Jodi Speaks Her Mind

Talking, talking, talking… well, almost 3/11/2006

Adelina is talking up a storm these days. Most of it is what could be called “approximations” and therefore not really intelligible to anyone besides us - and even then she often has to give us the sign along with the words for us to know what she is trying to say. But, the point is, she is trying to speak. Adelina seems to be a born communicator. She is always wanting to say something be it through signs or speech, and these days she is opting for speech more often. We are really encouraging her to keep this up, and hopefully soon she will be able to enunciate more accurately. Already she will try to correct herself if we feed her the correct pronunciation. But all in all, it will take time - probably a couple of years. Still, this is where the cochlear implant (CI) will really help. Once she is able to discriminate speech with it, she will be able to hear speech sounds she hasn’t before and it should enable her speech to much more closely approximate the speech of hearing children. We are realizing how fortunate we are that Adelina had such good residual hearing with her left ear (when using her hearing aid). She still does most of her listening with that ear, and prefers it over the CI right now. She has only been hearing with the implant for just over 2 weeks, so she is getting input from it, but it doesn’t yet make much sense to her. The more it begins to make sense, the more she will appreciate the CI.

I want to make a list of what she can say, but it has grown a lot. Here is a partial list: mommy, daddy, jake, lucy, grandma, grandpa, I love you, crackers, cookie, dog, cat, baby, bear, mary, birthday party, tomorrow, thank you, please, colleen, kayla, ella, ellen, cinderella (this one is a real hoot), astronaut (another fun one), morning, tea, egg, doll, dirty, bath, school, movie, umbrella, bathroom/potty, water, juice, apple, orange, milk, chocolate, stay, red, green, yellow (lellow), purple, blue, snow, table, better, big, small, tall, thirsty, one, two, three, four, five, six, and there’s much more. For someone who has only been around English for 5 months and has only heard English for 4 months, we are pretty impressed. She can also identify almost all the letters of the alphabet in sign, and is now learning the spoken names for the letters. She can fingerspell a few names, too!

We praise God for Adelina. She is such a joy!