Harry's Ears

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

We have just got back from some
Quality time away. The town of Dragonflies and crocodiles . Sunsets and Barramundi .

We were hanging out in Darwin with Harry’s new cousin Pearl who was born 8 weeks ago. It was just Harry and I on vacation and I couldn’t have a better traveling companion.
Following in the footsteps of eldest sister Tess Harry fell asleep on the plane just before take off. For 2 hours he slept and then spent the remainder of the flight playing open the window shutter , close the window shutter. A tad boring for me and my arm, but it passed the time adequately .

A change of temperature from chilly Melbourne 10 degrees to a gorgeous 29 degrees , has meant I have had to disband the bonnets and rely on tape to keep the magnets on. It seems he is more tolerant with age although I cringe everytime I have to pull off the tape as I feel his pain when the hairs are ripped from his head with the tape before each sleep.

With time to focus on just Harry he seems to have made a mountain of progress on this trip.

Small things like a new floor surface to crawl on that is less slippery, a great dog to chase around the room and a retro 60’s sofa with cushions in a perfect wedge for climbing have brought Harry’s physical development on leaps and bounds.

We also had time to listen to new environmental sounds . Listen to the chorus of birds in the morning . Listen to the rumble of a real 4WD. Listen to a didgeridoo at the local markets. Listen to the sound of an ice cold beer being gulped down by mum whilst he eat dinner.

It was a fab trip and a joy to slow down our hectic pace of a family of 5 to just focus on Harry at his pace.

The last two weeks I have managed to successfully concentrate on Harry’s development both physical and speech.

It has been such a pleasure not to spend my day obsessing about magnets . They do still get knocked off in the pram and he doesn’t wear them in the car unless he has one of the girls sitting with him, but overall we have overcome enough of the headgear hurdles to enjoy everyday life with Harry as a normal 11 mnth old baby.

There is a quiet time in our day when the girls are at school and he has woken from his morning sleep. He sits patiently in his high chair waiting for a
lunch fitting of a Feller – ratatouille and pasta or sautéed spinach, mushroom and leek with pasta.

He has a wooden puzzle with 6 assorted animals on it and we sit together going through the sounds each animal makes. I have been told to concentrate on 2 animals at a time with different sounds. For example Baaa – a long sound with arrr and woof woof – a short repeated sound.
I discovered if I place my face very close to his and over exaggerate my mouth movements he stops what he is doing and follows my mouth movements with amazing concentration. Next he attempts to copy my sound. Considering he is only 8 weeks into hearing I am blown away by this progress and according to the Speechies if he makes the sound more than once in context we can record it as his first “words”….

So what might these be I hear you ask? My money is on Baa for sheep and Brmm Brmm for his car toy steering wheel. It is now completely obvious to me that boys are genetically wired to be obsessed with cars and trucks. As for the sheep , there are no New Zealand genes in our family so it will remain unexplained.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Global, April 27, 2012

A Call for Help Gets Answered

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Press Release 04 27 2012

This week Harry had an appointment with the Physio. This is the 3rd session he has attended and he was referred by our paediatrician 6 months ago when she noticed his upper body muscle tone was slightly under-developed for his age. 

I haven’t really mentioned his physical development much in the Blog, as our primary focus is his hearing.  But it has been an underlying concern for us that there definitely seems to be a link with Harry’s lack of sound and his gross motor skill development. Gross motor skills are the sitting up, crawling, walking milestones that every baby has to go through to develop “normally”.  As part of our process to dot all the “i’s” and cross all the “t’s” we took Harry to see a Developmental Paediatrician in the beginning to assure us he was going to hit all his major developmental stages. So far all tests and diagnosis have been extremely positive and indicate that the deafness is isolated and with that we remain positive that it will always be such. 

The Paediatrician referred us to a Physio however, having picked up at 6 months that he could use some assistance with building his torso muscle tone. It was a simple case of the fact that he was not twisting the top half of his body to find sounds, so he was not building the necessary muscles in this area to allow him to sit up. Ultimately it was leading him to be reliant on lying flat on his back to play.

So back to the Physio.  I was excited to see her again as the last time we visited was prior to Harry’s operation. I really felt that his physical progress had been enormous since this time and she would be thrilled. One major milestone was his sitting up which took place 2 days after Switch On. There is no scientific evidence that the brain receiving sound and vestibular system have a connection but in our book it was amazing to see Harry finally sit up on his own so soon after he had the CI’s switched on.  

We walked away today with 4 main strategies to work on over a month. The goal now is to get him crawling on all 4’s (rather than Slug- like as he is now) and to teach him to get from crawling to sitting and vice versa.  This will then lead nicely into him pulling himself up to standing and then progressing to walking. The physiotherapist was very clear to point out that he would end up doing all of these things eventually but perhaps not in the most succinct fashion.  As I had laboured the fact that I need him upright to allow for a better grip on the magnets, she agreed we would fast track this stage of development so we could get him less reliant on lying on the floor.

I will be spending a great deal of time on the floor with Harry over the next 4 weeks pinning back his hips to force him to thrust his arms forward and push on them. This will lead to him realising that crawling can be more efficient by being on all fours and no longer dragging his tummy along with him.  Based on the amount he eats I would have thought it will be immeasurably easier!

The Physiotherapist also left me with some thoughts on Play.  Play patterns are all linked to brain development and specifically I need to focus on teaching Harry about cause and effect.  All those toys you see broken and scummy in the waiting rooms of doctor’s surgeries and crèches now needed to be on my shopping list. Posting a ball through a ball run to see it move from the top to the bottom. Banging on the pop up toys to see them appear from their hiding spot are all foreign games to me and I realised that at this age with both my girls I was already back at work and their development was in the hands of the childcare workers.

http://www.physioforkids.com.au/