Yay for Hearing Aids!

Emily got her first set of hearing aids on Monday! These are "loaners" through the Regional Day School for the Deaf Program--this is the auditory specialist that comes to our house weekly as part of the Early Childhood Intervention program. We get to use the loaners until we are able to get our own for her. Apparently, there are very few places in the community that are willing to fit infants which can make it a long process to get our own. Since these are free and we have access to them through the program until she is 3 years old we are very happy to use theirs until she gets a little older. They are new and the same quality we would get if we went out and got our own so really this is a great service that is available to us!

We haven't been able to tell a huge difference in her responses since she's had them. Today is the first day she's had them on all day. She was already turning to sound, vocalizing, and responding when we talk to her and she's continued to do those things. It does seem she may react a bit more to sounds than she did before but time and more use will give us a better idea of how she's responding to them. They don't seem to bother her for the most part. There is some feedback (that high pitched whistling sound) whenever her ears get too close to something so this is a challenge when she tries to go to sleep on us and during feeding. I had to turn them off at one point today because she kept trying to put her head down on my shoulder and then would get upset and pick it up again as she was trying to fall asleep for her nap. We'll give it some more time but they can apparently try to adjust for some of this if needed later on.

This will be a learning process for all of us and will take some getting used to, but will be our new "normal" with her.  She's basically supposed to have them on for all waking hours of the day.  The technology really is amazing--when listening to them myself (we have to know what they are supposed to sound like so we can check them daily to make sure they are working correctly since she can't tell us if they aren't) you can tell that certain sounds are amplified at different levels, basically to match her hearing so that they don't amplify at the levels where she has normal hearing and do amplify at the levels where she has loss.  Amazing. 

Here are some pictures that I took of our girl this morning with her new accessories. :-) They are small, but so are her ears, so they do make her little ears poke out a bit. Enjoy these pictures of the "new" Emily!