Can You Hear Me?

Over the past almost 27 months, we have met quite a variety of healthcare providers in dealing with various oddities for our lil guy; fortunately, none of them for threatening health matters.

There was the time he saw a physical therapist at the age of 3 1/2 months because of a mild case of torticollis. And then there was the ENT doctor who removed a cyst from his tongue on the day of the power outage (they sent us home to house with no power which had no power or heat in the dead of winter for 3 days!) We've met with speech and occupational therapists, and even last week we met with a fantastic pediatric neurologist who spent an hour with us explaining with great detail his insights on facing a neurological developmental expressive speech delay. My tongue gets tangled even trying to say that last one.

And today we had another interesting experience, which Colin found to be so much fun: he met with an audiologist to have his hearing checked. This is a routine recommendation for kiddos with speech delays and who also had jaundice as an infant.

I was curious as to how they test kids this young, as it's not like they will raise their hand when they hear a sound. So...we sat in a sound booth and they projected sounds from either the right or left corner. When he looked towards a sound, he was rewarded with a very brief animation on a screen the direction of the sound. It is a bit of a game that rewards him for looking the direction of the noise.

This kind of conditioning with the animation was a huge hit for Colin and at one point he was so tickled that he turned around and gave me a huge hug (he was sitting in my lap) as if to say, "Thanks for the cool play date!" He was jabbering with excitement through much of the session, so the audiologist had to pause until he was being quiet enough to listen for the fainter sounds.

All is well with his hearing (as we suspected), but we didn't want to be the parents who didn't have his hearing checked and then in kindergrden learn he can't hear his teacher. Now we know!