Langer Loksh

48 Months Ago This Minute

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CHARLIE!

GG and Baby Bea

Stick with the Green Box, People

I'm taking a photography class. The first assignment: composition. Three flowers are, apparently, way better than two. The teacher asked us to shoot in 200 ISO. (ISO is the old film speed--I'm not exactly sure what it corresponds to digitally, but it's a measure of sensitivity to light.) The only way for me to change the ISO on my camera was to take it out of the "green box" mode--the mode in which the camera makes all the decisions for you so you'll take the best picture. I want to show you the difference between the P mode, where I selected 200 ISO, and the green box mode, in which the camera selected an ISO in the 800s. Look at the color! (I took these photos at the Higgins House at WPI.)

Charlie's Fake Birthday Party

Summer knows that her birthday party will happen on a day prior to her actual birthday, because her birthday is on a Wednesday this year and also, we will be in Mexico, "For a change," as she says. She refers to her birthday party--the killer whale themed event--as her "fake" birthday party. By Summer's logic, today was Charlie's fake birthday party. (He turns two tomorrow.)

I made Charlie a fire engine birthday cake. Here is what it looks like in Family Fun magazine; here is what it looks like at our house. My mother dubbed it the world's first "tea rose" fire engine. How do the editors of Family Fun make red frosting? Do they use twelve gallons of red food coloring per cup of Betty Crocker vanilla? Or do they purchase frosting that is already red? Because my grocery store did not have pre-made red frosting.

The first gift Charlie opened was a talking plastic barbecue grill called Charlie Coal from Sarah and family. As far as Charlie was concerned, the party ended there. It was him and the grill, and all you grandparents and cousins can all just go home now because here is a talking grill, on which to make plastic burgers with a talking spatula, alrighty?

The second gift he opened was a puzzle called Changeable Charlie. The eponymous gift trend then ended with some stylish Puma clothing and some Thomas toys. We gave him his own snail backpack so he can be like his sister with her flower one. He hasn't even looked at it yet; he was too busy playing with the concrete truck my mom gave him, and with the grill. And then he took a nap, with tea rose frosting all over his shirt and arms and face. No faking.   

Circle of Smiles: Busted!

I got an email from the robots at WebRings saying that I have been kicked off the Circle of Smiles web ring for not displaying the proper navigation. So they ARE paying attention. Here 'tis...

Dingalingaling

Forgot to mention in gigundo post below that another reason Priscilla does not think Charlie's speech is affected by his hearing loss is that he makes all the Ling sounds. The (volume warning for the cubicle dwellers) Ling sounds are six sounds that cover the range of sounds we make when we talk. Since Charlie says ss, sh, mm, oo, ah, and ee when prompted, that means he can hear all the speech sounds just fine.

Also, I should mention that I secretly think that if Chachi did not have hearing loss and therefore was not being followed by EI, no one would be thinking twice about his speech yet, since he is not even two. My brother didn't say a word until after he turned two, and, as I believe I have mentioned, he was a professional talker for several years--the voice of the Madison Black Wolf, the Sioux City Explorers, and the Binghamton Mets. So let's give the little guy a break here. 

Speech Kids

Last Monday I took the kids to the Ecotarium with Maureen and her kids Ellie and Liam. Summer sat on a little bench and paid attention to a presentation about a bearded lizard. The museum staffer told the kids about how bearded lizards communicate to establish dominance in the wild. "Does anyone know of a way people talk to each other without using words?" she asked. Summer's hand shot up. "Sign language!" she said. Maureen, impressed, turned to me and asked, "Did she just say 'sign language'?" I smiled. "We have a high level of sign language awareness in our house," I said. (An aside: the Ecotarium is a nice little science museum, but it's acoustically dreadful for those with hearing loss--not a scrap of carpet anywhere. It's a big, open, rock-hard echo chamber. Here's Summer sitting in a chair that's supposed to be like a tick. It's part of an exhibit on bloodsuckers, which we all thoroughly enjoyed.)

Two days later, in my Early Intervention parent group, our leader Gale Ann mentioned "the packet." When an audiologist confirms your child's hearing loss with a hearing test after the baby does not pass the initial newborn hearing screen, he or she is supposed to hand you a packet from the state, filled with useful information. Gale Ann was reviewing a new leaflet for the packet--a single sheet of information about mild and unilateral (one-sided) hearing loss. Gale Ann was particularly interested in my feedback because Charlie has a unilateral loss. "It's for the packet," she explained.

Whenever anyone has talked about the packet in the past, I figured it was something someone gave me during the confusing days right after Charlie's birth, when we weren't sure if he'd really be OK. I assumed it was somewhere on my hideously messy desk, where just this morning I discovered my copy of this month's book club book, which I thought I'd lost at the gymnastics gym. But when it comes to Charlie, I'm really pretty organized. I could put my finger on his original hospital discharge papers in under 30 seconds.

Want to know what I think happened? I never got the @#$%ing packet.

No big deal. We have EI. I've found some stuff about unilateral hearing loss on the web (see links at left). What set me off, though, was that at the same meeting on Wednesday, some of the other moms were talking about the FSLP. "What's that?" I asked. "It's the Family Sign Language Program, from the Massachusetts State Association of the Deaf," Gale Ann said. It turns out that all this time, everyone else in my group has been having people come to their homes, for free, and teach sign language to them and anyone else--aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, friends--who wants to communicate with the deaf or hard of hearing child in their family. And I didn't know about it. Because I didn't get the packet.

Well. I was in a funk for hours after that meeting, as my friend Michelle, who drove all the way up from Plymouth and found me staring into space on my couch--I didn't even answer the door--can attest. I could have taken this course when Charlie was an infant, for free, in my house. I could have been signing with him all along, instead of frantically learning signs for train and ambulance and rabbit just as Charlie is beginning to talk. 

Fortunately, it's pretty much moot. Yesterday Priscilla, Charlie's speech and language pathologist, came over for a session. I asked her whether she thought I should bother to take the course now. "Probably not," she said. She told me that she had talked with Rachel, the speech path who sees him on Wednesdays during the EI play group, about Charlie. They agreed that he is a "speech kid" as opposed to a "language kid." They think his language development is fine, if very slightly delayed. As Uncle Joey in New Jersey and Aunt Lynn in Massachusetts have both pointed out in the past couple of weeks, Charlie understands everything we say to him, so his receptive language is fine. (One night a couple of weeks ago, Jeff fell asleep in Summer's bed because Summer had fallen asleep with me in my bed and there was no room for Jeff. In the morning I was fixing breakfast and I told Charlie, "Go get Daddy from Summer's bed," which you'd think might be confusing for someone under the age of two, but Charlie marched right up to Summer's room to wake up his dad.) His expressive language is OK too. While he doesn't put two and three words together very often, he has undergone a vocabulary explosion.

The problem--and it's not a big problem, it's something we can work on--is that his words are not clear. Sign language would have helped his language development by pouring "words" into his head, but it would not (obviously) help his speech. He leaves off all the initial consonants, so that "uck" is truck, stuck, and duck, and "ock" is rock and sock. "Ah-ee" is Charlie (which, admittedly, is a hard name to say) and "At-ya" is Katya (our neighbor) and "at" is cat and "ight" is light" and "eye-oh" is fire and "ih-en" is chicken and "Eee" is tree as well as horse (horsey) and "ah-ah" is tractor, and "ah-yu" is thank you, and so forth. He does say "Mama," "Dada," "Nana" and "more" very clearly, and he says "dih-oh" for digger, and he signs for milk, Summer (as soon as he wakes up in the morning he starts signing for Summer), train (with an accompanying "woo woo" sound effect), candy, baby, fish, and dog. He says "none" instead of done and "Num" instead of Jim.

One thing that he was doing that he seems to have dropped was this huge gasping noise that was supposed to be a horse's neigh. We'd be driving by some ponies near our house and I'd hear this awful strangled sound from the back seat and I'd whip around thinking he was choking to death and he was just pointing out the local farm animals. And he says "eep" instead of "eat," which is almost as cute as when he used to sign for "more" and "please."

So anyway, he's a speech kid. Priscilla believes his issues do not stem from his hearing loss at all. She thinks it might be a motor issue--the right side of his face and mouth are weaker--but then again, she points out, lots of kids with perfectly symmetrical faces have speech delays too. And Charlie compensates very nicely for his partial facial paralysis. Priscilla held up a plastic cow for Charlie to "earn" by imitating a noise and said "Ooo." Charlie, always an eager pupil for Priscilla, said "ooo" right back--and Priscilla pointed out to me that he makes that noise without making his lips into a big round "o." Same with "eee"--he makes the inside of his mouth make the sound without pulling back the corners of his mouth.

When Priscilla holds up another plastic animal, Charlie will produce a hard "c" for her, as in "cat" or "car," but not the whole word. "It's a sequencing issue," Priscilla says. Charlie can wrap his brain around a consonant, but apparently it's too hard for him to plan anything else that comes next. Sort of like how I fell apart when I consider that I need to find babysitting help for this coming Friday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. It's too much!

"You should be very optimistic," Priscilla told me. "He might not catch up by age three, but maybe by four." At worst, in other words, Charlie will still need speech services after he "graduates" from Early Intervention. I know that my friend Julie, who works with kids coming out of EI and into the public school system, has lots of little friends who, at age three, hide from her and yell "No U-ie!" but by Kindergarten they pass her in the hall, wave casually, and call "Oh, hi, Julie." 

I do feel that Summer has gotten the blogging shaft lately, what with all the Charlie ear drama--sorry Summer--one more thing--Charlie's ear bulge does appear to be shrinking just a bit--so I'd like to share a few funny things Summer has said recently. On Sunday, when it was so gorgeous out, Summer spent five hours playing outside with Katya and two other girls who live on the other side of the little strip of woods behind our house and the playground. Katya is nine and the other girls are younger, maybe six and eight. They all came back periodically for water but we mostly didn't see them. A dream come true for Summer. Jeff asked the girls about what they were doing in the woods. "We put our feet into the pond, like, a million times!" said Laura, the eight year old. "No, it was more like, 35," said Summer.

Last night Jeff painted a few pickets of our fence with a variety of stains because we're going to be staining the whole house and we need to choose between Million Dollar Red and Chili Pepper. We've let the fence rot away beyond repair--now we're finally replacing it--and when Jeff lightly swiped a picket with his little foam brush, the picket fell backwards off the fence, which made us all laugh. Summer launched into an impromptu advertisement: "It's the automatic moveable fence, always at Sears!"

And this morning, when I came down and turned on my computer, I pointed out that Jeff had left not one, not two, but three pairs of his shoes in a jumble under the desk. "Mommy," said Summer, "boys are boys, and sometimes they do things that are just, kind of weird."

Summer is another kind of "speech kid" entirely, and we're very proud of her and her little brother too. 

Bonitawatch: Day 173

Jeff just came out of the house and found me rolling around on the grass with my camera. "What are you doing?" he called. "Taking pictures of Bonita, to prove to the Internet that she's alive," I answered. He came down the porch steps. "You need something to prove it's not an old picture," he said. "Here!"

My Children, the Club Hoppers

Not Exactly the Continental Divide

There is a place where you can stand in two cities at once. Can anyone guess where Summer is planting her feet in this picture?