Moot Thoughts & Musings

I need to write this before I forget, because I think this little incident was an important little milestone in E's CI journey.

He's 2 1/2 months post-activation. He doesn't respond to his name as much as I'd like, but then he doesn't respond when I wave him down either. He just gets really focused. I think it's a 2yo thing. But he's responding really consistently to environmental sounds. For example, the other day we were playing in my IL's backyard, which is behind a house that sits next to a busy road. Every time a loud truck went down the road, he'd look up. I explained in sign and speaking that he was hearing a truck go by. I thought that it was pretty good, because it was invisible. We couldn't see the trucks.

Anyway, that's not the real story. We have these "learning to listen" sounds, sounds attached to objects to give them meaning, like "quack, quack" for duck or "beep, beep" for car, or "aaaah" for airplane (some make less intuitive sense than others). E has really nailed "aaah" for airplane. Whether his CI is on or not, he always vocalizes "aaah" for airplane.

Well, the other day, I was sitting in a room and on the floor in the doorway was a car and a duck. He was bending down for the car and I said "quack, quack" (he says "ba, ba"). he changed course for the duck. Then I said "beep, beep" and he picked up the car. I was like "wow, E, that's totally cool!" Then I said "go to your room and get your airplane" (except it was a combination of speaking and signing, more like "aaah" YOUR ROOM GO BRING-ME) And he totally got the airplane and brought it to me!

And another cute E story to round off the evening of our happy bilingual life. In school this morning, they read a book about fall (in ASL). I didn't read the whole book, but the teacher showed it to me and said it was really cute that E was enjoying signing "leaf". So at speech therapy later in the afternoon, the therapist showed him a pumpkin, and they did their stuff with a pumpkin. And then he looked at her and signed "leaf"--'cause, you know, pumpkins and leaves go together. *grin*