I was going through the photo files this morning in an effort to weed out some bad photos and back everything up with a new external hard drive we recently purchased. After wading through a couple of thousand photographs, I discovered that the kids had grabbed the camera and played around with it.
It’s a little late for Halloween, but they came up with some good ones:
Psssst.
Come here.
Want a hot stock tip?
Invest in a battery company.
In my household, we have to keep track of ten hearing aids. The hubby and I have four, and the three kids have six hearing aids. We have an entire kitchen drawer that is devoted to packs of batteries and extra tubes. The drawers are littered with the little orange tabs that are stuck to each battery. Try as I might, I haven’t been able to successfully train my kids to walk over to the garbage can (which is right across from the very kitchen drawer I spoke of) and dispose of the sticky orange tab. Instead, the drawer organizer and the cardboard packages are decorated in a random orange pattern.
One day, I took the hubby’s car and on my way to a presentation, a battery went out. I changed the battery and stuck the little orange tab on the front of the steering wheel, intending to toss it when I arrived home. I promptly forgot about it until the next time I got in the car a few days later. The bright orange tab was still stuck to the middle of the steering wheel. Apparently the entire family suffers from “Orange Tab Disorder.”
Despite their inability to locate garbage cans, the kids have managed to keep track of their hearing aids pretty well. Occasionally, we do have to play “Hunt for the Hearing Aid” around our house. My husband is especially good at initiating this game, for he frequently takes off one hearing aid and forgets just where he put it. This wouldn’t be a problem if I kept an immaculate house, but I tend to favor piles of books and papers in random places, so we’re often sifting through things around the house to try and locate a hearing aid.
With the addition of our puppy in January, we’ve had to be more vigilant about keeping hearing aids out of Kaycie’s reach. This past summer, I was giving David a haircut outside and he placed his hearing aids on the patio steps. He went inside to take a shower and came out looking for his hearing aids. I had let Kaycie outside, not knowing that his hearing aids were out there. You guessed it– we found Kaycie outside munching on an earmold. The hearing aids were nowhere to be seen. We located both earmolds, torn to shreds. After hauling everyone outside to join in the hunting game, we located both hearing aids. Despite a nice bite mark on one of them, they both were in working condition. This is the same kid who jumped into the lake with one hearing aid on during the previous summer. The hubby also had a lake adventure with his hearing aid: he had placed his hearing aid on a towel in the boat and accidently flung it overboard. I was able to locate the hearing aid with a scuba mask a few hours later. Today’s hearing aids seem to have nine lives, as we were able to bring them all back with a Dry-Aid kit.
With ten hearing aids to keep track of, it’s a miracle that we’ve only lost one of them. My daughter Lauren was at the library one day (this was when she was 9) and her battery went out. She didn’t have a back-up battery with her, so she took off her hearing aid and put it in her sweatshirt pocket. While she was waiting for Daddy to check out the books, she decided to do some gymnastic maneuvers on the floor. When she arrived home, the hearing aid was gone. We scoured the library and the parking lot, but the hearing aid with the bright blue earmold, was never found.
When David was three, I noticed that his hearing aid was missing. We were playing outside, so we figured the hearing aid had to be out in the backyard. Joe and I started searching through the grass. We must have looked pretty comical pacing up and down the backyard trying to locate a tiny hearing aid with a tiny earmold. Soon, the neighbors joined in and we covered every inch of the yard, continuing the search into the night with flashlights. We finally gave up the search two days later and had to order another aid. Many months later, we discovered the hearing aid in the bottom of a wicker toy hamper that had never been emptied.
Five people, ten hearing aids and an earmold-loving dog– never a dull moment in this household.
Gallaudet University’s Board of Trustees met on October 29 and voted to terminate the selection of Dr. Jane Fernandes as president.
Perhaps now Gallaudet can get back to the business of educating students. But sadly, the weeks of mudslinging has left Gallaudet with a host of issues that will need to be addressed before any true progress can be made. 
The next president is going to have to be one heck of man/woman with an iron heart (to deal with all the stress) and be someone who is going to be able to handle the laundry list of issues that have been showing up in blogs/vlogs around the internet.
Hopefully the next president will be one that embraces every student who attends Gallaudet, regardless of communication ability, use of technology or amount of hearing.
Only then, can true unity begin.
Photo courtesy of Maureen Conroy / Daily Nexus
This morning, a friend sent me the link to Listening to the deaf [this is the exact way the title appears on the page] by Clarence Page. It was printed in the Chicago Tribune yesterday and it shows a large picture of smiling protesters and a smaller portrait of Jane Fernandes.
As I walked down the driveway to get the mail the other day, I did a double-take:
No, that’s not an X-rated picture. It is a pair of mushrooms growing in my yard. Mother Nature has a great sense of humor!
Eleven years ago, I was hooked up to pitocin and laboring away with my second child. My first child, David, was born via cesarean and I was hoping for a VBAC (vagnal birth after cesarean). I had labored all day and all night. The doc came in at four in the morning and tried a couple of tricks, but nothing worked.
Lauren was born via cesarean and after my husband said, “It’s a girl,” that was the last thing I remembered. Despite my birth plan of staying awake and not being tied down, the anesthesiologist refused to allow one hand free and he ended up drugging me through the rest of the surgery. I woke up in recovery two hours later shivering, breaking out in hives from the epidural and feeling terrible. What should have been a joyous time with a new daughter got off to a rocky start.
It became even rockier for several months– what was diagnosed as the “baby blues” was actually post-partum depression. You can read more here: What You Need To Know About Post-Partum Depression.
Thanks to a VBAC support group, I was able to work through my feelings and enjoy my baby daughter. Today, Lauren is celebrating her eleventh birthday. She’s a girl after her mother’s heart– a budding writer and a lover of books. She recently taught herself to knit and has discovered volleyball, a sport that I played for many years.
Lauren was born with hearing in the normal range and when she was four, she became sick with a high fever and ended up with a moderate-to-severe hearing loss at the same time her two-year-old brother, Steven did. For Lauren, this was a hard blow. She quickly became frustrated because she couldn’t hear her friends on the phone. There was a long period of adjustment, but today, she’s a happy kid who learned to use the phone again (love that Captel!) and regularly runs up the phone bill yakking with her friends. She loves email and IM, and uses the videophone to chat with her deaf and hard of hearing friends.
So Happy Birthday to my Pumpkin!
I discovered SIGNews by accident one day after doing some heavy internet surfing. Browsing the site, I saw a link for a free issue and I promptly signed up for it. After receiving the first issue, I quickly sent in a check for a subscription and I’ve been enjoying it ever since.
SIGNews has a writing style that is similar to the Deaf Success magazine that ran a few years back but discontinued publishing after the first few issues. In every issue, you will find inspirational stories of deaf and hard of hearing persons in many different kinds of jobs. The current issue features nurses who are deaf.
SIGNews is a publication of CSD (Communication Service for the Deaf) based in South Dakota. While the focus is on those who use American Sign Language, I have found the newspaper to cover a wide variety of communication styles, including a recent article covering a conference for those who use Cued Speech.
I had lunch with my friend Mary recently. Mary grew up hard of hearing and became deaf as an adult. She is one of the early founders of ALDA–the Association of Late-Deafened Adults.
Mary lives in a beautiful old home that was undergoing some restoration by a company that they’ve used for several years. One early afternoon, the crew took a break for lunch and Mary decided to take a shower. She looked out the window and saw that all of the trucks were gone, so she figured she was alone in the house. Since it was a short distance from her room to the hall shower, she stripped buck naked, grabbed her clean clothes and headed off to the bathroom.
She came face to face with a lone construction worker who stayed behind to finish up some work.
Startled and red-faced, she continued her short run to the shower.
Fortunately, Mary has a great sense of humor and was able to look back at this and have a good laugh.
As for the construction worker, he probably had a smile on his face the rest of the day.
A fellow writer from Epinions recently sent me an email asking “Do you know why the students oppose the new president so fiercely?”
I was in a hurry and quickly replied, “Protesters don’t like Jane– they say she can’t lead, that she’s cold and that she’s “not deaf enough”(even when it is denied, this comes up). They’re also saying that the search process was flawed and racist (many felt that a person of color should have been one of the finalists) and that Jane was hand-picked by the current president.”
In a nutshell, that’s what I’ve gathered from a couple of months of reading blogs.
In 1988, the protest back then was about selecting a president who had one thing in common with the students, faculty and alumni: the absense of hearing in the normal range. When Jordan was selected, it seemed that many gathered together to celebrate and a sense of unity developed from the “Deaf President Now” movement. As a result of that movement, many deaf and hard of hearing students from all over decided to enroll in Gallaudet and some of them were students who would have never considered Gallaudet before the protest.
Many people like my friend from Epinions are expressing confusion at the selection of the first female president who has an impressive resume and happens to have a hearing loss. Mike McConnell recently posted Not Deaf Enough–What The World Sees on his blog and his post echoes the feedback that I’m getting from others on the outside.
One of the major differences between the two protests is that anyone off the streets has the ability to blog and post things on websites. The internet is now one huge information source, including vast amounts of gossip and postings that amount to slander. It is difficult to sort through factual information and the stuff that should appear in National Enquirer instead.
What started off as a complaint about a flawed search process has turned into a protest that has a list of issues that are popping up all over and it all has me wondering– is Gallaudet going to be a place that my three deaf and hard of hearing kids are going to consider? Will Gallaudet be a place of diversity that embraces every deaf and hard of hearing student that wants to attend there?
We’ll have to wait and see.