"My Bubbles"

My youngest daughter cracks me up to no end. She spent the first two years of her life diagnosed as having sensorineural hearing loss and was the proud recipient of a hearing aid at about 4 months of age. She refused to wear it most of the time, preferring rather to try to eat it. Sadly, baby slobber and fine technological devices do NOT mix well, and there were problems with corrosion. By about age 2, she was regularly hiding it: In the toy box, in the dresser, under the couch, anyplace she thought we would not find it. Eventually she figured out the miracle of the trash bin, and one day I busted her trying to sneak it in the garbage. "Thwash," she says. Well, it was time for her annual hearing exam, so off we went to see the doctor. He had a rather puzzled look on his face after the tests were done, and I told him about the trash can incident; he chuckled and said, "Well, now we know why. Her hearing is normal."

How the hell does sensorineural hearing loss become normal, especially in a child born to someone with a long-documented history of familial deafness, just disappear? "I don't know." The whole fam-damily is perplexed by this.

There is a point here, so bear with me: Because she had decreased hearing for the first two years of life (two of the most IMPORTANT years for speech/language development) she has relatively poor verbal skills. She is great at using sign language, but we are still working on the verbal part of it. She has always been very good at identifying her body parts, and now, out of the blue, comes to me to identify "my belbows" (her elbows), "my feet," "my knees," and "my bubbles" (her boobies). I had to grin over the bubbles, since at not-quite 3 she certainly does not have "bubbles," but I laughed so hard my big ass broke yet another office chair when she pointed at mine and said "your bubbles" and then signed "pretty."