"Aaaaaa" is for airplane.

We are 10 weeks post activation and sister continues to rock her CIs and blow us all away at her progress!

Hoarding cups.

Here's what we are doing now:

She turns almost all of the time to noise, sounds in her environment or her name being called. The exception being if she's in a noisy environment or if she is preoccupied with another activity. You know, kinda like your husband who is in the middle of watching an Alabama football game... (Love you, Pookie.)

Here she is responding to her name, fake laughing, ignoring my requests for a wave, grinding her teeth (which she still does on a regular basis) and a tiny example of her "I'm frustrated" scream. She is totally into Legos, but she lives in a house full of them, so I can't blame her. Ignore the laundry basket on the table. She put it up there.

No magical words yet, but definitely imitating coughs, laughing and other random sounds like "say ahhhh!" when I try to get her to open up to brush those tiny teeth. She usually obliges by copying what I have done and the sound I made. During speech therapy the other day, she randomly picked up the airplane and flew it through the air, making the "aaaaaaaa" sound. Which was a huge deal, because we've only done that with her 47 million times! Repetition counts, my friend. Even though I'm ready to chunk that plane out the window...

We've added a few signs to our repertoire, mainly because the level of frustration with no communication skills was going through the roof! She has a very distinct, ear splitting scream when she wants something. We sometimes get off track, but I can usually encourage her to use a sign or take me to what she wants instead of screaming. (Her favorite is dragging me to the fridge!) The best is when she uses every sign she knows at the same time if I'm not moving fast enough to satisfy her. I imagine in her mind she thinks she is screaming at me!

She has learned to give hugs. Which we love, but once she starts hugging, everyone in the room gets hugs. Multiple times. Ironically, her first spontaneous hug was for her speech therapist, Mrs. Cheryl. Which I suppose is fitting.

She has always had a little hip-hop-skip dance move that she does when I sign for her to dance, but now that she can actually hear the music, she will randomly dance to the TV or radio on her own by adding little crazy arm motions to her moves. Sister has zero rhythm, but I can't blame her. She doesn't really have a great dancing model...

What happens when a 13-year-old gets a hold of EK's hair.

And just because I measured her the other day to help a friend compare sizes for her new daughter, she weighs 19 pounds (fully clothed!) and is 30.5 inches. That means squirt is still wearing a size 2 diaper and mainly 12 months--some 18 month--clothes (needs 18 months for pants, definitely) and a size 3 infant shoe! Yes, she's tiny, but we have gained 6 pounds and grown 3.5 inches since June!!

Below is the speech banana, that gives better idea of how loud sounds are, etc.  The yellow part shows where sounds that we use for speech are located.  EK is now hearing from her right ear at roughly 25 db. Although remember her little ears are only about 2 months old and she often doesn't know what to do with what she hears.  This means she can feasibly learn the speech sounds now.  We will continue to tweak her CI to make sure we are maximizing her hearing.  We go back to her audiologist on Tuesday.  I'm eager to see how she does in the sound booth.  Since last time she flat out refused to participate.

Not at all a toddler thing to do...

(For reference, without her ear, she's between 100-110 dbs.  Essentially nothing.)

I'm still holding out for her first word.  Kenny has taught her to imitate "mmmmmmm" so we have bets on what it will be...

(Mommy.)