Decorating your child's hearing technology

Years ago I was chatting to a good friend about decorating our children’s magic ears. At the time, her son was about a year ahead of us in his cochlear implant journey. She told me about washi tape and I bought a selection - it was cheap as chips and I bought colours that would go well with the various different outfits Princess had.

I decorated them once or twice, but Princess didn’t notice and wasn’t bothered so I stopped. She loves her ears most of the time, but they are already baby pink and I think that was enough for her at the time.

She has never had a problem wearing her cochlear implants and we’ve always given her the choice to wear or not so she was in control. The only exception was at school because no one could sign yet.

Anyway, scroll forward to yesterday when she was ‘tidying’ her room. Every parent knows this actually means they pull out everything they’ve forgotten about to play with and make the mess worse, before eventually getting told off and actually putting things away! In the initial destruction, she found half a dozen rolls of washi tape and asked me what they were for.

I told her why I’d bought them and she was fascinated and wanted to decorate them immediately.

We did each piece differently (and not very neatly as you can see), but she is very happy with the result - wanting to wear them to school to show her friends and teacher.

I didn’t need her to ‘own her deafness’ as she already has that down to a tee. Anyone who’s been on the receiving end of “I’m deaf you know” will attest to that! However, this has been a lovely next step in her journey.