2 years old!

My little baby is 2 years old today. It is hard to believe that he is already 2. He seems like such a little boy now. 2 years ago today, my husband and I were ignorant of the deaf world. We had no idea how much our life would change when Kevin was born. Everyone said things would be different with 2 children, but no one had any idea how much different. This birthday marks a big milestone for us. This is a very happy occasion. Not that his first birthday wasn't happy, but Kevin was activated 2 months prior that and we were still getting used to the equipment. We were still experimenting with saying his name to him. This birthday, Kevin essentially will say anything you ask of him and we carry on conversations with him as we do with any hearing 2 year old. Basically, he is a normal 2 year old boy. He had a train party, lots of friends, loved his cake, and got very messy from the paint at his party. He is a normal 2 year old boy! He will even tell you he is 'two years old' while holding up 2 fingers. We couldn't be prouder of him.

So much has happened since my last post. We went to Hawaii for a week and everyone had a great time. It wasn't really an issue with Kevin's CIs. That is probably due to the fact that he really didn't want to get in the water, but still, it wasn't an issue. Everything just seems to be getting easier these days.... He also seemed to have a language explosion in Hawaii. His clarity is getting better and his vocabulary is increasing daily! He learned how to say 'yes' instead of 'yeah' over there. He will tell you that he saw '2 whales' very clearly and a whole host of other words that are Hawaii specific (sting ray, shark, big boat, etc). It is just getting so much easier to talk to him.

We are finding that while things are getting easier, we still put in a lot of extra work with him for speech, equipment maintenance, and other things that go along with CIs. This will never end for us. But, to our friends and distant family, they don't see the extra work we do, they just see Kevin doing really well and seeming to be hearing and talking like a hearing child. They don't treat us any different anymore. It is strange because in a way, I liked to have people feel bad that we had to go through all this extra work and ask us about it and now that it isn't as noticable, I miss it. There are times that I still get frustrated with everything related to CIs and people have seemed to forgotten that this is an ongoing condition and we still do need to be 'checked in' on to see how everything is going. It is just strange to have gotten to this point. I guess that is why it is so important to have friends with kids with CIs because they are the only ones who can really relate with everything we are going through. I don't know if this last paragraph was worded as I was thinking it, but hopefully the gist will come across.

Anyway, our little angel is 2 and is doing incredible. What a great year this will be.