Tooooova? Cannn yooooou hearrrrr me?

Recently Petra stuck her nose right into Tova's face and spat "Tooooova? Cannn yooooou hearrrrr me?" Of course, Tova stared blankly at her and then slapped her in the face.


One of the things about being some one's mommy is that that little baby of yours is perfect, no matter what. It doesn't matter if they tantrum 12-times a day, or if they pick crusty boogies from their muddy noses and pop those morsels of crunchityness into their mouths. It's the just the way we do, us imperfect mommies loving our very precious and perfect babies.

We're primal people, mommies, no different than sea otters or elephants. Our passion and love for our progeny is monstropolous. It drives us to insanity! We do everything we can to serve the world to them on silver platters. Any of us would do whatever it took to protect them from bad things, bad guys, bad dreams. All us mama bears here on this planet, we're mostly doing the right thing.

And, try as we might to teach them up from down, left from right and poop from high quality gardening soil, somethings sometimes still go wrong. We did our best, but our best wasn't quite enough. Tricky and sneaky things happen. Tough things that leave you wondering why everyone made you feel like adequate Vitamin D and vegetarian sources of Omega-3 fatty acids had all the answers. When good isn't good enough, you don't give up! Nooooo we don't! We sniffle, maybe pout, but we're mommies and we rule the world! Even when tricky little pooey things creep up.

Maybe your precious and perfect baby is a different perfect, like ours is today. For now, and probably since August, that's our gal. Differently perfect, with an imperfect mommy who wants to serve her up with a lively, buoyant and happy world on a cute little platter just for her.

Last week we were told with deep and apologetic sighs that Tova's recently diagnosed hearing impairment could be temporary. The "p" word (permanent, duh) was graciously not discussed. Our own hearing tests at home, like the one where you slam The Riverside Shakespeare anthology onto the hard floor behind her or the whisper into her "good" ear, confirm more selective hearing than the complete hearing loss in her right ear and greater than 50% hearing loss in her left ear that the doctor confirmed. I mean, you tell me, how does deaf baby sing on key or have such a wide vocabulary or listen earnestly to me when I sing pitchy French lullabies to her as I nurse her to sleep? Whatever it is, in the fact finding weeks to come, we know that at 16-months she's in a critical time period for language and social development. Maybe it's a simple fix, like talking louder (cause seriously, we can do loud round this house). Possibly more. So armed with our list of questions and our babbly baby we're heading off to the local children's hospital this week to see the 'best doctor' and get to the bottom of it. I know that we're all so happy and so excited that Tova is in our family that we're happy to do whatever we gotta do to make her a happy fella . . . maybe even including giving her one of Soren's ears, as he so generously offered.