A Team Effort

We have been working hard at our house. We are helping my little man prepare for his first year of school. It has become one big team effort between the entire family. Just a couple of months ago we learned that he has significant hearing loss (you may have noticed those cool looking black things in his ears in the last post. Those are his new hearing aids). I couldn't believe it. He talks really well, and he talks a lot. I never would have known that he was missing out on half of the sounds that the rest of us hear throughout the day. This hearing loss has not only prevented him from hearing, but it has slowed his learning down significantly as well. So now here we are with school approaching in the next couple of weeks and we are playing catch up. I literally mean we are "playing" catch up. We have been playing ABC Bingo with him, and the ABSea game, as well as watching the Letter Factory. We have all been putting in an effort to help him adjust to his new ears and learn all that he has been missing out on. It has been hard for him, but this concentrated effort has been good for all of us. Seej has taken a bit of a lead on this one. She is dreaming of becoming a teacher someday. It's perfect for her, and she has done so well working with her brother. Lou on the other hand provides the much needed entertainment he needs during his learning breaks. Like Seej, she is perfect at this job and he looks forward to his time with each of them. JM and I have been working with him any chance we get as well. We try to play letter games when we are out and about and that seems to be a good way for him to show us what he is learning.

This whole situation has been very insightful to me. It's like we have this unwritten list of things that constantly need to be done, but when we learned of his hearing loss and his need for our help, everything on the list was shoved to the bottom and he quietly landed on the top. That's exactly how it should be. It made me think back to Lilo & Stitch when she always said that Ohana means family, and family means nobody gets left behind. That is so right. We are his soft place to fall right now. We are his team. We will not allow him to be lost in the shuffle, and we will do whatever it takes for him to feel good about going to school. I don't ever want to leave those double doors out front with his hand in mine listening to him cry and say he is dumb the way he did two weeks ago, and he will stay at the top of our priority list as long as he needs to. It's what families do, and one day he will be playing a different role on our little team. He will become the soft place for one of us to fall. He will become the one that we lean on during difficulty. That's what the team effort is all about. Each player is important, and each player has value. We are all MVP's here and for him that definitely means success, because on this team nobody gets left behind.