Hello - well here we are - almost at our 1 year anniversary of Mollie's implant with her new ears. So much has happened and so much I have not documented and have intended to... but life with 3 children is full and busy.
Mollie will celebrate 1 year of hearing perfectly with her implants on February 13th. After last year's Valentines Day, I was never quite sure I would be happy about the holiday again. It was pretty tough putting Mollie through the surgery. But here we are a year later and she is quite possibly the "Poster Child" for a perfect bilateral cochlear implants surgery. Mollie has had great help the latter part of 2008 and beginning of 2009. She still attends the Mama Lere school. Her new therapist is Emily Byram - who was her Toddler Group teacher. Angela who was her first therapist had her baby and decided to be a "stay at home Mom". Her new teacher for preschool is Kelli and she has several other folks involved in her day, Katie, Jennifer and Alicia. All these teachers are wonderful and we are so blessed to see how much Mollie has achieved in such a short year.
Mollie has made new friends and kept some old ones too. In her class she has Isabella, Marketha, Henry, Najah, Hallie and Hunter. In her share with class she has Jeriah, Joshua, Claire and two new children I have not quite gotten to know yet. So she has quite a large preschool group. This year is very different for me because I am not in the classroom for circle time anymore or any of the day for that matter. She is a big girl now and spends 5 days a week at school. I take her to school but she now rides a bus home. Her busdriver is Ms. Betty and Mr. James and they adore her and she adores them and loves the bus. So really so much of her day occurs without me, which has been a change. I find myself spending more time with Nate this year as he only goes to school 3 days a week and we also attend speech for him one day a week for which I am involved with.
I will attach some pictures of Mollie and her friends as well as some of the celebrations they had throughout the end of last year. One big event that was so funny was their annual Christmas show. Mollie and her classmates were Santa's Reindeer and sang the cutest song, "Reindeer, Reindeer shake your fuzzy tail". I don't think I will ever in my life time forget that sweet sound of her voice and how funny -"fuzzy" came out. I had her sing it on our answering machine for the holidays because it was too cute. We would all drive around in the van and make Mollie sing and just laugh and laugh with her.
She has achieved so much in the last year. She now can say sentences that have up to 5 words in them, as our pediatrician proudly counted the other day. Might I add that she is especially good at tormenting her brother and telling him that "No Nate, timeout" if she does not like something he has done. The other thing I found funny is that she has learned to come tattle on her brother and sister. It starts off with, "Mommy, Madie - jibber, jibber, jibber, shiny back. Shiny stands for her bling bling or rather her rings that perhaps Madie decided to take away from her. She is also good at saying "help Mommy", "shoes on", "boots on", "what"...etc. Let's just put it this way, we never in our life thought we would tell our deaf child to "be quiet" for a moment. She likes to take your face in both her hands and turn your head to her face so that she knows you are paying attention to her. I also have to add that she can read lips very well, so now poor Bobby and I cannot spell out words (because Madie can spell) and we cannot mouth words across the room...because Mollie can read lips. So really, see no evil, speak no evil and hear no evil is a motto in our house.
The other great bit of news is that Mollie has graduated to wearing her full ears on her head without babyworn devices or cables. This is so great as she has learned to put on her own ears when they fall off and she is soooo good at telling us when they - "are not working" as she tells us with quite a bit of drama. She does not like to be without her ears.
The only tough times we seem to have are going to the playground and having to take off her ears, or when we go to Pump It Up to play. We have not tried the movie theatre either as we are afraid the loudness of the movies would hurt her ears. We are noticing now that outside of her school environment it is challenging to establish friendships as Nate and Madie are able to. It is still a different world for Mollie and we will have many challenges along the way.
Madie the big sister is in 3rd grade this year and doing well. She reads at a 5th grade level and is now practicing multiplication and using the computer for PowerPoint projects!!! Amazing to me as I did not learn to use the Power Point until college. My how technology moves our society along.
I have updated to hopefully help some parents who use this blog as a tool to understand the progress that Mollie has made with her ears.
Thanks for being a part of our journey.
