bottle. Shortly after that the "d" for "da da" and the "m" for "ma" appear and before you know it your little one is speaking jargon (which I recently learned is an actual technical term for that period of time when your baby babbles with such inflection and tone that it sounds like she's having a conversation in a foreign language.) I have been plugging away at momma, but I would settle for a "ba" or even a "da" at this point. While she has progressed developmentally in some areas of speech--she has engaged in repetitive sounds (the ah ah ah sequence) and in back and forth style verbal play--she is still exhibiting a true speech delay.

We will be able to start medical model speech therapy (this is the type of speech therapy where the therapist actually works directly with Abigail to stimulate speech sounds, while the consultative approach consists more of the therapist providing suggestions to Ben and I on how to encourage her speech at home) in just a few weeks when Abby turns one. I am trying to decide on where to start her speech therapy. There are a few local outpatient centers here that I can try, but much like everything else in this process we are totally new to this and I'm not sure how to know if I've chosen a good speech therapist or not. Luckily my sister-in-law is very versed in speech therapy (she has a little boy with Apraxia) and she was able to provide me with some great guidelines:

1. A good speech therapist should have a theory and process that he/she is able to explain to you regarding your child--this is the most important quality.
   
2. The speech therapist should explain how you can continue what he/she is doing during the session at home.
3. The speech therapist should be open and receptive to any ideas/concerns that you have regarding your child.

While these are just the basics, they are at least a good starting point for us. While I would like to explore speech therapy at Cincinnati Children's so that all of her care is centrally located, I just can't justify driving 45 minutes each way once a week without at least trying a few of the local places.

Working on signs

Incorporating sign language into our daily routine has been very difficult for us as a family. After using only our voices to communicate for roughly the past 29 years, Ben and I have to really work on signing to Abigail. Remembering to do this is one of the most difficult hurdles we have to overcome. While our signing vocabulary is expanding every day, we still are not signing to each other or to Benjy regularly. We often forget to use our signs in key teaching moments like at dinner or bath. Our hearing therapist and deaf mentor had some great ideas that we are going to implement over the next week to help us get comfortable with signing:

1. Establish a quiet time at dinner--even if just for ten minutes use only your signs to communicate. If this means all you say is please and thank you or dinner's good--that's fine. Abigail's first language is visual and she will be focused intently on your visual communication.
2. Put of sign flash cards in various areas of the house that can serve as key teaching areas for both Abby and Benjy--the bath, the play room, the dinner table, the mudroom. Each area can emphasize 1 or 2 signs to start and the cards will serve as reminders to use our signs as well as our voices to communicate.
   
3. Sign to each other and to your family--if you don't know a word, oh well! The more you practice, the more natural signing will become to you.

We plan to put these techniques to practice over the next few weeks and hope that it will help us to sign more often. Learning sign language is hard, but remembering to use when you're hearing is even harder.