Alandra's Lilacs: The Story of a Mother and Her Deaf Daughter

15. I Finally Get to Hear Baby Talk

CHAPTER 15 I Finally Get to Hear Baby Talk The "No Trespassing" signs went up the day Alandra and Chad brought Tyler home from the hospital. It was made obvious that they wanted some time just to celebrate having a deaf child, not to mention simply enjoy their new baby. Chad very possessively calls Alandra "my wife" when speaking to me. I've never been sure what he means by that, but I suspect it is partly to keep me in my place. (No matter, you can forgive a good son-in-law anything, especially when there are beautiful babies, and I am sure I need help remembering where my place is at times.) On the day of the homecoming , Chad told me that "his wife" was very tired. In other words, "Grannies are not needed today," so I stayed away with restraint. Though it was late fall in Texas, believe me when I tell you this Granny was smelling the lilacs. The funny thing was that I never felt the need to "test" what Tyler could hear. There was little use of voice and sound within his household, so how much he could hear really didn't matter. It was such a totally different feeling than when I learned that his mother was deaf, but it just seemed natural. Deafness had become the norm, not the exception, in our family. I think that it is interesting to note when we had his hearing tested through Cook Children's I33 I Finally Get to Hear Baby Talk Hospital in Fort Worth we discovered that Tyler actually had a lot ofusable hearing. He heard so much that often his parents were not convinced he was deaf at all. Even though I reassured Alandra many times, in the privacy of their home I'm sure they did many tests to prove to themselves that he was indeed deaf. Alandra and Chad began the input oflanguage through sign language only. I continued to speak while signing, if for no other reason than the fact that I am comfortable with this method. I have heard of studies in which researchers taught infant hearing children to sign. They found that infants are able to communicate faster using sign language and that later they naturally convert to oral communication. I actually saw this happen with Tyler's cousin Chip. My niece lived nearby, and her son Chip (a hearing child) was just six months younger than Tyler. Because my father had passed away the year before, my mother had moved back to Texas. We quickly put her into action as the boys' babysitter, and the two boys had been together almost every day since Chip was born. Chip began to sign with Tyler and used the signs to communicate with his mother. By the time Chip was about one year old, they had developed a language of their own, using signs that no one recognized . When my mother stopped keeping the kids the following year, Chip stopped interacting with Tyler every day. Sometimes he still tries to sign to Tyler, but for the most part that ability seems to be gone. Tyler signed his first word when he was eleven months I34 I Finally Get to Hear Baby Talk old. It was not "Mama" or "Dada"-those words actually came much later than I expected. His first word was "light." Babies love to play with light switches, and Tyler was being allowed to flip the switch to gain small motor skills. At the same time, we were signing "light" to him. You wouldn't believe how we all started cheering when those little fingers made their first sign. It truly was the most beautiful sight I have ever seen. Tyler's vocabulary increased rapidly as he started asking what things were. He would point to airplanes in the sky, and then try to repeat the sign when we showed it to him. I'm pretty certain "airplane" was his second word. Tyler learned language quicker than any other child I have ever seen. Now that he is three, he is able to have conversations like any hearing child his age. He has even been known to "eavesdrop" on conversations between his parents, or between his parents and me, and put his two cents worth in. It is such fun to talk with him, although sometimes his baby fingers make a sign that is unrecognizable...