The cleft clinic

Yesterday, Brett and I went to the Minneapolis Children's Cleft Clinic. Nothing really that exciting- nothing unexpected. We do have to go back for a sedated hearing test to measure how well she can hear. The audiologist thinks she could have moderate hearing loss. We believe otherwise. I don't think she hears as well as she should (she does have two ruptured ear drums), but she can hear me whisper "Amanda say "hi" to which she whispers back "hi". Here is the saga of how to inaccurately test a two year old's hearing... The time she went to the audiologist was lunch time, she had been shuffled around for 2 1/2 hours, been in a room without many toys and not a lot of space to run around and frankly was ready to take a nap. The audiologist had Amanda play a little game when the little ear beep went off. I was suprised Amanda played along even one time much less the over 5 minutes she tried this test (for a two year old with a 30 second attention span, this was an accomplishment in itself). At the end of that little game, the audiologist said her hearing is really poor and went onto another test. The next test, Amanda was squirming to get out of the room, I was trying to keep her from screaming, she wanted to play with the toys, and somehow, in the midst of all that, she's supposed to stay still to listen for the schooosh sound from the speakers. Frankly, at that point she could care less. Then a little headband thing was introduced to see how well the bones in her ear work. She took one look at that and started crying. So, no little headband thing. She can hear decent enough - we know it, but just to be sure, we need super hearing test. In the case she can't hear as well as she needs to, she gets hearing aids for a little bit until she's older and they can repair her ear drum. Ruptured ear drums usually heal, but I think hers have been ruptured too many times to heal on their own. Sigh...