Almost time...

...for the school year to start! We have about two weeks to go and Sophie could not be more excited! Okay, so she really has no clue, but I am very anxious. :) She is ready to go, complete with new shoes, a new fall wardrobe, and a backpack!

We went to our last audiology session until Sophie starts school a couple weeks ago, but I haven't had time to blog about it. We had another sound booth test and Sophie did great! She is responding to speech at 10-15 dB. My sister was with me this time because Jared had a meeting and there were two times that Sophie detected a sound that neither one of us heard. Absolutely amazing. Our audiologist also performed an Early Speech Perception test to determine how well Sophie understands speech. I was a little uncertain because they normally do not do the test on children as young as Sophie. Well, she nailed it! She showed "consistent word identification" meaning she is perceiving speech very well with her CIs.

As far as expressive language, Sophie's vocabulary is continuing to grow more each day. Our list - wrinkled, stained, and hanging on the fridge - is getting longer and longer. (I think it may be time to make an electronic version!) At last count, Sophie is saying 63 words and phrases. Take that, hearing loss! A couple of my new favorites are "Aunt Andi", pronounced "Ah-ah-tee" and "please". "Please" is the cutest, coupled by the sweet mispronunciation: "pweeeshhh", and the toothy grin that Sophie is forced to make at the end of the word:

Anyway, we are ready for school! It seems like it was just yesterday that I was pregnant with Sophie and we were busy planning for her arrival. Everything had to be absolutely perfect, from the nursery to childcare. We wanted in-home childcare for when Sophie was an infant and would explore different centers for a more structered setting by the time she was one and a half or two. We interviewed several people and found the perfect sitter in the beginning. Here we are today, at the point where we would begin looking at centers, and Sophie is entering a program at an oral deaf school. And it's a great one at that - a place families move from across the country to go to. Part of me is sad - sad that our child is deaf and has special needs that require her to go to a special school. Part of me wants to laugh - laugh at the plan that Jared and I had when we were naive and expecting our life to go the way we wanted. And then another part of me (and a pretty big one) feels incredibly lucky - lucky that Sophie gets to attend this AMAZING school with all of the AMAZING teachers and professionals that we would never have met if our life had gone according to plan.

Have I mentioned yet that we are excited?!