1 year 2 months and 2 days. Thats 415 days, 9,960 hours, 597,600 minutes, or 35,856,000 seconds. That is how long we have had to wait to talk to our son. After endless hours at doctors appointments, therapy, and surgery this first chapter of Carson’s life is finally coming to an end. January 7, 2015 has changed our lives forever. There are so many emotions that come along with today. We are excited that Carson can finally hear us, we are still a little unsettled that he even has to go through this in the first place, but most of all we are relieved. We have a lot more issues to deal with than just Carson being deaf, but now we finally feel like we made progress. We still have a lot of work to do. Carson has less language exposure than a normal unborn child. He has a lot of catching up to do, and it’s not going to be easy. But to us this is just another bump in the road that comes with raising a special needs child, so we are ready to tackle it head on. Now on to the fun stuff!

The morning started out with Carson being hooked up to a computer to program his implant. They were basically deciding what the lowest volume setting and the highest volume setting on his implant should be. He could only hear sounds that his audiologists sent to his implant from her computer. He could not hear us talking or any kind of background noises.

This is his reaction:  http://youtu.be/lOytWU0AGO0

After his implant was programmed he was unhooked from the computer and his implant was turned on. At this point he could hear everything. This one scared him just a little bit, but he quickly recovers and we get some good smiles.

This is his reaction: http://youtu.be/B9WThUhhYhU

Although he was scared when it was initially turned on, Carson has done great all afternoon. He was smiling at everything before we had even left Nemours. After lunch I was talking to him, and he absolutely cracked up. He laughed so hard he couldn’t catch his breath. Unfortunately none of us were expecting this or had our cameras ready, so that is not in the video. We did video the rest of the conversation though.

Watch the rest of the conversation here: http://youtu.be/gopLcTUUaps