Raising Bilingual Children
When my oldest kiddo was born sixteen years ago, the hubby and I taught him sign language when he was a few months old. We loved watching his little hands communicate back to us. He could tell us when he wanted to eat, when his diaper needed changing or could ask for another round of Sesame Street. The hubby and I were pretty sure he had hearing in the normal range up until he was about two, and then we noticed he wasn't responding to environmental sounds. A hearing test showed a profound hearing loss and our journey of raising a deaf child began.
We had two more kids and hearing tests showed that they had normal hearing. We knew that they could possibly lose their hearing because of our family history of five generations of deaf and hard of hearing relatives. We continued to sign and when my daughter was fourteen months old, she began speaking in full sentences. We started getting lazy with signing as her speech took off and we could lipread her easily. Early tests showed some great development in the intellectual area. Our journey of raising a gifted kid began.
When Lauren was four and Steven was two, they both became very sick for a week. When Lauren came home from preschool the following Monday, she said to me, "Mom, I can't hear." I talked with the preschool teacher and she noticed the same thing, that Lauren wasn't responding in the classroom and she was frustrated. Later that weekend, she tried to call her best friend and hung up the phone in tears. She couldn't understand her friend on the phone. I wiped away her tears as I fought back my own and later went in the bathroom to have my own crying spell. A hearing test showed a mild-to-severe hearing loss and we added the fourth pair of hearing aids to our family.
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