As I said in my last post, Madison failed the preschool hearing test. I never there was a chance of that, and I found myself a lot more upset about it than I thought it would be. I ended up Twittering about it, and a lot of the awesome people on there made me feel a lot better about it.
We lucked out and were able to get her in today to get her hearing tested. I was a little nervous, but she had a blast doing it. They did several cool things. First, they tested to see if she had fluid in her ears. They put a thing in her ear, and we watched a screen. If it looked like a pancake when the tone sounded, she had fluid in her ears. If it looked like a mountain, she didn’t. We saw two mountains (one for each ear). Then they did a test to check her middle ear, and she passed that. Lastly, they tested her manually. They put in earplug looking things in her ears, and the audiologist went into a different room and talked to Madison over it. She said words like carports, baseball, and ice cream, and Madison had to repeat the word. The audiologist told her she did a good job to which she replied that “she practices a lot”. I am not sure what she practices, but it was pretty funny. After she repeated the words, they then did a test with tones. If she heard the tone, she had to clap. They then did the word test again. Then they did a last test with some earphone looking thing. When she heard the beep, she had to say Beep.
The good news is that she passed! On a scale of 0 - 20 being normal, she scored 5s on most things. She did get 15 on 800 mhz stuff (it could be 8,000 I don’t remember). That is still in the normal range, but I could hear when she was missing words, so it is something I will keep an eye on. Their recommendation was just to keep an eye on it, but she was completely normal. Woohooo!!!!
My public school drives my absolutely bananas. I wanted to get Madison’s hearing screened just to make sure that there were no problems. We thought maybe some of Madison’s attention issues were due to her not hearing. However, my school being the pain in butt that they are wouldn’t do it unless we scheduled her to be prescreened for preschool through the school (which is a joke but I’ll tell you about that later). Obviously, there is some sort of federal funding they get for this, because I wanted a five minute screening and got stuck with an hour long screening. I sucked it up and took her.
I swear that they expect these kids to have a flash memory drive in their heads. I could hear some of the things they were testing her on, and from what I could tell, she was doing well. When they called me up after the testing was over, I was right. Except for cutting and catching, she scored everything else in the 6 year old range. Madison is only 4. I am seriously wondering if some of the attention issues we are having with her at preschool are due to her being bored. That was the good news.
The bad new was that we failed her hearing screening. I asked what the school would do for that. The answer: nothing. We would have to pay for additional testing elsewhere. The other thing that ticked me off to no end was that she couldn’t even get into the school preschool if I wanted to send her. The only kids who get in are those who are considered “at risk” (which Madison is obviously not) and if we made less than $80,000 a year. Umm, yeah. We make more than that. In Chicago, I am not sure if you can even own a decent house making less than $80,000 a year. Basically, the only kids who get in are those who don’t speak English (because there were several kids like that there) and low income people. I guess my question is what about the middle class? Why do we always get screwed?
I took this picture of Madison late last night. We had put her bed, and about an hour later, she came screaming out of her room. She was crying so hard that we had no idea what happened. All I know is that I saw she had a mouth full of blood, and I ran her into the bathroom. We still couldn’t figure out what had happened, but we had her rinse her mouth out with water and calmed her down a bit. What we learned was that somehow she took her Pumpkin flashlight, and whacked herself in the face. You can’t tell from this picture, but she actually somehow cut two little spots below her lip, and her entire lip is swollen. She also had some black and blue marks show up instantly. If she could do that good of a number on her face, could you imagine how well she would do with some Cobra golf clubs? (I keep telling Bill to keep dreaming.) After we calmed her down and found out what happened, she says to me “mommy, do you want to take a picture?”. That’s my blogging girl! LOL She knew I was going to write about this. LOL
The good news is that she is okay today. The swelling went down, and she just has 2 little cuts below her lip.
Last week, Will decided to pick up the phone, dial, and then try to talk into the phone. Instead of stopping him, of course, I went and ran and got the camera. I ended up calling my mom, so the poor boy would have somebody to talk to. Of course, we can’t understand a word he says, but he talked to my mom for about fifteen minute. It was super cute. I figure if he is trying to make phone calls at one, it won’t be long before he does some unlocked cell phones tricks! The best part — instead of holding the phone with his hand to his ear, he kept trying to hold it with his shoulder. Of course, that didn’t last long and he’d go “oh oh” every time it fell. Needless to say, if you call my house and hear gibberish, Will probably picked up the phone.
I had to pass along this story, because I found it super funny. This sign is up over in the UK. Obviously, the english is easy enough to read. However, they emailed their translator to translate that into Welsh. When they received an email back, they assumed (and we all know what happens when you assume) that the reply was the translation. Instead, the Welsh reads “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.” I am still giggling over that. Obviously, they need an inhouse translater.
