Hands and Voices

Chad is gone to the church's Men's Retreat, so I'm here catching up on lots of stuff- laundry, cleaning, blogging, billing (for work), reading, researching, and getting ready for my two's and three's Bible class. Fun stuff, I know. I also got a movie to watch. Whenever Chad is gone or out, I always try to get a movie that I know he won't want to watch. Last week I got "My Sister's Keeper." Saaaad movie, but really good! I want to read the book. Books are always better than the movies. So tonight I got "Love Happens" with Jennifer Aniston.

I thought I would write a post about my job and what I do. Today was a good day as one of my kids got their hearing aids FINALLY. He's two years old. Typically, when children first get their hearing aids, it is a very long and difficult battle to make the child keep the hearing aids in their ears. This could be for a variety of reasons whether it be just because they are being stubborn, because they are uncomfortable and they are not used to them, or because they are used to silence and do not find this new noisy environment to be an enjoyable experience. However, this child (I can't use names) got his hearing aids yesterday morning and left them on all day until he went to bed that night. Today I went over for our session and not once did he tug on those hearing aids!! Amazing, I have never seen this before! He was constantly turning around to new sounds, it was a great thing to watch.

Anyway, back to what I do exactly. I am called a SHINE Provider/Early Interventionist here in Florida (Serving Hearing-Impaired Newborns Effectively). I work with infants and toddlers birth-3 with hearing loss. I work with the child to improve/develop his/her communication/ language skills, speech, listening skills, cognitive skills, and personal-social skills. Most of our children just need work on language, speech and listening skills. Some families want their child to learn speech only, some sign only, and some want their child to learn both. Whatever communication mode the family wants, that's what I work on. Basically, we play but I turn it into a learning activity. The point is to do activities that the parents can carry over into their daily routines. An example of a listening activity would be calling the child's name when he/she is not looking. The goal of this would be for the child to turn around. As the child continues to learn to use his/her hearing, the child will learn to turn around after hearing his/her name at greater and greater distances. I don't know if that made sense at all. Sometimes I find it hard to put into words exactly what I am doing. But to continue....We might use snack time as an opportunity to work on vocabulary (whether it's through sign or not), work on having the child communicate his/her wants and needs (requesting what he/she wants), a

nd I might integrate some speech into this activity (if the food was a banana we would work on the "b" sound).

So these are just some examples to demonstrate what I do. Because each child is a different age, has needs in different areas, has varying degrees of hearing loss, lessons are very individually based. I love my job and hopefully I will get some new clients soon as I only have three right now.

Oh and here are some awesome photos of hearing aid molds. I know most of you might find this very strange, but I think they're beautiful and it puts a smile on my face =) I found them on some person's blog when I googled hearing aid molds: http://www.octamom.com This lady has eight kids (hence the blog name octamom), one of which has hearing loss. She was actually on the news too!

I need to get watching my movie, it's late!!