We really put Girlfriend through the wringer today. We have had a few days like that lately. She’s a trooper, Miss Tessa. She really is.
Two working educator parents means days like this – when we have a scheduled day off during the week, it means we have to jam pack it with all the appointments and phone calls and chores that cannot be done otherwise. I’m sure that others outside of education must work this way too, maybe.
Actually, I’m not sure. I just know that sub plans are a pain in the rear, so for us, everything that can wait, does until we get a weekday off for some random holiday or break.
In any case, with Thanksgiving tomorrow, we double-booked therapies for today (yes, we know that’s not very nice) and then threw in a follow-up visit with her ENT (now that’s just mean). I don’t know if we mentioned that we had a second set of tubes places in Tessa’s ears about a month ago… It was in the middle of our month-long advocacy-themed Down syndrome Awareness Month, so that little tidbit probably got lost in the shuffle.
(If you want my unsolicited, non-medical advice, I will tell you this: when an ENT tells you to get ear tubes, get them.)
I don’t know what Tessa’s hearing was like before the tubes, but I will say that almost immediately, we have experienced tremendous growth in her speech and general ability to react/interact. There are some minor trade-offs (the whole crying-when-we-laugh issue is back), but she speaks to us nowand other people outside of the family can understand some of the things that she says!
(For example, no. We can all clearly hear no.)
There are other words… a whole bunch of animal sounds, the number 2, hi and bye, please and thank you, papa, shh, up, and down.
For this, we are thankful.
But golly, it was a long day. And even with the tubes, the hearing test was not completely clear. A follow-up in a few months will hopefully give a better result. Today, she passed “behaviorally”, which means that when they put her in the soundproof box, she showed behaviors that suggested she was hearing. However, with the other test that somehow measures the function of her ear (note to self: look this up), she did not pass. And so we wait three months and try again.
There are so many other tidbits to share about life lately. So much is rushing around in our brains and on our calendar these days. Those tidbits are for another time… for a day when I didn’t run through the maze of life responsibility that we did today. For now, gobble gobble. I wish you a restful Thanksgiving… and a day to check things off your list too. May your children cooperate better than mine did. 😉
On an unrelated note, who is this young woman and what did she do with my four-year-old??! 
Yo soy La Lay 