Very Good News

Some of you may not know about the worries we've been dealing with about Ethan's hearing. When a baby is born, the hospital screens the new infant's hearing. Unfortunately, Ethan has repeatedly failed in his left ear. We had to take him in for further testing to an audiologist. Last weekend, we had a test called an ABR (Auditory Brainstem Response) done at the hospital. Fortunately, we found out that Ethan's hearing loss is very minimal. His right ear is perfect. He won't need a hearing aid but may have difficulty hearing softer sounds of speech like th, k, and p out of his left ear. Kyle sarcastically asked if Ethan will think his name is Ian because of the difficulty of hearing the th sound, but the audiologist said that he won't because of his perfect right ear. We will have to watch that things don't get worse over time, but we were very relieved to get this prognosis. (On a side note, Ethan doesn't seem to be behind developmentally at all, on the contrary, he has been a little a head in many ways, so we didn't worry too much before this test.)
Here is picture just for fun. Ethan has been teething for a while and we recently found out that he likes to chew on his rubber ducky. It makes for some funny photos!