Dog Trees

I've been reading a new book Keys to Raising a Deaf Child by Virginia Frazier-Maiwald and Lenore M Williams, M.A. I wish I would have found this book a long time ago, but am thankful for it now, and would recommend it HIGHLY to anyone who finds out that their child is deaf or hard of hearing. It's the most pro-child book I've read and cuts through all the different theories on how best to raise a deaf child and makes the information accessible to a hearing parent who is looking to give their deaf child the very best chance in life that they can.

Now having said that I will say that it is not necessarily a pro-homeschool book, but I don't really find that to be a drawback. It contains information that I've not seen anywhere else in such a succinct and straightforward manner. Everything from the pros and cons of each of the ideas on educating deaf children to a frank discussion on what it takes for a deaf kid to learn language and how vitally important that is to the child. John currently attends the Moog School for the Deaf in Columbia, Mo., we are blessed to have them and thankful that they are there. We are also blessed that in this oral only school John has a therapist who sees the need for him to have sign language and other communication options, who sees that language is of the primary importance and oral can come when it comes.

One of the things emphasized in this book is that for a deaf child to learn English it has got to be spoken to them, if they have amplified residual hearing, but that they have also got to have it signed correctly for them too. As any older person who is new to hearing loss and hearing aids will tell you, even the best most expensive hearing aids don't replace good working ears. Some speech is lost and according to this book what is the most lost is endings and the ability to differentiate between similar sounding words.

We've known for a while that John has a hard time with 'big' and 'pig' and can tell them in context now, but on their own he's guessing unless you are enunciating very, very well. What we didn't realize until a couple days ago was how hard it was for him to pick up the ending of the words. We had a good chuckle over our lesson, when he started telling us that he wanted to 'open' the cabinet to get out the 'dog trees'. It took me a second to realize what was going on, that he was after the 'dog treats', but since he can't quite hear the ending for the word and has no sign for 'treat' it's still 'dog trees'. Now the dogs don't care what you call them, at least Maggie is ready for them all the time, but really we want John to have a better command of the English language than that. So today we found that there was no SEE or ASL word for 'treat' and taught him to call them 'dog snacks' he was fine with this for the moment, but it sure showed us how intricate these language issues are going to be.

Thankfully John is a very smart little boy, he craves language like women crave chocolate and would like nothing better than for us to sit and talk, read, work on signs, and such with him. This has shown us that we are going to have to take some further steps around here to insure that he keeps up with language comprehension and so now we are imposing a 'sign language only time' for while John is down for his naps, okay other than when we have company. This was suggested to us by some savvy deaf-ed homeschooling mommies as a way to make us practice both our expressive and receptive sign skills and it's certainly time for mom and dad to get with the program and make sure that we can sign fluently so that John will learn to do so too! Oh and if you're wondering why we decided to do it during John's naps, well mom and dad are ssslllooooowwwwww and will have to finger spell stuff because their current sign vocab is not any bigger than John's, and we don't want to overly frustrate the toddler, besides he needs to keep learning to use his hearing too, at least that's the excuse I'm using at the moment :)

Time to Slow Down!

This past week has been one of interesting and in the end good developments.

Therapy on Monday was good, and John did so well, we're so excited to see all the progress that he makes. Wednesday, well that was another story. I took him to therapy by myself and he seemed excited and ready to go, he was good on the car trip there and even getting into the building he seemed ready to go. But well, all good things must come to an end, and this one surely did, and quickly too!

John ran right into the school and actually stopped and acknowledged a few people with a little wave, but when he got to Amy, his therapist, well he wouldn't look at her and instead of coming to her he wanted to run off into the supply closet to play. Now I'll spare you all the details, but suffice it to say that he spent his entire hour of therapy showing himself to be a very smart, very stubborn and very burnt out little boy. Instead of playing nicely at the table he tried to climb out of his chair to get in the toy box. Instead of telling us what the little girl in the pictures was doing he was only interested in the doggie. Instead of doing anything that he was supposed to do he did the opposite and then grinned and gave us the thumbs up sign. Amy was frustrated, mommy was frustrated and John well he had already taken out his frustrations on mommy and Amy and still had some more to go.

All the way home I thought and thought about what was going on with this child. I've joined an email list for LCMS Lutheran homeschool mommies and when I came home I asked them if they or their child had ever just hit the wall on therapy. Several mommies there have special needs kids and they were very helpful, very supportive and well all of them really helped us think through some stuff and make some decisions. First off it finally gave Mark and I the impetus to really sit down and discuss John's schedule and therapy and what we wanted to see and expected, and low and behold we were both thinking similar thoughts, like 'why are we driving an hour to therapy so that someone else can play with our kid when we could do this at home', we just thought we were the crazy one.

Well through much discussion, prayer and supportive input from friends we made some decisions regarding John and the various therapies and such that he has the opportunity to be in. Our determination has always been that he was a little boy first, and a special needs kid only when that interferred with little boy, and somehow we just got ourselves and our little boy lost in the therapy jungle. It's hard when people tell you things like 'I know a couple who took their child to therapy all the time and that kid is doing great' to then say "STOP" this is all too much and we have to slow down. It's hard to buck the authorities on anything, but we've finally decided that just as important as listening to our own selves when it comes to his health care it is important that we listen for therapy as well.

Mark called the Moog school and let them know that we were taking Friday off and starting vacation early. We're headed to Montana on Tuesday. He also let them know that we are only going to be bringing John in one time a week for the remainder of July and August and hasn't told them yet but when we get to setting the fall schedule he's only going one day then too. We have seen for quite some time that John makes great progress on the days that he comes back to school after several days out, and well it's just time that we take our homeschool ideals and apply them to therapy as well.

So we are off on a new adventure in our house. So far it's been fantastic. We've had time to relax, play Uno - which John loves and is getting better at, and draw and read and go for walks and all those things that our little boy loves and that he learns from too! Mark and I have started really working on learning more sign too, and hoping that as summer progresses we can get to the point that we can sign most of what we speak, that way John can pick up language expression naturally by watching us and repeating. Even tonight he was copying the way that Mark would hold his hands and fold his arms, it was funny.

Tuesday we are off to visit my family in Montana, where John will get to meet his aunt, uncle and cousins and see grandma too, get to ride a horse, pet some chickens and ride on a four wheeler and who knows what else. We'll update and post lots of pics when we get back!