Yesterday I took Charlie to the hearing impaired baby playgroup run by our Early Intervention office. Charlie loved playing with new toys, watching and reaching for other babies, bouncing on a big ball with his speech pathologist Priscilla, smiling at his physical therapist Mary, and generally charming everyone with his alert- and wiggly-ness.
The group meets for an hour and a half. The babies--there are maybe six or eight kids ranging from Charlie at the youngest to about two years old--play in a room with the speech paths and PTs, and the parents get together in another room to talk about hearing loss stuff or just other parenting stuff. Since it was our first time I never made it out of the baby room.
After the first hour of "free play," they have a little circle time with a song and some sign language and then they have a snack. Now, when it came to the snack session, it was like these women had never met a baby. Odd, considering they were surrounded by babies. First they had me put Charlie in a chair that would not be too small for Summer. Then they served him juice in a straw cup. I told them he was too little for juice and one woman said, "It's OK, it's diluted with water," and I was like, "Yeah. He can't have juice." Then they gave him three Cheerios and one animal cracker, which he promptly swiped onto the floor. Fortunately I had some wagon wheels in my bag for him to gnaw on. I explained that if they wanted to give him Cheerios they would need to make a pile of about 4,000 and maybe he would get three of them in his mouth. However, I must say, he is BRILLIANT with the straw. Priscilla had given me a plastic teddy bear cup about a week ago, just like those bear-shaped plastic honey bottles, and Charlie figured out how to use the straw after about one minute of practice. Now he is Mr. Straw, which makes for a better mouth movement for developing speech than a sippy cup does, according to Priscilla--and Julie, my personal on-call speech path.
There was a baby, Graham, who is one month older than Charlie and who wears two hearing aids, and then a two-year-old girl, Eliza, who is totally deaf in one ear. I talked to both their moms a bit. I can't believe I even thought for a second that this group would be anything but a positive. I was worried about treating Charlie differently, but as I watched him squirm on the floor next to Graham, I realized that all these kids are overwhelmingly normal. That is to say, they are not defined by their hearing impairments or whatever else they have going on. They are babies. Who happen to have hearing impairments.
Duh.
There's an Ani DiFranco song, "Little Plastic Castle": "They say goldfish have no memory / I guess their lives are just like mine / And the little plastic castle / is a surprise every time." It's like I forget, and have to learn every day all over again, that Charlie's going to be ok.
My, Charlie looks cute in that hat! I am liking the blog - and liking that two of my picks made it onto your top 10 :)
Posted by: Heather | December 19, 2005 at 02:50 PM