Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Amelia's first day of preschool

Amelia started an auditory preschool program for deaf and hard-of-hearing children today.  She has been wanting to go to school ever since her sister Siena started last week.  She was very excited to get a new backpack last night and help pack her own lunch. 








Amelia will be going to school 4 days a week for 5 hours a day.  We were a little worried it would be too long of a day for her but she was so busy playing when we arrived to pick her up that she barely even noticed us standing there.



I suppose I can take the small bruise to my ego if it means she is enjoying herself :).  Her teacher and the rest of the staff are wonderful and we are looking forward to a great first year at school and all of the accomplishments it will bring.


Tuesday, August 28, 2012

3rd mapping at House Ear Institute


Here are a few pictures and videos from Amelia's third mapping.  It is very exciting to watch her become more and more aware of all the sounds around her.  We are working on trying to get her to recognize more speech sounds.  Every night DJ and I play the "listening game" with her to check her response to the Ling-6 sounds.  These sounds represent speech sounds from low to high pitch and help us as well as her audiologists gain a better understanding of the quality of the sounds she hears.  The sounds are "ah", "ee", "s", "sh", "oo" and "m".  We had been able to get consistent responses to all of these sounds expect "oo" and "m" so at this mapping session, the audiologists are trying to adjust the programming on her ABI to see if we can get better responses.  This was a few weeks ago and with the changes, we are now getting a few responses to those sounds but still not as consistently as the other ones.




In this next video, Amelia's ABI is connected to the computer and each electrode is being tested separately.  A sound plays through the device and when she hears it she responds by looking at the video monitor and placing a puzzle piece in the puzzle.




Ok, I'm having trouble uploading the video so I will try to update this post tomorrow......