One Year of Hearing!

Today is the first anniversary of Peter's first activation. I am hoping to film him and add that, but unfortunately he seems to have come down with a cold and is not feeling great, so we will see.

This last year has been intense, to say the least. Peter is doing so well, even better then predicted, so I can't complain. As much as I hate being so busy and driving so much each week, I am overjoyed about the results. Right now we have 2 mornings of Oral school (class is 9:00-11:30, with 30 minutes of that time with a speech therapist), one morning with a 45 minute Music Together class followed a 60 minutes AVT session, and occasional play dates at the School for the Deaf to see ASL in action. I had given up on the county services because they were so depressing, but they are revamping the program starting with summer session, so I might see if it's any better.  I don't think you have to do as much as we do to be as successful, but I don't want to cut back on what seems to be working for us.

Peter's vocabulary continues to grow weekly, if not daily, so it's impossible to keep an accurate list! I will add a document showing signed and spoken vocab growth over the last six months, but since I did it for his birthday it is already out of date ;)

Two-word combos are frequent, three words are coming along nicely ("Where mama car?" Or "Where red vacuum?" for example). Peter has some great listening skills- last night from across the room and up half a flight of stairs he heard the door open and shouted "Hello, Daddy!" As my husband came home. He said it so clearly my husband thought it was our 5-year-old daughter!

Current obsessions: the Music Together song "Hop Ol' Squirrel", watering things with the spray nozzle of the hose (sisters included), opening doors, or just shouting "open!" when he sees doors, clocks ("Tick-tick, tick-tick!!!) and identifying people who are crying (and if it is his sisters, making fun of them for it !)

Below: one poorly filmed, hastily edited video snapshot of where we are.

Right now I feel like we are in the middle of scaling Half-Dome. The climb is not over. We are securely tied in, and I don't think we are going to fall at all, but there is still a lot of hard work to do. We will pay for one more year of school, and we have one more year of coverage for the AVT therapy, then we are in the hands of our school district (which is tiny, and I don't think they have ever had a CI kid, and maybe not even any deaf or hard-of-hearing kids). I feel like that set of transitions will be like stepping off of Half Dome, so I had better get to the top before they happen ;).