HEARING AIDS AND ALEX

This is the best picture I could get of his hearing aids.  They are absolutely tiny and are great for him.  Anyhow, we wanted to give an update of how he is doing.  When we first got them the Audiologist started them at half the strength, so that he would not be overwhelmed with sound.  Today we went in and she turned them on all the way.  Again, when she asked him how he liked the way they sounded afterwards, he just smiled his million dollar smile.  I love seeing him smile like this in reference to his hearing aids.  It just is reassuring to us that they are right for him.  


We were also having problems with one of the aids for the last week and a half, because a connection was loose.  We told her about it and she was actually able to pull up how many hours a day it was functioning.  The right side was on 9 hours and left one only 3, so there really was a problem.  He really was not getting any benefit from the left aid.  But she fixed it and he is good to go again.


I know that most of you are really interested in hearing updates on speech progress with these, so we will tell you what we have seen so far.  It is really neat to listen.  He has started to use prepositions (the small words of the sentence that help with understanding) and has used many abstract terms.  For his birthday he got a game and he told me "we have to figure it out." I was like "OH, Really, where did you learn about how to use 'figure' this way in a sentence?" (Children with an impairment that existed before speaking, typically do not use prepositions or abstract terms). Today he was counting his money in the car and said 1 dollar followed by 2 dollarS, 3 dollarS.  It was amazing to me to hear him using plurals - adding the S at the end- and correctly identifying the rule of use.  When I told Saul about it, he commented, "yeah, I know.  I was listening to him this morning and he told me he slippED".   It is so nice to hear these word endings coming together! And that is only after having his aids for 3 weeks with 1 of them not working 1/2 the time. 


I can't wait to see how he will be next month!