Wild nights at the Kitch house

We have the craziest, wild nights in our house.

Guess what we do for fun some evenings?

Regularly scheduled auditory maintenance.

I should explain...

Travis is in charge of hearing aid maintenance - battery up keep, cleaning and drying ear molds, syncing the FM systems, and general hearing aid trouble shooting.  Trav is a hearing aid guru.  I'm serious.  He spends a lot of time with those little buggers.  Morning and night there is prepping to do.  Cleaning hearing aid molds at least once/day (perhaps more during heavy wax season...more on that in a bit).  I'm so grateful he 'gets' those little systems and can keep everything straight. 

Then there are the kids' ears.  This is a team effort.

We all have ear wax.  We all deal with it in our own little way.  Then there is the ear wax situation when you wear hearing aids.  I believe (note - nothing scientific about this, just personal parental experience) the poor auditory system is confused when hearing aids and hearing aid molds enter the situation.  Does the system think "foreign invader" and go into overdrive earwax production?  I kinda think so.  Anywhoo, the kids' ears require extra and special attention every now and then.

We start with ear irrigation.  This is best achieved during bath time.  We have a huge dull-tipped syringe that we fill with warm water and irrigate each respective kids' ears.  We do several 'rounds' in each ear.  Hopefully we've loosed up some wax in the process.

We check the irrigation progress with one of our best investments - a home otoscope (yes, this would make a good Christmas present for some families!!!).  If this thing kicks the bucket you can be sure a new one would be ordered the next day.  :)  Anyway, we actually start the whole process by checking things out with the otoscope.  Just to size up the situation and see what we are facing.  It is used hand-in-hand with the irrigation system.  Check with light, flush, check with light, flush.  The kids know the drill.  And both giggle through the whole thing.  Thank goodness!

Hopefully irrigation has done the trick.  If not, we follow with a few nights of drops to loosen things up a bit.  Think of the drops as ex-lax for the ears!

Regardless, after irrigation we try to get in a round of antibiotic ear drops that we always have on hand.  Ciprodex is one of the greatest things ever and I wonder how many ear infections we've warded off by starting the drops at the first sign of redness.  We are grateful to always have a bottle on hand.  Standing order with the kids' doc and the stuff is great.  When we start running low we order up a new bottle.

Small trivia fact - Carson never had an ear infection until he got his hearing aids at age 18+ months.  Go figure.  He was pretty healthy in that dept. up until that time (never mind the fact he had had his Kasai operation, an open heart surgery and a liver transplant by the time he was 8 months old).

Back to our wild nights.

If we need to follow up with more irrigation we do so.  Usually within two evenings we've cleaned things out (and saved a trip to the doctor's office).

Then the kiddos experience really dry, flaky inner ear stuff every now and then.  Carson gets it much worse than Grace (at least so far).  It probably looks like swimmer's ear but it is really hearing aid ear.  I don't believe that is much of a medical diagnosis, so we call it dry, flaky ear.  Quite technical.  Perhaps years from now it'll be known as 'hearing aid ear'.  Better than 'Carson ear'.  For this pesky affliction we use triamcinolone cream.  This is amazing stuff.  Before bedtime, we use a tiny dab on a q-tip and spread it around the inner part of the ear (not in the ear canal).  By morning things look a whole lot better.  We often only have to do one or two treatments and the ear looks fab again. 

All of this gets repeated as needed.  Typically at least once per month.  Sometimes (during heavy ear wax seasons - summertime, cold and sniffles are most challenging) it is twice a month or even weekly.

I wish there was a not-so-scary mini vacuum we could use to suction all of the yucky ear wax.  Do you think Amazon would sell it for use at home?  That would make our wild nights even crazier.

So it's pretty sad when the kids see the ear light come out and they lay down on the over sized pillow in the living room so we can get a good look at their ears.  It's the stuff wild nights are made of.

* Note - we are in no way getting pharmaceutical kick-backs for mentioning ciprodex and triamcinolone cream.  We just love the stuff and how each medication helps our kiddos.  And that makes us happy parents.  :-)