There’s something about flying that makes me think. I look out the window over the clouds, laid out so much like fallen snow over a vast field, with bumps and dips and tracks tread through them in every direction, and my mind begins to wander to the bigger, deeper things in life.

I’m off on a few days’ vacation to visit my best friend and her new baby, and I find myself embracing the time away, the distraction, the distance as I approach another NICU follow up visit. I know, I know – I said months ago that we were done, but since then John and I have agreed that touching base with the neurologist isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Hopefully, it will amount to nothing but relieving some of our over-anxious worries and fears of the unknown. I swing back and forth between feeling like it’s all nothing, and feeling like there are just a few too many random pieces that might fit together into a bigger picture I don’t even want to think about right now.

There is a strong urge in me, after the past two and a half years, to just stick my head in the sand and focus only on what we very obviously can see. I’m not sure how I’d handle anything “more,” anything I can’t even really put a name or finger on yet, when I am so overwhelmed with the concrete challenges.

Even I have to admit, though, that ignorance – while bliss – is not a good thing. And really…if the doctor ends up just relieving our fears, it will be a beautiful thing.

I know I’m being vague. That’s not really purposeful; it’s just that we don’t know anything right now. We just have some things, some stray thoughts, that we keep bringing up and then talking circles around. We toss out words, names, conditions, but none of them are concrete and we have just as many reasons to disbelieve them as we have to think they could be true. I don’t want to toss a term out there until we get a diagnosis, if we get a diagnosis. I don’t want my son labeled.

On my first flight of the day (I’m waiting to board the second), I pulled up the pilot episode of Parenthood, a show that caught my interest but I never got around to putting on the DVR. I was expecting a comedy-drama around the craziness of kids and being a parent. What I wasn’t prepared for was one of the children in the show to have a disability, namely Asperger’s. Now, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that regardless of the diagnosis, any parent with a special needs child of any type has something in common. The boy was diagnosed in the episode, and the parents met after he’d gone back to school, the mom calling the dad from work. She started to dance around what she’d found out; he started to deny it. Then, she stopped and looked at him, shouting over his continued denials.

“There’s something wrong with our child! Don’t make me be alone with it.”

He stopped short, and they clung to each other as the scene faded. The emotions of it overwhelmed me. Here I am on a flight, crying my eyes out. I’m not sure if it was that emotional a scene to the general viewing audience, but for someone who’s been there, someone who one day had some vague suspicions and the next had been told there was no denying something wasn’t quite right… It was poignant. They did it well.

(I’m not sure if I was that thrilled with the rest of the show – I’m sitting here debating downloading another episode or just leaving it be, because to follow it for just that one scene…meh.)

Many days, I wish I could just insert myself into Danny’s head and hear what he hears, understand what he understands. It would sure clear up a lot of the grey areas as far as knowing how well his cochlear implants are working, and how well his brain is working. We have no reason to think that the calcification on his brain is wreaking havoc, but at the same time, every little quirk of his is accompanied by a little voice whispering that maybe it’s not a stage, something he’ll grow out of…

He pulled another trick out of his hat this morning on me. They’ve moved drop off at daycare to a room with a little piece of play equipment in it, one with 3 or 4 stairs on one side and a drop on the other than is just high enough to let Danny climb up and down. He loves it. Today, he was doing his usual drop-off routine: he got into the room, looked around, decided it wasn’t where he wanted to be, and tried to slip past me and out the door. Master of distraction that I am, I started to prime him for the mother of all redirects.

“Hey, Danny, where are the stairs? Let’s go-”

I stopped then as he gave a huge smile, spun away from me, and booked it the entire length of the room to start climbing the stairs. I was so flabberghasted I just stared for a moment, then turned to the teachers with an amazed, “I didn’t expect that to work…”

With all of his receptive language and understanding lately, I’ve done a gut check lately. When Danny turned 2, we requested that he not move immediately over to the 2′s room. After all, he was only at a listening age of 13 months, and his comprehension was pretty low still. It’s expanding at a decent rate, and he’s made a lot of social progress as well as far as being part of the class and interacting with his peers, but honestly I don’t think he’s ready to make the jump still. His class has a lot of older toddlers, 18-24 months, and while Danny is definitely the oldest he’s not the most advanced. Lots of them will say “hi” and “bye” to me, they wave for greetings, they just seem to have more daily living skills.

I think it’s the best fit for him to be with kids that are at his mental level rather than his physical age, and the best benefit to him to be in a classroom where his peers have language skills just slightly more advanced than his. At the end of my gut check, I compared him to Eric…not in a negative way, but more of a situational comparison. Eric is a smart kid. There’s no doubt that he’s going to do awesome things when he reaches Kindergarten, and he will totally thrive in that environment. But, for as smart and quick as he is, I wouldn’t drop him into Kindergarten today, when his coping skills and language skills and comprehension skills are that of a not-quite-4 year old. He might be able to make it through, with a little extra help from the teachers, but it wouldn’t be the right fit.

As great as Danny is doing, he is still a developmentally delayed child. A few years ago, a manager of mine shared with me her philosophy for her direct reports: “Put people in positions where they can succeed.” (I’m sure it was worded better than that, but that’s the general idea!) I see it the same with my boys: I want to challenge them so they are always growing and learning, but I don’t want to make it a titanic struggle, don’t want to make it impossible.

Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t doubt it at times. Maybe if he was around more advanced peers, it would motivate him to keep up. Maybe if there was a general expectation of understanding and speech in the room, he would understand and speak. Maybe we made the wrong call in March, or maybe now is the time to move Danny up – except Danny will be leaving that school in a couple months, and I’m not sure it’s best for him now to transition to a new room, just to turn around and do it again.

Ahhhhh!

Who stole the instruction manual to this child, and how can I get it back?

There has been a lot of buzz this past month in the CMV online community! A push for awareness and support – especially in the UK – has been going on, the Brendan B McGinnis foundation announced their Making Tracks Together gathering for families coming this summer, and the US Department of Health & Human Services has officially designated June “National Congenital CMV Awareness Month.” WOW!

As a mom with a CMV baby, this is uplifting. Nothing will ever reverse Danny’s getting sick, but this movement gives me hope that some other babies will be saved from CMV because of it. There’s nothing to be gained from dwelling on the “ifs,” but if I had known about CMV and known I was at such a high risk for contracting it because of Eric, I would have changed my habits. If I had changed my habits, maybe … just maybe … we would not have gotten sick, and Danny would not have had to fight so hard.

So here’s the if’s. If we can raise enough awareness, hundreds of other babies won’t have to fight. If we can spread the word, some of those babies won’t be disabled. If we can keep the wave going, we can literally save lives. Up to 20% of babies born with symptomatic CMV die. I can’t even think about what would have happened if Danny had landed in that 20%.

In honor of June being CMV Awareness Month, the Stop CMV organization is hosting a huge public awareness campaign. That’s what it’s all about, after all! They are asking for everyone – old and young, local and around the globe – to take 5 minutes of their time to join in. Write “Stop CMV” on your hand, take a picture, and upload it by May 15.

That’s it.

If you have a minute, please consider participating. Share this with others. Spread the word. CMV disables more children than Downs Syndrome, and yet 97% of women know about Downs and only 14% know about CMV. Let’s even that out a little.

Learn more at http://www.stopcmv.org/june.php, and please, lend us a hand.

I decided this morning that having a special needs child is basically like being on a roller coaster ride that never ends. There’s no real final goal or destination; it’s just endlessly going, sometimes rolling along up high, sometimes plummeting down so suddenly your breath is taken away.

I always hesitate to post about the more emotional, difficult side of our journey, because I don’t want to show myself as negative. I’m not usually. I’ve spoken for the past 2 years, though, about how sometimes it just catches up and overwhelms. I have a few bad days, I shake it off, and I carry on.

This time, it’s how Danny seems to always master something, and we get so excited, and then he just…stops. For a while he was saying “hi” when we said it to him, then he stopped. For a while he was showing off his tummy when we asked where it was, then he stopped. Other times he’ll show something once that is obviously not a fluke, like stopping short when we ask where his monkey is and turning around to pick it up, or echoing “mown” after we ask if he wants down, and then he’ll never repeat it. Enough of those add up and it’s like there’s an overflow point where I start to obsess.

Is it all just coincidental timing and he’s not really learning these things?

Is he losing skills because his calcification from the CMV makes it impossible for him to retain?

They say something about losing skills and autism – is he autistic?

Is he ever going to learn to listen and speak?

Did we put him through 7 hours of surgery for it to fail?

Breathe, Kelly, breathe.

The truth is – and I know this! – there are no answers for us right now. Whatever he will or won’t do, he’s going to do it, and he’s going to do it on his own time. Instead of all those other things he used to do, he’s trying to sing now, and learning all the actions to songs we sing a lot both at home and at school. My husband tells me to be patient, and my initial reaction is, “It’s been 2 freaking years already – how much longer do I need to wait!”

As long as it takes.

I stared out the window after he said it last night, watching paramedics take a stretcher out of the back of an ambulance and disappear into a neighbor’s house, and took a few deep breaths. He’s here. He’s healthy, which is a miracle all to itself that we don’t have to deal with hospital visits and medical fragility. He’s walking, and eating, and laughing, and snuggling, and making cheesy faces for the camera, and rolling trains across his train table and up the wall and over my leg, all because he can.

So the roller coaster starts its slow climb again, because the drops are quick but the rises are slow, and then we’ll be sailing along again. After all, any ride with this adorable child (who has to be one of the cutest kids on the face of the planet, seriously!) can’t be too bad.

One would think, after a 2 month NICU stay, a marathon ABR, 6 weeks of visit to the viral specialist, a massive 7 hour surgery, three minor outpatient procedures, and regular visits to the doctor’s building attached to it, that I would be over that constricting feeling in my chest when I think about visiting the hospital. And yet when I got a call this morning from the St. John’s Mercy administration my first reaction was to hold my breath, and I got flutters in my stomach.

They were just confirming some information before his appointment next week. That’s fine, but now, with a week to go, I wish they’d waited until the day before. I dislike NICU follow ups anyway, and can’t wait to be rid of them – when do they run out, anyway?

Any doctors hiding in there?

I suppose it’s one of those things that just hits home every now and then, no matter how distant it becomes. Talking with Nat, she’s mentioned how ultrasounds get to her, and how she hates to be in the same ultrasound room she was in when she found out Devin had passed away… I think it’s the same thing for me. To this day, that drive down the highway that I made far too many times takes my mind places I’d rather not revisit, and I wonder sometimes if I’ll ever entirely lose that.

Maybe we should have gone with the deaf school down that road instead of avoiding it, simply to give me another association. Of course, even though it’s the same building as our pediatrician (whom I love), I still think of the doctor’s building out the other direction as where my perinatologist was, and avoid going down the hall that took me to all those damned ultrasounds.

No, really, what’s in there?

Some memories fade with time; others seem to have crystallized. Fortunately, they have a happy ending in our brilliant little boy – who, by the way, is now saying “bababa” all the time. He’s sacrificed those rare “hi” and “uh oh” sounds for it, but I remember Eric dropping sounds and words once he’d played with them a bit, so I don’t worry.

I’ll be glad when I don’t have to visit the hospital at all and I can place all those icky feelings on a shelf, never to be touched again.

I’ve never seen myself as much of a politic-y person. I stand up for what I believe in, of course, but have never really been the type to go out and advocate for anything. Advocating for my children comes naturally, but past that, it’s a struggle for me. I worry about losing the right balance, of crossing the line from advocating to unnecessarily pushing and offending people, and in the end I err on the side of caution.

That being said, there are moments that I just want to scream at the top of my lungs, topics that need a spotlight shone on them that just are not. Stillbirth stands out as a big one in my mind simply because it is a topic that seems to draw willing ignorance. People tend to shy away from the topic because it’s frightening, and I understand that fear…but how are we ever going to find ways to prevent it if no one will talk about it? Simple things – kick counts, open communication with your doctor, awareness of your baby’s active times of day – may not save all the babies, but it could save some.

I wonder, sometimes, at the lack of awareness of CMV and think it falls down to the same reasoning: ignorance due to fear. Unfortunately, it’s less a matter of willing ignorance in this case, because no one even presents the topic to be discussed. Because there is (so far) no vaccine and no cure, and there is that assumed chance of immunity, it just isn’t brought up. Why needlessly worry the mother? Why cause fear?

Because awareness can lead to prevention, that’s why. If someone had told me, when I got pregnant with Danny, that there was a virus that could leave him disabled or dead, I damn well would have done everything I could to prevent it. Eric and I shared drinks all the time, I nibbled on his food when he let it sit, I wasn’t the greatest about washing my hands, and accepted sloppy drooly baby kisses on the mouth. I practically put up a neon sign: “CMV Rest Stop, Come On In!”

With no cure, there is only prevention, and prevention only happens with awareness.

A friend of mine has a quote that she shares with everyone she meets online: Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes. I’m not a big advocate person, but sometimes, it’s worth it to step up and speak out.

With that in mind, I and a number of CMV moms made videos for a pretty amazing project. There’s a new movie, Extraordinary Measures, that’s coming out (or maybe it’s out already?). The movie is based on a true story of a father with special needs children, going to any length he can to find a cure and save their lives. To promote the movie, they opened up their website to build what they call an inspirational quilt of videos from parents of children with special needs. One will be chosen to win a bunch of money for a charity of their choice toward their special need. There’s voting involved, more votes for more chances, and honestly I didn’t want to get involved in that aspect as much…but our goal was to have as many CMV videos up there as we could get, if nothing else to raise awareness and share our message.

If you want to see the quilt, it is at this website. The videos are all pretty amazing that I’ve seen, incredible and heart wrenching stories. I’ve tried to watch many of them, so I can make myself aware, just like I hope others do with our CMV videos.

Viewing the other CMV videos, especially, has not only reminded me how lucky we are, but reminded me how important it is to speak out now and then, to try to prevent other children from having to live with the life-long ramifications. Especially right now, at this time of year: two years ago, I was 7 months pregnant and coming down with CMV, and one year ago, I spent an entire day in the hospital waiting room while Danny went through his cochlear implant surgery that he shouldn’t have needed, if I hadn’t gotten sick.

How far we’ve come in two short years.

My Video

We have been tossing the idea of orthotics around for quite some time with Danny. In keeping with what, over time, I see as a general left side weakness for Danny, his left foot has a tendency to be weaker than the right. Both feet, actually, roll inward when he walks barefoot. We saw this pretty extreme before he was walking, but once he started we gave him some time to gain strength…and he did! 3 or so months later, however, he still rolls his ankles inward, and so his physical therapist and we decided it was time to get him some support.

The extra time and strength he gained means that our original idea of Sure Step orthotics – a brace that would wrap around his foot and ankle entirely – is no longer our first direction. Instead, we have “downgraded” a little and have gotten Danny a set of Pollywogs. At the fitting, the orthotic specialist said that if it was just his right foot, he wouldn’t be concerned because of his age and how short a time he’s been walking. Because the left is more pronounced, though, it won’t hurt to give it a shot.

These slide right into his shoe in place of the normal pad, and are foam so they have a little bit of give for comfort while still providing good support. The wrap around the back gives his heel a bit more support to help keep his foot in better alignment, and he has a bit of built up arch support to keep it from collapsing as well. We slipped it in and had him walk around and he did a lot of staring at his feet for the first little bit, but he has taken to it well. We started him with just a couple hours (one hour increments), and are building him up to where we just leave them in his shoes and forget about them, and he wears them like normal.

Hopefully, he will start to gain a bit of stability that he’s been lacking. In 3-6 months, when he outgrows them, we’ll re-evaluate to decide if we need the same thing, more support (full bracing), or if he’s corrected enough with this help that he no longer needs them.

Eric, seeing the cool bright yellow things in Danny’s shoes, has decided he wants a pair too. Yellow is, after all, his favorite color.

Late last week, one of Danny’s teachers at daycare wrote his daily note and included a little line: “It’s been so fun watching Danny progress and change just in the last month!” It got me thinking, and it is so true… A lot of times the focus now seems to be so much on his language, the speed it is progressing (which is, not super speedy), and I miss all the other little triumphs of a CMV kiddo.

The truth is, for a symptomatic CMV newborn, there are a lot of things that is it assumed they won’t do. Of course, there is a (slim) chance they will beat the odds, but you prepare for a lot of pretty scary stuff. For all Danny takes his time, he does amazing things. A huge shift just in the past month or so has been his attention span. He came out of his shell when he first got his implants activated, but he has always been a child who likes to blaze his own trail, wandering away from activities and crowds to do his own thing. In therapy and in school, he is doing so much better at paying attention! He will sit and work/play, he has started to show good interest in coloring and finger painting, he’s just being more attentive all around. He actually takes to tasks; for example, in PT we are working on stairs and on jumping, and he will bounce with us, he will walk up and down steps over and over again to practice and to learn. Repetition is how babies and toddlers learn, and he’s actually agreeing to do it – even initiating it on his own in some cases, he loves to go up and down small steps!

One area I’ve really noticed improvement in lately is his left hand. Forever, pretty much, he’s had a very strong preference for his right…almost like he forgets he even has a left hand for tasks, unlike most babies and toddlers who interchange all the time. He can use it for two handed tasks – he never had trouble with it crawling or climbing or carrying big objects – but he just didn’t, and if we tried to get him to work with it, he would fight us and refuse. This month, he’s experimenting with it a lot. If I give him something in his right hand, he will use his left for ling checks (picking up and putting toys in a bucket), peg puzzles, even picking things up off the ground! He also has started to clap; for the longest time, he would never mimic a clap for us, but just this past week he has multiple times. The improved coordination and willingness to learn is huge to me! He’s even learning to use his left hand to escape from his CI harness…which is a win and a challenge at the same time.

What it’s coming down to in the end is that working with Danny, helping him learn, is less a matter of his true limitations and more a matter of patience and a battle of wills. He proves over and over again that he can, it’s just figuring out how to get it so that he will. I imagine, when we take him in for his next NICU follow up in a few weeks, they’ll tell me again that he is months behind his actual age…but I am learning slowly to take that in stride and have confidence that he will get there. It is more of a struggle with his language than other things I think, because progress in that area is so much harder to track, but we’ve even seen a few things there too: while he isn’t using them in correct context yet, this week he is mimicking “hi” and “uh oh.” Now we just have to focus on teaching him when we use those words…and we might actually be able to dub him as having a “first word!”

I’ve always been an over-achiever. It started young, and through school it just became a part of who I was. I was always at the top of the class, on special committees and groups and councils, even at work still I have made a spot for myself as one of the key members of our team, even if I haven’t had much room for promotion yet. Eric is a lot like I am… He excels in whatever he puts his mind to, and he likes to challenge himself. He finds new ways to accomplish the things he wants, he loves to do puzzles, he picks up on things quickly.

Sometimes I wonder if that isn’t part of why it’s so hard for me with Danny some days.

Danny is … not much of the above. Now, that doesn’t mean he’s a stupid child by any stretch; he is very smart when he wants to be, picks up on a lot and misses little. He has a stubborn streak a mile wide, and when he sets his mind to something, he will accomplish it. The problem comes in that he doesn’t often set his mind to things, or at least, the things we wish he would.

Whether it be the CMV and some as of yet undiagnosed disability or learning disorder, or his hearing loss and the fact that he is in daycare and not being stayed at home with one on one, or just his general self, Danny is often the “one left behind” in groups. I’m a part of an online community of mothers, and I’m a part of two age groups, one group of moms of kids due in July 2006 and one group with kids with in April 2008. Once Danny and the other babies were born, he quickly established himself at the back of the pack with one other baby. I’ve worked hard to overcome the fact that everyone else hits things a good ways before I do, and they’re a good group of ladies who don’t make a deal out of it, who are friends…but it’s rough sometimes, there’s no denying it. When nearly everyone else was walking and Danny still wasn’t even crawling, it was rough. Now, they’re all often discussing how much their children are saying, or understanding, what new words they’re picking up, how they’re starting to talk in two, three, four word sentences…and it’s rough.

At daycare, we purposefully hold him behind a room because it’s where his development is, and because the younger room has a much better listening environment. I fully support the decision, and am glad they’re willing to accommodate us, because I know he gets so much more out of being in that room – but every time someone asks me if Danny’s been moved up to the next room yet, there’s a moment of awkwardness.

When we approached Danny’s cochlear implant surgery, I was lucky enough to find two other blogs of children about Danny’s age, who would be getting implants at around the same time. I was thrilled! Here, at least, Danny would be on equal footing. Here, Danny would fit in. One of the toddlers celebrated his first hearing birthday this week, the one year mark of their cochlear implant activation. He understands everything his parents say, to the point of having to spell words around him, and has over 150 expressive word approximations. He has more than caught up to an age appropriate level for language. I am absolutely thrilled!! I have followed this little guy and his mom for so long, and know first hand what they’ve been through, and this is just so exciting and wonderful and incredible. Genuinely and truly, I am thankful for the progress he’s made, and very happy for him and his family.

…At the same time, it sucks, because once again Danny is left in the dust.

They say you can’t compare your child to anyone else, and I agree with that. I follow that. Eric had some spots where he was “behind” the general crowd for a while, and he’s caught up and then some. I know in the long run it usually balances out. I try to set aside the immediate fear that comes from it too, because with CMV there is always that little voice in the back of your head that screams “brain damage! disability! apraxia! epic fail!” I also try to focus on how far Danny has come in such a short time, because he has had so much going on and has accomplished so much that surely that’s taken away from his language development.

But dangit, just once I wish I wouldn’t be left feeling a million miles behind. And I hate that I’m “that mother,” the one that always feels bad for herself when someone else has exciting news. I wish I could get used to it. In Danny’s therapy session yesterday with our Claire, she reminded me that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and I responded that I knew that, but I couldn’t help thinking some days that Rome wasn’t built in a million years either.

We’ll get there.

He’ll get there.

And one day, I’ll stop wishing for it to be a little bit sooner, a little bit faster, too.

I’ve had a few people ask me this lately that follow the website, so here goes.

Really, it’s a question that eludes me every time. Therapists, coming to visit every week or two, ask at the top of sessions and it stops me cold. How do you answer that? My brain scrambles to find an answer, something definitive, something relevant … something.

“He’s great!” doesn’t cut it, it’s too vague.

“He’s teething and is particularly crabby, thanks.” True, but not really what they’re going for.

“The same?” may also be true but doesn’t really accomplish anything. Change is slow, progress comes in spurts, and so often I’m left with a whole lot of nothing but the same thing I said last time. Babbling, but not with meaning no matter how much you and I would both like that. Eating, but his molars are killing him so he’s gone back to preferring softer foods. Walking, tripping, falling, same as he has been with his parents’ coordination in his genes.

Of course, then you get the non-therapists who ask, in which case it opens up a whole other line of scrambling. What’s too much? Do they really want details? He’s great, he’s a happy kid. He’s healthy, we’re dodging seasonal illness well so far, knock on wood. He keeps us in a perpetual state of wonder and worry, wonder that he is doing so well and has come so far, worry that there is still another shoe to fall and we’re living in its shadow. He’s developing nicely but never as much or as quickly as we’d wish for.

At our last speech session, his Claire – his speech/AVT/therapist/language/listening/hearing/TOD/type lady who shall forever now be known as his Claire even though sometimes we feel as though she’s here more for us than for him – gave me some copies of a resource that lists out steps in auditory-verbal development, and it gave me some ways to qualify “how’s Danny doing.”

He is pretty firmly in the stage where they’re just starting to piece it all together. To read down the list, it’s like a checklist of “yes, that’s Danny.” Imitates games like peek-a-boo and patty cake, vocalizes more when his implant is on, imitates mother’s vocal play, practices vowel sound vocal play (ah, oo, ee), plays with inflection, and babbles (though could do more of it!). He’s also starting to associate certain sounds with what’s happening … like if he’s hungry and fussing and the microwave turns on, he hears it and quiets, turning to it and waiting for food.

Receptively, he’s quite close to a 9 month level, which is awesome considering he’s almost 9 months listening age. He locates sources of sound, recognizes and differentiates between familiar voices (mom, dad, Eric), responds to verbal requests like patty cake and waving hi with only verbal prompting, raises arms when we say “up” and reach to him, and absolutely is starting to listen to his own vocalizations and babbles for babbling’s sake.

Expressively, he’s solidly hit all of the 6 month level stuff and is coming close to (but not quite at) the 9 month level stuff. We are still stuck at “mamama” and “yayaya” as his primary consonant babbles, but he is intermixing them and his vowels as he talks – “ahhh ma ma ya eeee ya ya ya.” He uses consonants like h and g as well, though not as often anymore. He babbles to get your attention and recognizes that words have meaning. “mm” is still more, and “ee ee” seems to be his general multipurpose “gimme!” He vocalizes for pleasure and for displeasure other than crying and is playing with inflection.

Is he super ahead or catching up at all? Not really. But, he is staying on track, and that in itself is awesome. On a non-listening level, he’s doing…well? It’s hard to tell sometimes, because a lot of the things you look for are related to hearing and understanding, where he’s obviously at a disadvantage. You look for whether kids can point to animals or body parts when you name them, whether they know to stay away from something if you tell them it’s hot, that sort of thing. He experiments with toys and tries to make them work. He attends better and better these days to playing with people. He’s spending more time with his peers rather than off on his own, more time watching people when they speak to him. He recognizes things in his day to day pattern, that the table and chair mean it’s almost time to eat, that getting his jacket on means going to the garage. When we’re getting dressed, he will help put his arms into his sleeves and get his legs into the right holes on his pants; undressed he’ll lift his arms to help take his shirt off and step out of pants.

All around he’s a happy, healthy, crazy, daredevil, clumsy, stubborn, brother-worshiping boy that is becoming more toddler every day. I almost hate to say it, but he seems to be leaving his CMV-developmentally delayed side behind and becoming more “typical” … for a deaf toddler with cochlear implants, at least. There’s still concerns, but they’re smaller.

And that … is how Danny’s doing.