A question

[Guest guest]

Hi! I introduced myself about 6 weeks ago, but haven't posted much

since then, but now I have a question...am looking for other's

experience.

My daughter is 23 months old tomorrow. She was diagnosed with

severe-profound loss in right ear and moderate loss in the left in

late August of this year. She has been aided bilat since 9/16.

My question has to do with communication... We have been working

with Jenna on both verbal and signing skills. We are involved with

Early Intervention in our area and she is currently set up to have

one session / week with the speech teacher (45 minutes). She has

only had one session so far. Between her EI eval meeting and the

first speech theray session she learned quite a few new signs and

started vocalizing much more. Anyway, we had pretty much decided to

go with a total communication for her as she was so frustrated with

not being able to communicate with us well. The speech teacher was

totally impressed with what she had learned between the two times

she saw her. She said we should be more focused on the verbalizing

right now (but still using some signs too).

Her audiologist told me last week that Jenna would always have

difficulties in settings with background noises, classrooms, etc.

We know that she probably hears no speech sounds in her right, so

she'll always have localization problems, etc.

So, from what the audi says I think we should still go with total

communication. But yet we want her to be verbal also. What's the

best way to confront this? Anybody else have experiences like

this. Jenna is a very, very quick learner as far as the signs go

and she tries the verbals, but gets frustrated sometimes. I'd love

to hear about any other's experiences similar and what you did and

how things turned out. I want her to be able to communicate both

now and in the future, whether it be sign or auditory.

Thanks in advance,

a