First CI Surgery Pictures

What a star!!

What a week for Miss Kat. She has memorized a scene for her drama class (something that is extremely hard for her) and scored proficient of her 6th grade math test (up from 3rd grade at the beginning of the year)! She is also going to end the semester with straight A's. She has grown tremendously this year and has absolutely risen to the occasion of being in a mainstream school.

The beauty that is our life...

I am so proud of Miss Kat. She is doing beautifully in school, she had her first band concert (she plays guitar) and her drama teacher says that she has never seen a student with such an expressive face and voice. But most of all, I am proud of the faithful young woman she is becoming. She went to her room today and prepared our Family Home Evening lesson completely on her own. She read about Hannah and Samuel and taught us about faith. She also has been working diligently on her Personal Progress, and is always pushing us to attend the temple more. She is a shining star with a strong testimony, and I am so thankful to have her in our lives.

Nothing left to say...

I so rarely blog anymore because I feel as though I have nothing left to say. Miss Kat is perfectly typical. She goes to school, she has friends, she loves Girl Scouts, she helped babysit today at church, she wants to know why more people didn't join the book club at school...Her hearing loss rarely comes up in more than a routine way.

"Did you switch your batteries?"
"Remember to synch your FM"
"If it is too noisy at the carnival, I'll ask them to speak up"
"I'll go see if they will turn on the captions for me"

Things like that.

School is going beautifully, Miss Kat is doing well. She really liked Health last semester, but also like Drama. I think she will love Family and Consumer Sciences! Social Studies has been the hardest class for her, there is a ton of vocabulary to remember, but she is beginning to bloom as a writer.

I did not see this as our life 10 years ago when we found out about her hearing loss, and I certainly couldn't imagine it 7 years ago when she got her first CI. Amazing.

Learning Language

I remember sitting and watching one of Miss Kat's speech sessions just after her implant. She was working on discriminating between two fairly different sounding words. Then the therapist read a story that targeted one of the words. I saw that while she was gaining vocabulary, the therapist was having to teach one word at a time. In that moment, I was struck with the pure impossibility of teaching a child every word in the English language individually. It was an task that surely no one could do. There just simply wasn't enough time.

I was absolutely right, but I was also wrong. It is impossible to individually teach every word through therapy. But, I was missed was that because of her CIs, Miss Kat would NOT need to learn them that way. She would eventually be able to pick up language through context, brief explanations, conversation and reading. When these skills fell into place, her language exploded.

Update from the Mainstream

Miss Kat has officially been in her neighborhood school with supports for a full quarter. She is doing AMAZING! She has friends, she enjoys school, and her academics skills are really rising. Right now she has all A's except for one B (in Comm. Arts). We also heard from her reading teacher and they did her first Lexcile test. The mid-range for a 6th grader in the middle of the year is 800. Miss Kat is already at 879! While this transition has been a lot of work, and we were very worried, she is showing us what a star she is!!

5 years bilateral

This week was Miss Kat's 5 year anniversary of being bilateral. We had some brownies and retold the story of her second activation. I asked her what it sounded like when she was only wearing one ear, if they sounded any different? (She did have 18 months between them.) She described only that it was like the sound was being "sucked out" of that side of her head. I thought that was a very interesting description. Her ears have similar word discrimination scores and she really doesn't have a preference if one dies, so neither is really "stronger". I was just curious if she could hear a quality difference. Guess not.