I wouldn’t consider Li-Li’s CI a ‘fix’, just as I don’t think of hearing aids as a ‘fix’ for those who are deaf. She’s still profoundly deaf. She just has a very cool device that bypasses the usual hearing pathways and approximates sounds to some degree that her brain is just now learning to [...]
Holy cow! From CNNMoney, looks like the Performance with a Purpose campaign is putting its money where its hands are:
On Sunday, February 3, television viewers will be checking their volume controls when PepsiCo airs a 60-second commercial filmed in American Sign Language (ASL), with open-captioned text for the benefit of all viewers. The spot [...]
At times Li-Li makes such well-articulated sounds that I’m convinced she knows a complex spoken language, just not one I know. Before the cochlear implant, we suspected she was part dolphin, based on the high frequencies she would hit. But now, when she urgently wants something (sippy cup, cheese, her book, my wallet, out of [...]
The wee one has started singing! That’s not a typo, she started signing a while back, but singing is something new. Her teachers mentioned that where previously she would follow soundlessly, this past week she’s begun to sing along with the other children (a mixed group of deaf, CI deaf, HOH, and CODAs). It’s a [...]
John told me it was somehow ethically wrong and that Li-Li would retain the memory forever if I pursued my experiment. But come on, if you knew your child had a magnet in her head, wouldn’t you try it, just once? Especially if your child seemed to have some gravitational pull that kept drawing her [...]
This morning I stayed with Li-Li a little bit longer than usual at school, and dropped her off at the parent-infant program that meets for a few hours on Wednesday mornings. The kids and parents were just starting to come in — the session wouldn’t start for some time yet. I introduced Li-Li [...]
Our first basketball game: we watched the JV Lady Ghosts play against the Rhode Island School for the Deaf!
This is such a beautiful commentary from Lauren Ridloff. Li-Li may have a cochlear implant, but my beautiful, profoundly deaf, ASL-using, school-for-the-deaf-attending cyborg child IS deaf enough and some day she’ll show all you cranky anti-CI types what Deafhood means.
The flurry of medical excitement over Li-Li’s recent cochlear implant is fading a bit, and we’re considering bilateral implantation, although less urgently than our efforts to get that first surgery completed prior to 2 years, after which the brain is increasingly less plastic, mapping is not so easily achieved, and by which time it is [...]
Monthly Archives: January 2008