Marianne...

Cool evening  air fills the room, the gentle song of a cricket softly beats in the background, soft giggles of little girls, happy conversations of two boys and their Legos, cliking clapping sounds from the boys room, mom and dad speaking about work, family, and schedules, gentle beats, rhthyms of music softly flows from the speakers and into the home, and high pitched squeals from the sweetest baby lips.  Those are the sounds of the home in the evening.  But for Marianne... her world is quiet.

For Marianne it is...white static....unidentified noise that sometime filters into her ears, and sometimes never reaches them. Hours of silence, no noise...no music...no sounds of laughter sparkling into her ears like sunshine sparkles over water.  For her...it is quiet...silence....then short blips of sounds that her brain is not able to identify or make an auditory pattern...different...different...For her it is called Auditory Neuropathy Spectrum Disorder.

Auditory Neuropathy Spectrum Disorder: sound enters the ear normally, but because of damage to the inner row of hair cells or synapses between the inner hair cells and the auditory nerve, or damage to the auditory nerve itself, sound isn't properly transmitted from the inner ear to the brain.  As a result, the sound that arrives at the brain isn't organized in a way that the brain can understand. It is disorganized and in some cases the sound never even makes it to the brain.

For us: we are on a new journey...familiar in the sense that we are learning to understand a whole new Spectrum Disorder...but unfamiliar in learning that sound, speech, music, everyday noise will not be the same for Marianne. 

We are learning about the two communication paths...ASL or Voiced.  We are learning how to grasp the fact that we will be learning a new language and that she will depend on us for her communication needs and that she is going to have to trust that we have done our homework about what is the best for her. 

Trust...trust...that is what Heavenly Father must have in us, our family, in order to have her sent to us.  Marianne is who she is: a beautiful daughter of our Heavenly Father on loan to us to raise and help her to return to live with Him one day.  Our journey is just beginning.  Our faith is just beginning to stretch, hopefully to stretch far enough with the Atonement for us to be able to handle the challenges that we are now presented with.  Wow, never say never.  Pray like your life depends on it, becuase it does, and laugh...laughter through tears is one of my favorite emotions.  Laugh, love, live!  Marianne is teaching us the deeper meaning of this.  Here we go...one step at a time.