I have a few things I would like to share with the world, but none of them are pressing or important enough to blog about by themselves, so I'm going to make a jumbled post about all my recent thoughts.
First, I want to declare that I support the California bill, AB 2072. I believe that parents need unbiased information. I think they deserve to be given choices and to decide what will work for their family. For a child to be successful, they need involved, passionate parents. If parents are uninformed or worse, forced to do something they don't believe in, their children will suffer. Personally, I chose to give my daughter ASL. I believe it is the right choice for children with a hearing loss. I think it is fully accessible, right from the start, and that you are gambling if you choose a spoken language only path. From my experience, I believe that there are children who can hear well with amplification, but are unable to access spoken language. It is impossible to know which children will do well with spoken language and which will need ASL. If you give them all ASL, no one loses out.
BUT, that is only my opinion. I have seen passionate Cuers whose children have no language delays and are doing wonderfully. I know some hard-core AV families, and their children are doing beautifully as well. Just because I chose ASL for my family, and I have a strong personal opinion does NOT mean I should get to make the choice for other families.
ANYWAY....I wanted to share a cute story too. Miss Kat was asleep next to me on the couch a few weeks ago. She was rolling around, deep asleep, but trying to get comfortable. All of a sudden we hear, "....dinosaurs...". She was talking in her sleep! It is becoming pretty clear that her "internal voice" in now using spoken English. There have been little sign like that for several months now.
We are also in the process of changing insurance carriers so Miss Kat can get her bilateral CI. People have asked me why we decided to go ahead with the second when Miss Kat has "so much residual hearing" and "still has some speech perception with her hearing aid". To us it wasn't a hard decision. With her CI, Miss Kat has very good open set speech comprehension. In closed set testing she is at 96%. With her hearing aid? Nope. She tests with closed sets at about 20%. In daily life (open set) she is able to lipread a little, but it is as if she is unamplified for speech. So, to me, she has one usable ear, and one useless. Why would we choose to have her stay that way if we have a choice? Why not get both ears up to 96%? Seems simple to us...
Oh, also, Miss Kat started taking Kenpo! She is having a great time. Her teacher uses ASL in class and all the other kids are Deaf too. I'm so happy we found it! We are so lucky that we have an active Deaf community. They really are the best!
So, that's it. Life has been very simple lately. We have a good routine going with school (Miss Kat has gotten 100's on ALL her spelling tests since the first one I blogged about!), therapy, Kenpo, and church. I'm sure once school is out and we head to CID I will have lots to write about!
Kat Reading
