Beginnings

Today a parent educator from Beginnings came out to give us information on Olivia's hearing loss. Beverly Elwell came to our house and was so sweet and helpful. She gave me a copy of Olivia's hearing loss plotted on a speech banana audiogram and gave us lots of helpful information. Beginnings is a non-profit agency that provides support to parents of children who are hard of hearing or deaf from birth until age 22. North Carolina has so many resources right now for the hard of hearing/deaf and so I am very thankful we are able to tap into these. North Carolina also has adopted the  1-3-6 objective which means a hearing screen by 1 month, diagnosis by 3 months, and amplification and early intervention by 6 months. I am thrilled we are ahead of the game.. Olivia already has her hearing aids and we have started intervention. We have more appointments next week! The pink line (red, right, round) is her right ear and the X or blue line is her left ear. You can see her loss is pretty symmetrical. Without her hearing aids she misses the sounds above the line ( /p/, /h/, /g/, /ch/, /sh/, /k/, /f/, /s/, /th/). 

She also gave me this story by Emily Perl Kingsley: Welcome to Holland

c1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley. All rights reserved
I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......
When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."
"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."
But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.
The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.
So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."
And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.
But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.