Cooperative or uncooperative? That is the question...

I'll give Lucas a grade of B on the cooperation level today. Overall, we had a great day. I was flying solo. It was just me, Lucas, the GPS lady, and Dave Matthews. The same exact trip that took me 1 hr 20 minutes on Monday took me 2 hours flat today. It's a good thing that I left at 7:45 AM for our 10:00 appointment. I timed it perfectly.

While sitting in traffic on the Schuykill, Lucas informed me that he had to go potty. I told him he had to wait. That was not good enough of an answer for my 3 year old munchkin. He started to cry and whine. We weren't going anywhere, but there was nowhere to pull off on the side of the road, not even a small shoulder. I made an executive mommy decision: Lucas was going to pee in our potty on-the-go, while I was driving. He unbuckled the top and I unbuckled the bottom of the 5-point harness, and he wiggled onto the floor the sit on his moving potty. Then we reversed the order. I was pretty relieved when I heard that last click. It ended up being a good decision, as we wouldn't arrive for another 30 minutes.

What happens on the Schuykill, stays on the Schuykill. I promise, precedent has not been set.

The purpose of today's speech & audiology appointments was strictly new ear follow-up (6 months post-activation). We started with speech, and Lucas was quite cooperative. He gets an A- for that appointment. It was interesting to see some of the deficiencies he still has with that ear, although he's come a long way. He has trouble differentiating between /b/ and /d/, and he was unable to discriminate the word "ball" at all, on several occasions. He confused it with "dog". We decided that if he would slow down and listen, he might get more, but he wants it to be easy, and he just tries to fill in the information. I think that it comes back to the disparity between the two ears. It IS really easy for him to hear with his old ear. He has to work  hard with his new ear. At one point she used the phrase, "read the book" and he repeated, "ride the bike." He got the r/d/b/k part, just not the vowels. I thought that was pretty interesting.

He got a nice little break between appointments: some time to play and have a snack. I thought he would be good to go for audiology. He was more interested in doing this:


That was really only part of the time. He was willing to listen to the various frequencies/decibels, but he lost it when he was asked to repeat and/or point to pictures. He moved into teacher mode.

This is where I pulled out the bribery card.

When we went to the room for him to be mapped, I reminded him several times that we would go to the Please Touch Museum if he listened to M. He remembered playing on the digger & dump truck, and he kept confirming that that's what we would do. I think the bribery encouragement worked. He let M map him pretty well. He got a few new programs to work through, that hopefully will help him in the lower frequencies. 

We had a great time at Please Touch! 




He was asleep about 5 minutes after we got in the car to go home. The only thing that kept me awake for the ride ahead was singing a little Dave at the top of my lungs. 

Lucas couldn't hear me. It was probably a good thing, to which my husband will attest.

Tomorrow's line-up includes the last day of camp for this session, and another trip to CHOP for a heart echo and a visit with cardiology. At least we won't be driving the whole way into the city, but going to the King of Prussia office. There might be time to stop for a little Baja Fresh too...