So that’s it. We’re all done. Four home-based Cued Speech lessons later and we’re fully clued up (or should that be cued up?? Boom boom).

Last night was our final session with Catharine. Tremendous fun as ever and I must admit to a few nerves at the prospect of being ‘on our own’ now. That’s not to say that we wont/can’t have refresher courses, in addition to my level 1 cued speech exam which I hope to sit shortly. Apparently if I pass the level 3 exam I can teach cued speech, which given the current recession, may well be a sensible course of action.

Much of last night was spent being tested and practising some fairly complex phrases. We have all got to the stage now where we can pretty much cue anything we want to say (albeit rather slowly). Catharine decided last night would be a good time to cue the Lewis Carol poem ‘Jabberwocky’. For those of you who haven’t worked out what cued speech actually is, you can see someone cueing the very same poem on Youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5hiRL2ujM4

Now you see how far we have come.

So to Alice. The difficulty is keeping her attention when you are cueing to her. We are pretty confident that she has worked out ‘No’ (which we seem to say with monotonous regularity), but trying to engage her in anything more complex is proving a little tricky. Patience is certainly a virtue.

All this said, I am so very proud of my whole family for taking such a keen interest in helping Alice to communicate. It’s not easy (particularly for the olds, whose arthritic fingers struggle to get round some of the cues) but it is to everyone’s credit that they have come so far.

It would be remiss of me not to thank Catharine for her tremendous help, support and wise words these past couple of months. She has been an inspiration to us all and I was so proud of myself for correcting her on a misplaced cue last night.

Catharine, you are a star.

Alice is the sort of daughter to make any father proud.

Not only is she incredibly beautiful (credit to her mummy there) but she is a real joy to be around. Always happy and smiling and she has a laugh that could make even Gordon Brown smile. That’s not to say she doesn’t have her moments. Alice is a determined little so-and-so and has a naughty streak that even her brother would be proud of.

It is so very hard to reconcile this normal, inquisitive, bright and beautiful young lady with her world of silence. The thing that breaks our hearts more than anything is that when she cries, whether it be because she has hurt herself or she is just a bit sad, you can’t comfort her in the way you would any other child. You can hold her, cuddle her, stroke her but you can’t tell her everything is ok in the way we can her brother.

It is such a torment for a parent knowing that she can’t hear us when we tell her we love her. Of course, we make up for it in many other ways.

As her Daddy, one of the first things I said to Alice’s Mummy when we found out she couldn’t hear was that all I wanted was to hear her say ‘Daddy’. Such a small thing and probably entirely selfish, but it is the small things that make the biggest difference.

Somewhere in Alice is a voice and I have no doubt a wonderful one at that. If she has a CI and performs very well, will I ever hear this voice or will she always struggle to talk in the way God intended?

Whatever the outcome, we never want Alice to be frustrated by her problem and, even at her tender age, this is starting to creep in. Communication is something we all take for granted. It is a basic instinct and you can see it in her eyes sometimes that she doesn’t understand why she can’t communicate in the way that we and her brother can.

Bless her big brother Joseph. He knows Alice’s ears don’t work and even at 3, you can see he wants to help. He has been learning some of the basic cues and tries so hard to help Alice to understand.

It is a humbling experience and I am the proudest Daddy in the world.