Hearing Loss Hack: Swim hat

So, about a year ago we found out that our newborn son was deaf. Its been a bit of a whirlwind, and we've spent the last year navigating all the audiology appointments, surgeries, speech therapy, hearing technology, and learning ASL. Its been an incredible journey, and we have met incredible people.

Having a deaf kid rocks, but what doesn't rock is figuring out strategies to help him keep his Cochlear implants on. From what we have learned over the past year, there's lots of drawbacks to CI's, and situations where they aren't terribly effective (one of the many, many reasons we are also doing ASL). One of these more difficult situations involves swimming. 

For some reason, nobody has yet been able to make a cochlear implant that is waterproof. There are silicone "skins" you can use that allow the CI to function properly, but these are big and bulky and pull down on my son's tiny ears. They are also blue, which was a terrible design choice because pools are also blue... so if a CI were to happen to fall off and sink to the bottom of the pool, they are almost impossible to see.  

After a summer of constant checking to see if they were still on (and the sheer panic that occurred when they weren't), I went in search of a solution. There are headbands kids can wear to keep their CI's on (you can find them all over Etsy) but as babies are apt to do, my son would immediately pull them off. I also don't love the headband solution.... I feel like they look a little funny and out of place.

One day, I was browsing the thrift store and I saw my solve: a bucket hat! I'm told by my teenage sisters that bucket hats have come back into fashion, and I thought I could easily sew some elastic loops into the hat to hold my son's processors. Plus, the hat would hold the coils on his head, and be easy to find if it fell off! I bought the hat (a whopping ninety cents) and used some leftover foldover elastic to sew two loops on each side of the hat, stitching in the ditch where the crown of the hat meets the brim. The silicone covers are pretty grippy, and once they're in those loops it takes a lot of concerted effort to budge them.

I think this could easily be a no sew solution as well.... A bit of fabric glue, and you're on the road.

we've since tested my son's new hat several times, and my pool stress levels have gone down about 3000%. The hat stays on, looks normal, and is easy to use. Win!