Ben's journey into a hearing world.: November 2011

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Veteran's Day

In honor of Veteran's Day, a town close to ours hosted an exciting celebration- a Blackhawk Helicopter landing. Ben was super excited and certain he was going to be driving it. Addilyn, as usual, was just happy to go somewhere.

We arrived just in time to see the helicopter land in Riverview Park.

Excitement!!!

Ben pushed his way through the crowd of people and climbed inside. He sat in each one of the seats.

And the Pilots seat! He got to push all the buttons and move the controller.

He said, "Buckle me up Mom. I'm ready to go!"

Just giddy with excitement!

Ben also got to 'drive' a Firetruck. An actual Fireman climbed in while Ben was at the wheel. Ben turned to him pointed to the back and said, "You can just sit right there." Poor guy!

Watching the Helicopter take off was really cool. It took the pilots along time to get ready, even after starting the engine. In this video Ben is saying, "Say cheese pilots. Say cheese for Mommy." Pilots sounds like 'pirates'.

To top it all off, the local paper took a picture of Ben in the Pilot's seat. It was published the next day. You can see it here:http://www.statesmanjournal.com/article/20111111/UPDATE/111111025/Vets-honored-mid-Valley-events?odyssey=nav%7Chead

click the little 'more' button under the picture of the guy on the horse on the left hand side if you can't see Ben's cool picture.

The next morning, when I got Ben up, he said, "Ok. I'm ready to go fly my helicopter now."

It's so much fun to see my little boy that happy.

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Ben's Words

“I'll try to make a visual picture that relates to the way sound is heard by a child with a cochlear implant. Suppose that you have to identify a four-legged animal, and you’ve not seen that animal before, but you have to figure out what it is. Maybe you have to draw it. Maybe you have to learn the name for it. Now, that animal is standing behind a bunch of trees. To see that animal, you have to look through tree trunks that are hiding big parts of that animal. Now, if you were looking through those trees with the equivalent of a hearing aid, you could probably only see the tail end of that animal, because you could only hear the low frequencies with that hearing aid. With a cochlear implant, though, you could see pieces of that animal’s head, pieces of its neck, its legs, its body, and pieces of its tail end, but you still would be missing pieces in between each of those that you could see. The reason I’m bringing this up for you to think about is because it’s important for us to realize that children who are using cochlear implants still don’t see the whole animal. They see more of a range of that animal, but they have to use their brains. They have to use what they already know about the world. They have to use their cognitive abilities to fill in those gaps to be able to put together a picture of that whole animal. That’s the kind of task that a child is facing using a cochlear implant.”
Dr. Patricia Spencer. Considerations for the Future: Putting It All Together, Presented at Cochlear Implants and Sign Language conference, April, 2002.