The ultimate game of bowling

My phone camera blurs during action shots, but this is Chance making his move.

Chance is quite the bowler.  Our family doesn't actually go bowling all that often. but between our family trips and the few times Chance has gone bowling with friends, it has been enough to give him a knack for the game.

To celebrate Chance's younger brother's birthday, we set out for bowling as a family this past week and Chance beat us all. I like to think that I gave him a bit of competition, but he did beat me by 12 points. I am not a superb bowler but I was having a good day:)

I wonder if you can get college scholarships for bowling?  What about a soccer bowling mix?  We may need to let Chance go bowling more often.  If having long legs helps you to bowl better, Chance has that one covered.

When deaf and hard of hearing kids think they can hear you

Now that I have another child with hearing loss, I am noticing a trend.  They think they can hear you when their devices aren't on.  But I'm here to tell you that they can't.  Chance used to tell us, without his hearing aids on, that he could hear us.  It was actually pretty hilarious sometimes.  Like the time he was climbing up onto the cupboard to get something down.  It was bedtime so his hearing aids were not on. I was trying to tell him that I was saving whatever he was trying to get down, but he couldn't hear me so I suggested that he put his hearing aids back on.

"I can hear you mom!" He shouted, that's not a clue at all that he is not hearing well:)  He wasn't shouting at me because he was mad, he was shouting everything he said.

So, I turned my back to him so he couldn't see my lips.  He did not like that one bit!

"Mom!  Turn around so I can hear you!!"  Uh huh. So I can read your lips is what he was really saying.

Chance has pretty much come to the conclusion after all of this time that he is deaf, although every once in a while he will tell us he can hear us when we all know for sure that he can not.

My other son who is losing his hearing does the same thing sometimes.  You can kind of see him being confused, due to the fact that his hearing is not stable.  It came up in some middle pitches, and fell quite a bit in his right ear.  Just today, his brother asked him which ear was easier to hear out of and he shrugged his shoulders. He is in the moderate to severe hearing loss range though, so when he doesn't have a hearing aid on and he is a room away from me, telling me he hears me, I don't buy it. This is not my first time around the block with hearing loss:) He may be looking at me, but he doesn't yet have the lip reading skills of Chance.  He hasn't had the need to learn how to lip read thus far.  Chance is a master.

In honor of deaf and hard of hearing kids in our family, who claim to hear when they really don't, I give you Chance during the early years.

Chance at a hike to a waterfall when he was 5 years old.

The walk back from the waterfall.