Alex is 9 years old. He really loves his teacher at school. His favorite subject is P.E. He enjoys playing soccer at school with his best friend Will. He is a boyscout this year and absolutely loves boy scouting. He was able to participate in the Pinewood Derby and had a lot of fun doing it. He enjoys Camping and going on bike rides with the family. He also loves playing on the computer & playing the Wii. His favorite present from Christmas was his MP3 player that plays music and takes pictures & videos.
Alex failed his newborn screening. At the time there were no newborn screening initiatives to follow the infants that did not pass. He was our first child and so everything he did was 'normal' to us. He was a very quiet baby. At 9 months old the only cooing he did was with 'oo'. He was beginning to talk at 18 months. His first word was an approximated bye-bye (ba-ba), however, soon after we moved to Mexico and changed our/his primary language to Spanish; time to start learning to talk all over again. By the time he was 3 we were back to the US and speaking English again. At 2.5 years old he started speech therapy. His hearing scores were 25dB. At that time these were insignificant values that did not warrant hearing aids, though the next year the American Academy of Audiology would publish their Pediatric Amplification Protocol (pg 3 d), which called for hearing aids to be placed on all infants with a minimal/slight loss or greater, because it affects speech language development. Too bad this did not come out before Alex was born. He recieved his hearing aids at the end of April.
