SO much has happened since my last post.
In the first month of Harry’s second year, he has learnt to pull himself up to standing on every possible surface. He has adapted his crawl to incorporate a right, left movement rather than pulling his arms forward in one motion. He is squatting to pick up items.
With speech , my animal noises at meal times using his puzzle required a new extension to ensure he didn’t get bored, so we are now crowing, snorting and neighing to a puzzle, the storybook of Old MacDonald , fridge magnets and an Ipad App . Thankfully the App has its own sounds that leave little room for interpretation and my vocal cords can occasionally have a rest.
As a result of this extended activity Harry’s latest sounds include “EE, ii, eee, ii, oo” , his rendition of the famous nursery rhyme “Old MacDonald had a farm”.
I am also sure I spotted the use of the constant “G” in his babbling as well. That now makes M, B, and G.
With the girls on school holidays the last 2 weeks, I have used Harry as an excuse to hang out at indoor play centres. Do not think for a moment that I have enjoyed the constant screaming of other people’s kids, or their snotty noses being brushed against my jeans as I tried to navigate Harry through the infant play equipment. I was even so brave as to place him on the bouncy castle and watch him try and crawl his way to the other end. It reminded me of Tom Hanks trying to row out of the reef of his island when attempting to escape in Castaway. Up, down, up, down but going nowhere fast!
When I wasn’t spending $40 entry to get everyone into Lollipops I was in the local park. I found some equipment that had Lego steps up to a tube that then led to a baby slide. Harry’s new 4pm routine was doing this circuit til he dropped and was taken home for dinner. Surface to say I haven’t managed to get him to go down the slide any other way than head first in fits of giggles…. I will have to work on that before we progress to the larger slides.
With all these exciting developments I reflected upon the fact that I rarely think of Harry as deaf anymore. He is now so close to the levels of his peers that my mind is not constantly racing down a track relating to what I need to do to get him up to speed – with gross motor skills or speech. Boys can take so long to speak that the amount of noises he makes to chat fills me with pride as I am sure it is more than many boys his age. And the physical stuff is just happening- finally. He is doing all the things I remember Alice doing at the same age (if only I could remember back to Tess 8 years ago!)
This week marks the last of the Cochlear Implant Clinic appointments. Our last Mapping session for 6 months is on Thursday when Harry will be given threshold levels to last til the end of the year. We are going to replace clinic appointments with things normal 1 year olds do. We are embarking on a Term of Gymberoo. Hours of crawling around play equipment in a local church with songs and dance. In tandem with the normality I have a goal to get along to Mother Goose singing once a fortnight at Taralye. We have joined this impressive community for the Hearing Impaired at Taralye School in Blackburn, but have yet to make real use of the network there and all it has to offer. So perhaps I shall start my next post with that.
You can check out www.taralye.vic.edu.au
Harry's Ears 