Last fall my wife Shell and I attended a drama showcase presented at our kids’ school. This was not a full-blown production of a play; rather, it was a sort of informal warm up - a series of single-act pieces and improvisational exercises intended to let the middle school drama troupe get familiar with the stage and experience performing in front ( Read more... )

Micah is walking in the Great Human Race in support of CASTLE, the pre-school program for pre-lingually deafened children that Micah attended and for which he now volunteers. In short, these folks teach deaf children to hear. Pretty miraculous!

If you would like to sponsor Micah, you can do so on his very own fundraising page or on the main ( Read more... )

Micah has been participating in a long-term NIH study on pediatric deafness. As part of this study, each year he undertakes a comprehensive battery of testing that evaluates his progress in speech and language. And when I say comprehensive I mean soup to nuts-verbal skills, diction, comprehension, speech, language use, vocabulary, reading, etc., ( Read more... )

Micah and Shell were featured in an article in yesterday's Durham News. Many thanks to all our friends at CASTLE for all of their hard work. Our family has benefited immeasurably from this program. They are miracle workers.

Yesterday, while browsing through Google Books, I tripped across a section from the book Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human. The book is the memoir of author Michael Chorost's experience with deafness and acclimating to a cochlear implant. His account of the cochlear implant experience from the "other side" makes for ( Read more... )

Two items ( Read more... )

We have decided to pursue a second cochlear implant for Micah. He is currently implanted in his left ear; this will give him hearing in his right ear, also ( Read more... )

Today, Micah is visiting CASTLE, the facility that provided him with speech therapy for several years. He has been invited to join them on a regular basis to read to the kids. This provides the kids (and their parents) with a successful model of habilitation and provides Micah with a great outlet for interaction ( Read more... )