Hearing Aids on Stephen????
Yes, it wasn’t exactly the news we wanted to hear AGAIN. After Stephen was born we were quite anxious to have the nurses do the new born hearing screen. They were having some trouble with the OAE testing equipment that day, so they decided to test him the next morning. He actually passed the test and we all breathed a sigh of relief. We set up an appointment to have our audiologist do an ABR test on Stephen, whether he passed his OAE or not. We knew that he had a 25% chance of being deaf if what Molly has is genetically related. We never did do the blood test, but we were pretty sure it was genetic. So we were optimistic that he would pass his ABR, seeing as he passed his OAE (Molly failed her OAE). Unfortunately, our Audiologist was not able to get a response from the hearing nerve pathways. She said that he most likely has what is called Auditory Neuropathy. In my understanding, this diagnosis is given when there is hair cell activity present in the cochlea (which the OAE shows), but no neural components of the ABR are present. AN seems to be quite rare in congenital hearing loss. AN patients could have hearing loss ranging from moderate to severe. There is an outside chance that he could get by with just hearing aids. Our plan is to monitor Stephen with hearing aids for the next 7 months. If we see that he is not hearing enough for speech/language, we will move ahead with the Cochlear Implant when he is 10 mos old.
We take great comfort in knowing God’s purposes in all of this are right and good. Molly’s progress has given us much hope for Stephen’s future in the hearing world.

Long time no blog....... I have so much to tell. Where do I begin??? I will start with Molly and give you the news on Stephen later.

I would never have described Molly as "sweet" before baby Stephen came along, but she has proven to us that she does have a tender side. She really does adore him and wants to be mummy’s little helper, particularly with diaper changes and bath time. She looks for him when she wakes up in the morning and after nap. She is quite concerned when he cries (she calls it "cwyin"). She always wants him next to her when she is sitting. She pats the floor and says "sit down here baby" (how’s that for a four-word sentence). When Stephen was a couple days old, Molly noticed his umbilical cord and said a three-word sentence, "oooh dirty cut". Since Stephen’s birth, Molly has had somewhat of a speech/language explosion. Could be because the daily focus has been taken off of her — not the center of attention. She loves to say the full alphabet over and over in speech babble. She is identifying most colors and shapes by name. In the last two weeks she has decided to care more about numbers. She likes to combine them with the alphabet ("1-2-3-4-i-j-k"). Just a bunch of sounds to her at this point. A couple days ago, I noticed that Molly was counting Stephen’s fingers aloud. Pretty cool.