I can't believe how long it has been since my last post. I have spent the last couple of weeks thinking that I must be a bad blogger because I don't make time to write. However...I've now decided that I am just adjusting to my new lifestyle which is less structured than my previous one and more Tom filled - which is great but I have less time at a pc.
Quick Nursery update Tom makes me so proud, he is doing so well and is such a little character. He has been at his nursery school for about 4 weeks now and loves it. He still doesn't tell me what he does in much detail (or any detail actually) which I am now getting used to, our daily conversation goes like this - Me: "What did you do today" Tom: "I was at school" Me: "what did you do" Tom: "I played" Me:"What did you play with?" Tom: "Cars". Tom always plays with cars, thinks about cars, probably dreams about cars and imagines that he is playing with them when he isn't so what did he actually do at nursery?
Talking about earsHe is becoming more aware of his implants and talks about them, I have taken this cue to talk to him about them. For a while Jason and I have talked about how we will explain to him what happened to him and we have decided that we will just talk to him casually about it from a young age so that it's not a big deal. Last week we went to a soft play area which is a bit of cochlear implant nightmare in terms of avoiding static (static can wipe the programming on the external parts of the implant). There are ball pits and plastic slides everywhere. I asked him if he would take off one of his 'ears' and he said he didn't want to. I said ok but don't go down the slides. He really wanted to go down the slide but he wanted to go with me so I thought 'Ok, he's got to live a little and his friend Chloe is going down so I don't want him to be left out'. We went down the slide and I was scared - it's a massive tube, very steep and dark, hot and stinky - lovely. The worst part is that I got a big electric shock and wasn't even going down very fast. On the way home I talked to him about it and said that next time we go there he has to take his processors off if he goes down the slide. I tried to explain why in 3 year old speak "if you go down the slide with your ears on they could break them and we'd have to go to see Tracy (his audiologist) to fix them". I explained that he had very special ears and sometimes we need to take extra care to look after them. He said that Joe (his friend) goes down the slide without ears, he thought about this and then said "Joe can't hear his mummy". I had to try and explain that Joe uses his different ears to hear and that he doesn't have the special ears that are blue (Tom's coils are blue) so can hear without blue ears. I went on to say that Tom has special blue ears because his other ears were damaged and broke when he was a baby. He was then given a new pair of blue ears to hear with. You have to understand that this is all new territory to me, I had (and still have) no idea what to say without permanently damaging him emotionally, and that by this point my heart was breaking and I wanted to go home, go to bed, hide under the duvet and cry. Tom was in the back of the car, he was looking out the window and squealed "mummy a lorry, it's red just like Mack (from the film cars), look it's big". Hopefully no damage done this time.
