Every Thursday morning, Miss Amy, (Cole's speech and language pathologist), comes to our house to help Cole develop more listening and speaking skills. We see her at Cole's school on Mondays for an hour, and then on Thursdays she comes to visit us! We all look forward to her coming each week, but the boys especially love it when Miss Amy comes through the door with her green bag of toys, ready to play. She is wonderful at including Ryder in our times of therapy with Cole, so he almost feels as if she's coming for him too! To begin each therapy session, we sit Cole in his high chair and test how well he can hear sounds across the speech spectrum using "Ling Sounds." They are named after Dr. Daniel Ling, who established this test to see how well children who are hard of hearing can hear sounds across the speech spectrum. Since Cole cannot tell us how well he can hear right now, we use this test to show us which sounds he can and cannot hear. 
The sounds we test are /ah/, /oo/, /ee/, /s/, /sh/, /m/. Amy has helped train Cole to hold an object at his cheek until he hears the sound. When we hears the sound, he gets to either throw the ball or put the toy in the bucket, etc. If he doesn't respond to one of the sounds, we know that his cochlear implants need to be adjusted by our audiologist to help him hear those sounds better. When we first started training him in this task 3 months ago, Amy said the sounds right by his head, very close to his headpieces. Now, as you will see in the video, I sit father away from him in saying the sounds since the goal is for him to listen and respond to sounds far away from him as well. We don't want him to only listen to sounds when they are very close. You will also see that I am holding a screen in front of my face when I say each sound. This is to make sure Cole is responding to what he hears my voice say, and not the movement of my lips. 
We are almost at the 4 month anniversary of Cole's hearing birthday! In this last month he's made incredible progress! We notice a huge difference in his "babbling" and attempt and imitating what he hears us say to him. Some of the words he is beginning to say are...hi, up, help, ow, uh-oh, hop, da-da, a-ra (his version of Ry-Ry), and my favorite...po-po! You have to start somewhere, right?! Enjoy this video of Cole responding to "Lings" and while you're watching, know that it was a challenge finding footage to share where Cole and Ryder were co-operating as well as they were! You'll be able to tell that I'm trying to include Ryder as much as possible without him distracting Cole from focusing on listening! It's not easy, but we're getting there! Cole's attention span is definitely growing but one of the hardest parts about completing all six sounds on each side each time, is is keeping him focused and not wanting to move on to playing!
I took the following pictures during one home visit...
1, 2, 3, ....GO!
STOP!
GO! (Cole LOVES his truck from Gramps!)
Tie your SHOE... (you can see Cole saying "oo" here)
Not Miss Amy's shoe! (Shoes are STILL his favorite thing to play with!)
He actually walked across the room in her high heels! He does better than I do! We're so thankful for God bringing people into our life who are helping us learn to communicate with our boy and are helping him learn to communicte with us and the world! Through it all, it's incredible to think that there is no therapy need for him to learn to communicate with the One who made him. God is always listening and always ready to hear what we bring him, regardless of how well we think we sound...our honest cry before Him is ALWAYS music to His ears. What a gracious and good God we serve!
Gosh sounds like you are having fun. Mary had hers done last June so we are a little ahead of you. Although cant get her to play the 1,2,3...Stop game. She is such an independant miss.
http://deafgirl-missmary.blogspot.com/
This is our record.Be nice to keep an eye on Cole's progress. The babling is great. So nice to have their voices turned on too.
I just played the video and after just listening to it, Matthew asked me if it were a video of our Levi. Levi is only a week younger than Cole and it's amazing how similar they sound!