How many of you out there remember this blast from the past?
I remember the countless hours I spent wandering around the house with Alice teaching her to ask where things were…it’s all part of the ‘AV thing’. It’s so important if your child is oral to give them useful language not just vocabulary. It’s all very well Ollie learning the name for everything he sees or interacts with, but unless he has useful language around those nouns; adjectives, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions and the like then the nouns don’t help him get what he wants or ask for what he needs. More importantly, they won’t help him tell his big Brother and Sister to go away when they are annoying him…
Don’t get me wrong; we have taught Ollie plenty of nouns: Our own names, those of his siblings and the names for just about every form of motorised transport there is. Ollie has a wonderful habit of stopping in the middle of the street to point out cars, buses, helicopters and planes in a manner not dissimilar to a famous Harry Enfield sketch (the one with the aliens) from the 1990s.
Anyway, Ollie is doing fantastically well. He has had a real language explosion of late and he is so enthusiastic with his new-found voice. He is certainly ahead of where Alice was at the same age which, given how well things have turned out for her, can only be a good sign.
Here we go again…
Alice's Ears 
It’s lovely to hear him, well done
Hi, my child was diagnosed with ANSD. He had his first implant on the 5th of January and his switch on , is on the 3rd of February. I just wanted to ask you how your children are getting on, if there speech is clear and if they listen to music. I am terrified that my son won t reach his peers as he is 2 years 7 months old. It was such a consolation reading about your experience.
Hi Marisa
Sorry we haven’t updated the blog in so long; life is pretty busy at present. Both Ollie and Al;ice are doing great. I don’t mean ‘great given that they are deaf’ i mean that their hearing loss is no roadblock to them in life. The choices we have made for them have, it would seem, been the right ones. They both have CIs and both went through AVT. Alice is like any other seven-year-old girl: She likes music, dancing, plays the drums and sings in the school choir. Ollie never shuts up…….I sometimes wish he would. Be careful what you wish for :-).
A bit of an update on them can be found here; I must post it on the blog:
So glad you found us: have you joined the Facebook group?
Chris
Hi Chris, thanks for your reply. At the moment I’m still grieving, so joining in groups is still very hard for me. When we go out, I still try to find children with CI to see how they behave and if they speak….but here in Malta , people with CI s are smaller in number as the population is rather small.
Reading your updates and seeing your posted videos gave me more courage…….and made me cry like a baby. Next week Neil s implant will be switched on. The surgeon operated only on one as he didn’t have a response when he carried out the Medel s ART test. Its the same as the NRT, They told us that this could be due to anesthesia or due to the fact that Neil s brain has to adapt. They told us that the switch on is crucial and if we see a response, than they ll do the second one.
This devastated me more and my hopes are not so high at the moment.