Chance's school is having a three week period called Winterim where the kids do in depth study of topics not usually covered in school. It is a three week term of learning that the kids look forward to after the Christmas break. One of the classes this year is an introduction to ASL. Since Chance attends the school as a deaf boy who hears, the teacher asked us if we would come and do a 90 minute presentation about how we chose to get implants for Chance and our journey. These kids will have also been exposed to the Deaf culture and their desire for deaf children to learn to sign.
Although there can be very passionate feelings on both sides of the choice to teach a deaf child to hear or to teach them ASL to communicate, we hold no ill will towards any families and their decision. To be honest, we have felt judged during our process to help Chance hear by those who thought deaf children should mainly sign. That path would have not have been right for Chance. Chance hears and he loves to hear. He will use sign language when a situation calls for quiet such as church or when he doesn't want his siblings to know what he is telling us. But on the whole, Chance considers himself a speaker and he is very good at it.
Chance knows about this presentation and I asked him if he was OK with us sharing his story, along with pictures and video of him growing up. He had no problem what so ever. His fellow classmates are about to hear the nitty gritty story of Chance's deafness and his journey to hear.
We have some great video of Chance when he was little and learning to speak and read. My favorite is the prayer video, because it captures a period of our lives perfectly. At the time of the video, we didn't know that Chance was deaf, we just knew that his prayers at night and over food were long and full of words the rest of us didn't know. Some of Chance's prayers would go on for some time and his brother who was 4(Chance was 2) would start signaling to Chance that he should start to wrap it up. We don;t usually record prayers, but Chance's prayer ritual was getting so amusing that we felt we should record it for posterity. And we are glad that we did. It shows quite well what Chance's attitude was. He was perfectly fine and knew what he was saying...... it was the rest of the family who had issues if we couldn't understand him.
I just love this kid.
Chance getting ready for his first implant surgery.
We will work on uploading the video to the blog tomorrow. We may be a bit biased, but we think Chance is adorable in the video.
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