First Words......

Hi everyone... it's been a while that I have not put news about Fakhri in this blog. It was quite a crazy busy life for me to juggle between works, business travelling, fakhri's therapy, and dealing with his older brother jealousy.

If we count from his first switch on, it has been 6 months Fakhri has access to his hearings (with his CI implant). His receptive language is developing very fast. He can now identify the toy by its name that includes train, cars, aeroplanes, bus, and all sorts of farm and wild animals (horse, cow, sheep, elephant, lion, snake, monkey), etc. He starts imitating the sound of each toys as he learned it through his AVT session e.g the cars goes "brrrmmmm" ... the monkey goes "e..e...e", etc. Most of time he name his toys with this sounds.

Fakhri also has develop some skill on imitating on demand. He starts imitating 6 ling sounds, he can do all 6, but his "u" sounds more like "mmm". His therapist says this is quite normal that some implanted kids perceived 'u' with 'm', and I read that along the time the kids can pronounce it correctly and not every kid has the same difficulty. Some has difficulty in pronouncing 'k' which is not the case with Fakhri. In addition, his 'sh' seems similar with 'sss'.

Just 3 weeks ago our family went to Pekanbaru in Riau Province to visit my younger sister who just delivered a baby girl - the first granddaughter for my parents. Fakhri was so excited. He talked/bables a lot! I have heard several times for the past couple of weeks Fakhri yell out my name as ...."Mah...." but in Pekanbaru he starts saying "Pak...Pak..." (Bapak = Father), and "Amang".... (Abang = Brother), "Ade" (kid/baby).

It seems that Fakhri is in the stage of labelling people (attaching face with name). It provides some sort of achievements when he calls out the person name like the above and the person gives response back.

His challenge is now in saying "u", for example if he says "bunga" (=flower), he says it (mmnga)... when he says "buka" (=open) he says "mmka". Also there are some words that he pronounced not really similar to what it sounds. And not everyone understands what he is trying to say at this moment, but we think it all takes time.

Our next target: Introducing Primary Colours.... Opposites adjectives..... (in and out, forward and backward, up and down, etc), and pick 2 toys out of 3 and put it in identified box.