Posts Tagged ‘range’
The Audiologist
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!!!!
3 Comments »
The Preschool Screening
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?
Izeafest – Day 2
We learned on Day 1 that we had to get there bright and early to make sure that we got a plugin for our laptops. Without that, day one didn’t have a lot of blogging or twittering going on. Well, at least not from me. Day 2 started with a keynote speech from Merlin Mann. I have to say that it was one of the best keynote speeches I have ever heard. His speech was about “don’t be a dick”. Everything he said was true. He even asked the audience to disagree with what he said, but no one did, because he was right.
The next panel was Social Network and included Michael Brito, Sean Bonner, Etan Horowitz, and Lena West. This was another panel that really wasted my time. First, we had Lena West stating that she was too busy to actually do it herself. My first question was then why are you on this panel? Then she managed to offend half the room (google: Lena West and mommybloggers to find out why. Trust me, there was no
airbrush do over. The more she tried to explain herself, the worse it got). They pretty much said to use Twitter and Facebook. Umm, yeah, knew that already. Now, tell me how to use them to help me, because I really don’t get Facebook at all. There are also dozens of social networking sites out there — and nobody even mentioned them.
Next, there was Loren Feldman. I love Loren Feldman. He speaks his mind, and he makes awesome videos! It was almost breathtaking to hear what equipment he uses. We learned that you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to do good videos on your blog.
Next, we had the plug-in panel with Loren Baker, Jonathan Dingman, and Erik Hersman. This was definitely cool, because I learned I am using a lot of the wordpress plugins that I should be!
Last, there was the Blog Design Makeover Panel with Scott Allen,Matt Blancarte, and Christopher Schmitt. My only complaint with this is that they were very rushed. Also, the designs were nice, but way out of the price range of us normal bloggers.
In a nutshell, that was the conference. I have one more post about the IzeaHunt that we did, and that will pretty much summarize the conference. Would I go again? I’ll be honest — I don’t know. It is a lot of money. Did I learn things? Yes. However, does any of it help me to monetize? Not really. I really thing they need to have breakout sessions, and you can pick and choose what sessions to go to. That way, you can reach the middle ground bloggers and the beginning bloggers. What I found lacking was that none of the big name big money bloggers really told us how to get from middle group to up on top. Telling me what you are doing now really doesn’t help me all that much.
4 Comments »
5 Days Left 