Moot Thoughts & Musings

(I started this last thurs. better finish so I can get to other things)

Today Ellis and I went to the children's hospital (chop) for his weekly speech therapy. I'd prefer that we not be going to a hospital for that as it reinforces the medical associations with deafness, which we essentially believe is a social, not a medical, disability.* But, that aside, the therapist there is the best thing we've got going. Don't even get me started on how dumb my county is. Not to mention the fact that E is the ONLY kid in the county who receives Early Intervention services, has a CI, and whose hearing family signs. Can you believe it? So anyway, I'm having trouble getting a speech therapist in my county because we don't go to the "other" deaf school. So we go to the hospital.

Quite frankly, if it weren't for hauling into center city and going to a hospital once a week, two things I can live with, I'd happily keep our therapist for eternity. I so heart her!!

When we first started with her, I was a little nervous, because she is an AVT therapist, so I wasn't sure if she would respect our desire for E to bilingual. Well, not only does she respect it wholeheartedly, she suggests ways for us to incorporate the speech and the signs without one losing out AND she even uses signs with Ellis (which means she's taken the time to learn a bit of ASL). Of course, her attention is primarily focused on speaking and listening, but she's very good at strategically incorporating Ellis's already existent language.

He's doing really well, especially expressively. He's vocalizing a lot. And now regularly says bye-bye (ba-ba), and I notice him saying "ba" with other signs (like "wait" or "train") as his token word. Very cute.

It hasn't even been two months yet since his activation, so the therapist is naturally pleased with his progress, then she something really interesting. She said that he was catching on quickly and that she's starting to notice that consistently kids who have signed before their CI catch on more quickly than kids who don't, probably because they have a language base. To which my thought is duh. I love that she is noticing this empirically, though. And then she said, "it's a difficult position [being a parent]. I always thought that if I was in that situation I would just go to listening, but now I'm not so sure."

I hope we can stay with this therapist for awhile. I really like her. I'll stay with her as long as medical assistance will fund it. And my county isn't making great strides in finding me someone suitable.

*Before I get raked over the coals for anything. :-) Bear with me as our thought processes develop. When the dominating/majority culture is hearing, being deaf requires social adjustment. It is unfortunate, but nevertheless, a reality. Hopefully, in the future, the adjustment will be more slight. Some of the polemic out there reduces deafness to a medical problem, thus making the deaf person someone to be treated. I hope we can get beyond that, because deaf kids are just as healthy as hearing kids. In fact, one of the reasons I was happy when i found out E was deaf was because he was happy and healthy!! Unfortunately some of the technological tools I want to give him are located in the hospital.