She said it... the 3 letter word!!
She said it, the word I've been waiting a long time to hear. I started playing a peg board game with Sienna to encourage speech. It goes a little something like this...I put a peg up to my cheek and say a sound ex:babaRylee or a 2nd person will repeat the action and the soundThen, Sienna takes the peg, holds it to her chin and repeats the soundthen puts the peg in the board!Fantastic activity...just started it yesterday. Today, when doing this activity, she repeated

Sienna's hearing progress!
Well, it'll be just about 3 months post-activation for our little Sienna.Everyone always asks...so are they working?Here is what I say...Yes, my little girl can hear! She looks right at us when we speak to her!She looks at the phone base when the phone rings!She recognizes certain sounds and points or acts it out! ex: When she hears "eeee" she does a monkey.She differentiates between sounds... for example a bark an

Wash your hands....STOP CMV!
As most of you know, Sienna has congenital (born with it) cytomegalovirus, CMV. While pregnant with Sienna, my doctor noticed on the ultrasound that Sienna had an enlarged ventricule in her brain. After many ultrasounds at the Royal Alex, one doctor recommended that we get a TORCH screen done once the baby arrives. This would have meant, Sienna would have immediately been diagnosed with CMV, perhaps given an antiviral which could have slowed down and maybe stopped the virus from attacking. She may not have had severe/profound hearing loss, she may not have had such great developmental and growth delays but the doctors referral was missed; all the doctors under baby Sienna's care did n

Grieving a child with a diability
Just to bring you back to the day we found out Sienna was deaf... For months we were told that she may have a minor hearing loss as she was very vocal and had also passed her newborn screening test. So after many consultations, we finally had an ABR scheduled, an auditory brain response test where the child is sedated in order to test their brain's response to all levels of sound. There we were waiting in the recovery room, our ENT entered. She went on and on about hearing loss and that Sienna had a profou

Sienna's Activation video, at last!
Video is from August 11th, her CI activation. What a great reaction!! The big frown, the look around, the arms out and of course the turn to mom, it was just too much for her.UPDATE:We have begun seeing our SLP, Lindsay, in Peace River. We go once a week and we have a schedule of activities that we do. Right now it's all about receptive language for Sienna. She is taking it all in. You can tell that she is hearing everything, I just love it when she turns her head to me immediately after I start talking to her. We read to her everyday, we sing songs and we repeat everything...and by the way we have chosen to do all of this in french. We are a bilingual family, we are