Eleanor Isabel

Many more pictures are available here.

I dropped Eleanor off at her school this morning. They were having “Dress Like Dad/Donuts With Dad” for Father’s Day. Eleanor was very proud, introducing me to all of her friends and teachers. We were both decked out in jeans and a white shirt. During donuts, other kids and their dads were talking, so the room was filled with sound. I went and got Eleanor’s “microphone” so that she could hear me better. We had bought a Phonak SmartLink shortly after she was implanted. It helps tremendously when she’s in situations like that. Our voice (or the teacher’s) is piped directly into her processors so that she can hear us through the cacophony. Laura worked with a specialist at Callier doing a study on how the FM system helps. Here are some videos from a few years ago showing the difference the FM system makes:

In the car with the FM system disabled:

In the car with the FM system enabled:

On top of all of that, the SmartLink includes Bluetooth and auxiliary input, so she can hook a phone or media player to it. We’ll be using this a ton on our upcoming 15-hour drive to Tennessee!

Here’s a video from a while ago. I had meant to upload it, but it got lost in the shuffle. I think Eleanor’s about 7 or 8 months old here.

I hope to start doing more videos. Chasing after a 2 1/2 year-old isn’t always the easiest time to start recording video, but sometimes it’s easier to record her than it is to get a good picture. For every 10 pictures, we may get one that’s good. We won’t stop taking pictures, but we want to record her for prosperity and so we can show her how energetic she was when she’s grown up. Plus, we can make DVDs for family.

She’s doing very well with her implants. Her activation anniversary was August 19th and we went to Galveston to celebrate. She had a great time at the beach. She has a love/hate relationship with the waves. When she’s just floating, she enjoys it, but when a wave breaks in her face, she’s done. I can’t say I blame her. Grandma Karen brought some bread to feed the seagulls, so Eleanor got a kick out of that. We dug in the sand a bit, but she’s a little prissy and doesn’t like to be dirty, so it didn’t last long. We took her to the beaches at Moody Gardens, too. They have two shallow pools surrounded by a sandy beach and a play area with lots of waterfalls, spouts, and a couple of slides. She had a blast there, too.

According to the tests, she’s still just a little behind her age group for speech, but she comprehends very well. She has far exceeded where they expected her to be after only a year of hearing. She’s using several 3-word phrases: “more cheese please”, “where’s the red truck?”, “daddy, up please.” We’re working on 4-word phrases now. As you might expect from a 2 1/2 year-old, she doesn’t always want to cooperate during learning time. When we’re with the therapists, she does better because it’s a special treat to have new people around. Laura and I are too boring, I guess. We’ve found that she needs to be challenged constantly in order to improve. She’s got colors down pat and she can count to 12 by herself and 20 with a little help. I think we might do more letters and reading. It would be fun to learn different tastes, too. The teaching part of parenthood is the fun part.

Easter came and went. We found a ton of eggs (though not as many hard-boiled ones for Daddy) and had a great time running around while the weather was nice.

Eleanor has been meeting with three speech therapists every week and so much instruction is definitely working. We’ve started a list of all of the words she says and she’s working up to and past 50 now. Mama, Dada, Grandma, Grandpa, Doggy, Cat, Cow, Bath Time, etc. She’s become very proficient at saying “No”, too. She’s gaining her independence quickly.

She had a new map done last week and whatever they did, it seems to have not only helped her understand more, it’s made her less crabby! The first evening after the map, she was repeating “Sss” and “Shh” sounds, which are some of the more difficult sounds for CI users to understand. Since then, she’s also had less tantrums, which has been great! She gets frustrated easily, so we constantly try to challenge her with new things to learn. I think the new map opened up a new level of sounds that are now challenging her.

We had an evaluation with her therapists and they feel that she’s understanding and speaking just as well if not better than her peers. That’s excellent progress for only having the implants for 8 months. The barrage of therapy sessions and constant interaction with mom, dad, and grandparents is certainly doing wonders. I was hoping that she would be caught up to her peers at 3 years old and it’s looking like she’ll exceed that at this rate. Now, I’m hoping for Valedictorian

Today is 4 months after Eleanor got implanted and about 3 1/2 months since they were activated. She is doing extremely well. She turns when you say her name, she can hear airplanes fly overhead from inside the house, she loves to drive Maddie crazy just to hear her bark, and when we turn her “ears” on in the morning, she starts babbling just to make sure they’re working. On top of the hearing, she’s talking, too! She imitates the airplanes flying (“aaAAAaaaah”), says “Mo” when she wants more food (that’s my favorite), goes “Buh buh buh” when driving a bus around, and recently, she’s been saying “Mama” when referring to Laura (she also signs it at the same time, so we know it’s not just babbling). We’re still trying to get her to use more “blow” sounds like “Buh”, “Puh”, “Ooh”, “Sss”, and “Shh”. After that will probably be the “tongue” sounds like “La”, “Ta”, “Thuh”, “Nuh”, and most importantly “Dada”! So far, so good.

I recently did some work on my computer and haven’t gotten everything restored yet, but Christmas pictures are on the way soon.

I uploaded a few pictures this morning from the past few weeks (including Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas-so-far). The above picture is from this morning (it’s pretty nippy!). For Halloween, Laura and aunt Missy took her to a petting zoo/pumpkin patch. Around that time, we took another trip to the Dallas Zoo. For Thanksgiving, we went to Laura’s Granny and Paw Paw’s. There are also a few from around-the-house learning/playing time. When she’s not being a terrible two toddler, she’s a goofy little monkey (see banana pictures).

She’s coming along pretty well with her hearing and speech. She can pick out the sound of airplanes like nothing else…must be the frequency or something. We think she might have a photographic memory, too, with the way she can put puzzles together so easily (even ones she doesn’t do very often).

Eleanor, Daddy, Grandma, and Grandpa took a trip to Houston this weekend to see “Unkie” Dave and Aunt Amy. Despite the long time in the car, we had a good time. Dave and Amy’s place is very nice and very spacious. We had a tasty (and crowded) breakfast on Saturday, spent time visiting, went to a mosquito-infested park long enough to toss a few rocks in the stagnant lake and creek, rode the slides (about a thousand times) at the playground, then watched Texas Tech beat OSU. Eleanor (or was it Daddy?) really enjoyed that last part We made another trip to the playground the next morning where Daddy and Eleanor got to ride the slide together (it doesn’t work as well that way). The trip back was a little longer and the car toys got pretty old, but we made it back safe and sound.

I uploaded a slew of new pictures going back to Eleanor’s surgery. Since the surgery on July 31st, we had a couple of post-surgery scares that turned out to be harmless, Eleanor recovered very well and healed up nicely, the equipment came in and we activated her Cochlear Implants on August 19th.

Since all of that, she’s been learning to use her implants, hearing, and making more sounds. She still relies pretty heavily on her signs and hasn’t figured out how to manipulate the sounds she makes by using her tongue and lips, but she’s getting there. There are six basic sounds we use to help condition her, called the “Ling Six”: mmm, ooo, ahh, eee, shh, sss. She responds better to the first four, but shh and sss are harder for her to recognize. She’s only had her implants adjusted (remapped) once, so there’s plenty of adjustments to do to get it right for her.

She still has a speech-language therapist that comes to her school once a week to work with her, another that comes to our house to work with her and us once a week, and now we have another that we work with through Callier once a week. With 3 therapy sessions each week, she’s getting inundated with learning! She really enjoys therapy because it’s really just more play time. It can be a little frustrating for us, though, because she doesn’t always want to focus on what we want her to. We go with the flow, though.

So far, we’ve heard her imitate the airplane sound “ah-AH-ah”, the ambulance sound “OOO-ooo-OOO-ooo”, “uh-oh”, and Moo, witch she does as “ooo”. She rarely responds with sounds, but she soaks it in. She’s getting pretty good at lipreading, so we’re having to cover our mouth when we make sounds so that she focuses on the sounds, not our lips.

The external pieces (speech processors and transmitter coils) came in and we activated her entire system on Tuesday morning (August 19th). They played a couple of test tones while she was playing with a barrel of monkeys. She stopped playing for a second each time and would look around like, “What was that? Did you do that?” Then, they put the processors on and activated the microphones. She closed the lid to the barrel of monkeys and heard it click. She looked at it, amazed, then did it again to see if it happened again. Once she figured out how to make noise, she was clicking away, smiling the whole time. We played with some maracas, a tambourine, small cymbals, and a few other percussion instruments. We call her “Destruct-anor” for a reason, so maybe percussion instruments weren’t the best idea .

Since then, she’s been wearing them almost non-stop. Unlike her hearing aids, which didn’t provide any sound and were more of a nuisance than anything, she loves wearing the implants and hearing all of these new sounds. For two days now, the first thing she wants when we get her out of bed are her implants. She reaches for them, then touches her head where the transmitter coil attaches because she wants the sound turned on! She loves to watch Laura and I talk and loves it when I clap loud. Each loud clap, she’ll blink her eyes, but each soft clap sounds different. That amazes her.