deaf education

Today Chris and I were on our first parent panel. We were asked to come to a regional meeting that the State Dept of Ed sponsors for those who are service providers for children with hearing loss. There were people in the room from all over eastern Pennsylvania.

In a previous post I talked about our difficulties finding an interpreter for church, and I mentioned some of the reasons why we think it's important to have one. Let me just say: thank God for the men in our church. Here's why.

We recently changed churches. When we moved from the 'burbs to the city we were much closer to another church in the same denomination. So it seemed to make sense to make a move. We were worried about what would happen with all the work we'd done with our session, but decided to at least visit the closer church to say 'hi, we're in the neighborhood.'

Amid all the searching and learning we've done since we discovered Ellis was deaf, the biggest issue for us, the elephant in the room, always was what to do about church.

Anyone who knows us well knows that we take church very seriously. J and my own experiences growing up in the church were typical of what we call "covenant children". We believe that our children are Christians, and ought to be treated as such, until they prove otherwise. That means that children are taught at a very young age to participate in every aspect of public and private worship.

I've gotten some fun movies of Ellis recently. These are taken roughly around eighteen moths post CI activation.

This blog is in honor of our 3 year old son, Ellis, who was born congenitally, profoundly deaf. I've been blogging a bit about it here and there on my my personal blog. But as we have gotten to know more about Deaf culture and even CI culture, we've decided to create some space devoted to our experiences. All the previous blog entries have been imported here, so we are picking up where we left off with my former blog, "Moot Thoughts and Musings."

Though I almost never post on my wife's blog, I almost always read through the comments she gets re. d/Deaf issues. Mostly I tend to stay away from commenting, because I have a tendency to take things personally, whereas she is much more measured in her responses. However, I feel like taking this opportunity to reiterate for those not familiar with our story, some of our reasoning about the CI.

It seems that most of the negative reactions to Ellis' CI center on the accusation that we are doing what is best for ourselves, and not what is best for Ellis, because:

I wanted to post a link to a blog that I guest blogged on yesterday. Amy and I have had some exciting conversations and we wanted to share some our dialogue, which we did on her blog. It's been an incredibly encouraging to me as a parent, yet unsure how my crazy kid's life is going to go. :-) I'm totally pumped, writing the blog entry and VIDEOchatting later. How exciting!!!!