Tuesday, January 22, 2013

2 more articles

Here are the links to the next two articles from Love Without Boundaries. My heart was moved today when our eldest daughter announced that she wanted to raise money to send to China to help the children who are still there. She also told me that she really wants to go back to China :) If anyone has any fund raising ideas for a 7 year old feel free to chime in :)

http://www.lwbstories.com/?p=15829

http://www.lwbstories.com/?p=15886


Friday, January 18, 2013

An awesome read!!!

I am going to post some links to a Love Without Boundaries blog that deals with the changing situation in China's orphanages. It is an amazing article and provides answers to just about every question I have been asked since coming home with Sofie. Please read. If people aren't educated and realize what happens and why, it will never change.

http://www.lwbstories.com/?p=15660

http://www.lwbstories.com/?p=15664

http://www.lwbstories.com/?p=15745

http://www.lwbstories.com/?p=15688

http://www.lwbstories.com/?p=15770


Hope you enjoyed it and learned something :)

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Happy New Year a little late!!!!!!

Happy New Year to everyone. It has been a while since I posted on here . So much has happened the past month that I don't even know where to begin.  This is going to be a long one so bear with me.

December was filled with one appointment after another. Sofie had an evaluation with the ENT speech pathologist and several evaluations with the school district. She now attends speech therapy at the ENT office on Mondays and Tuesdays, has a two hour speech class with 5 other kids through the school district on Wednesdays and Fridays and a one hour appointment at home with the deaf and hard of hearing teacher on Wed mornings. Somewhere in there I have to fit in Audiology appointments too and I work on Thursday and Friday........ I am pooped :) Sofie just trudges through it all and then has a nap on the way home :) Of course, I could be pooped because of the pneumonia that I managed to catch just before Christmas. I finally got the last of the ornaments on the tree on Dec 24!! That is unheard of in my home.

Sofie's genetic results have come back negative. Her hearing loss was not caused by a mutation of the Connexin protein. To add some mystery to the mix, she aced her hearing test without hearing aids last Wednesday. She still can't hear, but, she passed the bone conduction test with flying colors!!!! In short, this means that she does not have sensory neural hearing loss, just conductive hearing loss. That means, if I understand it properly and feel free to correct me, that there is something structurally wrong that is causing her hearing loss. Her CT Scan was negative though so it is nothing in the inner ear! The only thing left to do is an MRI which she will have to be put to sleep for and intubated so I don't think we are willing to do that just to satisfy our curiosity. We still are no closer to figuring out why she lost her hearing and we have decided to stop trying to figure it out. It is what it is and we are fine with that :) They were also able to test her hearing at all the upper and lower Hertz. I tell you, Sofie was a rock star at this appointment. She did the entire audiogram without even flinching. It must have taken over a half an hour and the whole time she just sat there with her headphones on and put rings on a stand whenever she heard the noise in her ear. You know you have done well when you completely impress a pediatric audiologist. The results of the upper and lower sound test showed that at the levels above and below speech, her left ear drops from being mild hearing loss to moderate hearing loss just like the right ear. Her hearing is a little worse than we had thought, but, the audiologist was able to fine tune her hearing aids to make up for it. We also had new ear molds done as Miss Fancy Pants has grown again and the ear molds are now too small......yeah!! We also showed up at the audiologist with a dead battery in one of her hearing aids.......oops! Mother of the year right here :) So so far we have lost the cleaning kit for her hearing aids and found it, lost a hearing aid and found it, shown up in audiology with a dead battery! The audiologist just laughs at us now. That reminds me, I haven't told you the story about the lost hearing aid..............

I have decided to just post whatever I manage to get down in writing in a particular day. I started this post 4 days ago and never finished it, so .......to be continued...............