He has a voice - and knows how to use it!!

In the last week or two, Landon has developed an extremely LOUD screech that he has been doing all the time. He does it when he's happy and when he is mad. I also don't think it has anything to do with him being deaf. Garrett did the same thing at this age. Luckily he seems to have grown out of it, although it does reappear every once in a while when he doesn't get his way. It was one of the things that clued us in to Landon's hearing loss. He would be sound asleep in the bassinet and Garrett would let one loose right next to him and Landon wouldn't flinch. The only problem is we are so excited for Landon to be using his voice and trying to imitate sounds we hate to have to tell him Shhh. It makes it easy to find him though :

We had a couple of new things in therapy this week. For the most part, we are just listening for him to repeat duration, pitch, that type of thing - we aren't listening for him to repeat what we say exactly. When we did quack, quack, quack with the ducks, he repeated it a couple of times. When we did the whispered PtPtPtPt for the boat at first he would do BuBuBuBu and get the duration then he did it once where he just moved his mouth but didn't make any sound with it - his attempt at a whisper I guess.

We are starting to pick up on words that Landon understands. If you say "Yeah!" he starts clapping. If you say "No No" he'll shake his finger at you - of course he goes right back to what he was doing but most kids do that :) If you say "Shh" he'll put his finger on his mouth. When you say "Bye Bye" he starts waving his hand. He is also saying MaMa and knows it's me. At first I thought he was just getting a new consonant sound but Eric was holding him and I walked through the room and he started calling it and then came after me. We've also heard him put a couple of consonants together when he is babbling instead of just saying one over and over. He just started this week blowing. He's always been good at raspberries but now he'll just blow air. Pretty soon he is going to want to start having a turn with the bubbles too.

On an equipment note, we had to send our first set of processors back. The connection where we hook in either the babyworn cable or the battery pack has gotten loose so if it moved at all when he was wearing them they would cut off. We also had to move his next mapping up. After I bumped him up to his P3 map, I noticed he was starting to do a lot of eye blinking when we would put his ears on and was starting to pull them off a lot more. I asked his audiologist about it and she thinks his maps may be too strong for him. We are going back at the end of this month - to give his processors time to come back in. We had to switch to his backup processors when we sent the others in and these have his old maps on it so he's using those for now. He seems to be back to his old self with these.