Radio Free Jamesie

James's hearing therapist came last week, and she continues to be very pleased with his progress. However, she said that we should be using his FM system (the wireless microphone that transmits the wearer's voice directly to his hearing aids) on a regular basis, because he's getting to a stage of language development where he really needs to be hearing soft sounds (such as the ess sound that makes words plural or possessive, and initial and ending consonants).

When James is two and a half, she might refer him to speech therapy, or she may not need to -- and she said that using the FM system would be helpful in perhaps allowing him to not need speech therapy, so that was good enough motivation for us! We have basically not used the system at all so far mainly because it didn't seem like we needed to (our house is fairly quiet and he's been picking up new words and seeming to hear well), and secondarily because it seemed like a hassle.

But we started using it yesterday, and it's really not a big deal, and I have mixed feelings about reporting that I think it helps him. He's repeating words quite a bit, and today he was repeating them pretty clearly. (The mixed feelings are that I'm happy that it's useful for him, but I now also feel guilty that we weren't doing it before! Ah well, live and learn.)

Speaking of learning, Mike discovered that our bathroom radio picks up James's FM system broadcast on TV channel 13. We usually just have that radio on NPR, but Mike has an irrational hatred of the show "Car Talk", so he was flipping around the channels and caught the "broadcast" of me talking to the boys. Hopefully the neighbors won't be tuning in!

The therapist's other recommendations were to do nursery rhymes with him and to start reading more stories with plots (in addition to the type of toddler books that are more a series of pictures), because talking about past/future events is one of the next stages of language development. The story she brought with her was the Gingerbread Man, complete with cute little wooden puppets. It was so funny, though, because she was reading along and turned the page and got to the ending, where (spoiler alert!), the gingerbread man gets eaten by a fox. She stopped and looked at it and said, "I forgot about the ending -- we'll just talk about the fox eating a cookie!" She didn't want to traumatize poor James! (Those old kids' stories are pretty tough! I don't think he would have cared, actually, but I didn't mind toning it down a bit.)