I haven't posted forever, but think I'm coming up for air now. I ran across this post on a blog which I've followed for a number of years and thought it perfectly captured how I'm feeling now. We met this family at AGBell last year. Just substitute Lily's name and I could have written it myself. However this Mom has boy triplets who are seven-years-old (one of which has CIs and one with hearing aids) and one three-year-old girl with her own set of challenges. The family is amazing. When does she have time to blog?
http://thelawrencetriplets.blogspot.com/2013/10/a-reason-purpose.html
Her blog post is titled "A Reason, A purpose?" And I think it captures a big part of Lily and my purpose, at least right now. We've connected and mentored and been mentored by so many families around the world and in our hometown, many of who have become very close friends. And many who have gone on to mentor others. Which is amazingly cool. Families almost always thank us for giving them "hope" which is so desperately needed, especially in the early days.
It seems everywhere I go, we are introduced to people with hearing loss or people with children with hearing loss. It may be fate or our network crossing, but it truly is some of the most satisfying work I do.
Lily inspires them all. She too, like Cormac in the blog post, has a love of life and the ability to inspire others. She also has a great skill at listening and spoken language, something we've focused hard on since she was two months old. It's paid off.
She received all 4s, the highest grade in Language Arts, which is dreamy. Her reading test, after the first quarter of the first grade, placed her at the end of the third grade. She could read beyond this, but began to lose some comprehension. She also received 4s in "Confidence in Self" and "Singing," among others, which is pretty awesome. These are both areas which we have worried about for years.
But I also see Lily's 22-month-old brother listening with ease, picking up words out of songs on the radio and speaking in four-plus word sentences already. He probably knows more than 500 words. At the the same point in Lily's life, she was not yet putting two words together, but she knew 200 words or so and we documented each one. That early childhood hearing matters. Lily's certainly caught up, but we certainly can't let up.
Lily struggles hearing especially when it's noisy or kids have soft voices. I watch how much she misses when I volunteer in the classroom or when Lily is outside the school. It's tough.
One Mom told us she used to tell her daughter with CIs, who is now in high school, just to run after the girls when they run, even though her daughter had no idea what game they were playing or why they were running because she couldn't always hear the conversations. The Mom said the girls would make it very clear if they didn't want her daughter there. I think that was pretty good advice. :)
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