Having a deaf child keeps life interesting...

Chance has a friend that he knew from school come over to play. His friend is also deaf and has a cochlear implant that he received last year.

His friend had been at our house for just a few minutes when the batteries went dead in his cochlear implant. One might think that we could just put some of Chance's batteries into his friend's implant. Alas, this is not the case. The boys have different brands of implants. His friend's implant only takes rechargable batteries. Different from both Chanc'es usual battery pack, that requires 3 disposable batteries, and from the rechargable battery pack that works with his brand of implant :)

We don't use Chance's rechargable batteries as often as we could because we like to stash batteries everywhere we might possibly go so that we never run out of batteries and can replace them immidately. We have batteries stashed at both grandparents houses. When Chance goes to movies we stash them in his coat pocket. His school backpack has batteries shoved into the front pocket. They are in the glove compartment of the car, and in my purse. We have had too many times when the batteries went dead and we have not been able to replace them in a timely fashion. So now we just attach batteries to ourselves.

Thankfully, Chance's batteries actually last through a few days so we don't have to worry about changing them daily.

Since Chance's friend was from school, and Chance attends school two cities away, we could not just run over and get some batteries from his friend's house.

So, we had a child who could not hear us at all dashing around with Chance. We explained to Chance that he needed to make sure that his friend was looking right at him when he talked to him and that his friend would not be able to hear him.

Of course, Chance is familiar with the feeling of having no hearing without implants, so he caught on and they were good to go. We used a little sign language or made sure that he was looking right at us (these kids get good at lip reading) when we talked to him.

We had to chuckle though as we had to remind ourselves that his friend could not hear us. He would come up and talk to us and we would answer while doing dishes etc. and then turn to find him looking at us, his head cocked and his brows furrowed.

The boys had a great time though. Not being able to hear can not override the bond of friendship.:)