New Look

It is only Wednesday and this has been a big week for the Kohlers. Two of the five have a new look! On Monday we took Logan to the Pediatric Opthamologist to follow up on his esophoria. As it turns out we will now begin treating amblyopia (lazy eye). This develops when one eye is used more than the other, causing the less used eye's vision to become weak. To treat it Logan will have to wear a patch on his good eye (left) for two hours every day to try to improve the vision in his right eye. Once the vision is equal to his good eye they will, more than likely, do surgery to straighten his right eye. Apparently there are two issues, poor vision and alignment. If we correct the vision through patching he will have a greater chance of his eyes working together after surgery. Fortunately, we don't have to worry about glasses anymore, just the patch!

The first day we only made it 45 minutes and an hour and 15 minutes today. The only way we could get him to do it was to use a timer. If he was still wearing his patch when the timer went off he could pick out a treat. Jeremy joined in the festivities and has been a pirate right along with Logan.

My Pirates

Today Courtney got her hearing aids! She did great! I had a lot of anxiety about what they would look like, what would people think, how she was going to do, how I would feel, etc. While we were at Sunshine Cottage we practiced putting them in and taking them out several times. She didn't seem to mind at all. We were all quite impressed with her. It wasn't until we were driving home that we caught her with them in her mouth. Once all of the fun distractions were gone, her tiny fingers would creep up and snatch one out. I would take it away, she would cry until she would find the other one and put it in her mouth. We did two rounds of this before we decided we should wait to put them in again until we were at home where we had better distractions.

Overall, she did awesome! We go back to Sunshine Cottage next Tuesday for more techniques and strategies. This week we are to focus on keeping the aids on and not asking her, "Can you hear that?" You don't realize how bad you really want to say that, it's kind of funny! Here are a few other things we are to do:

• Keep a happy face on when putting the hearing aids on - we want Courtney to associate them to something positive.
• Point to our ears when we hear something and say, "I hear a ..., that's a ....." so she will begin associating sound to ears.
• Label everything auditorally (i.e. call Jeremy and Logan by their name not The Boys)
• Don't use pronouns - everything has a name.
• Don't panic!

Our hope now is that we don't find Jeremy or Logan with a hearing aid on or Courtney wearing a patch! It will be a miracle if we can keep everything and everyone straight! Tomorrow we are back to San Antonio for Courtney's CT scan.

Daddy and Courtney

Courtney's New Profile