Hearing and speech

AwesomeCloud had his hearing test, finally, after months of me not making any effort to schedule him one. He did wonderfully and his hearing is very good. I was afraid he wouldn't want to sit still and pay attention, but remarkably, he did. He had a few things working against him, though. First, the facility had a fabulous set of stairs that he wanted to go up and down and up and down and up and down. Second, we had to sit in a tiny metal box of a room, which was a real letdown after discovering those wonderful stairs. Third, after each beep he was rewarded with a glimpse of Elmo. That's not much of a reward. AwesomeCloud dislikes Elmo.

I really haven't seen any reason to acclimate him to Elmo. TV and movies don't interest him after a few minutes, and he doesn't like any stuffed animals or toys with faces on them.

Then we had speech therapy, which I'm starting to like. The speech therapist is very mellow, but she keeps Cloud moving at a very quick pace. She really makes him work. At the end she told us how impressed she was that he was so neat - he didn't strew her toys and props around at all.

It's true. He doesn't try to play with everything at once. It takes him days to cover the floor with toys - I'd have to never clean up, ever, if he were ever to succeed.

That's good for our cat Melody, who hates to find plastic toys all over her beloved living room rug.

Last night the three of us went to a library fundraising event. We were asked to come onstage and talk about why we love the library. Cloud was soooo good onstage. He just sat perched on Daddy's side and gazed cutely at all the wealthy people looking up at him.

The O'ville library conundrum is a sad one. In a town this rich, the library shouldn't have to struggle like this. There's a lot of story behind it, a lot of drama and sabotage and just generally people being unhelpful. There are not a lot of ordinary people like ourselves who appreciate the opportunity to borrow books and movies for two weeks and then return them and get more. I hope seeing Cloud's cute, wide-eyed face softened people's hearts and made them want to donate more.

Some people have said it was a mistake for Barnstable to have several small village libraries and we should have just built one giant one like Mashpee. I can see their point. But we didn't.

I can always just go to Mashpee. I can reserve the books online - they're all the same books. But that's not the point.