Improvise

When I was a kid, I was the queen of ‘make-do’. If I couldn’t find a hammer, I’d use the heel of a shoe to drive in a nail. If I had no access to a drill, which in hindsight was probably a good thing, I’d use a screw and screwdriver to predrill a hole. If I couldn’t find curtains, I’d make curtains out of old fabric. No curtain rods? Well, push pins worked great. I remember playing baseball with my older brother using a 2×4 as a bat and blocks of scrapwood as baseballs. I also remember pegging him square in the forehead with a scrapwood block, which I thought was hilariously funny, but for some reason brought about the end of block baseball.
An ingenuitive kid WILL find a way to ‘make-do’. History, fiction, and literature are filled with some of the most entertaining stories of kids finding some way to make what they need. Instead of stopping their plans because they don’t have just the right tool, they find a way.
They improvise.
Kids naturally do this. Not every child to the same degree, but in some form, some way, all kids do it. My daughter does not have access to a real kitchen, with utility tools, oven, sink, microwave, etc. but she will pretend that all of those things are at her disposal when she is making a special imaginary creation from her pretend kitchen.
Kids don’t stop improvising unless their ideas are constantly hindered. Kids don’t give up, unless they are taught to give up.
A child doesn’t know that something is ‘wrong’ with them until someone they respect tells them that something is wrong with them.
A deaf or hard of hearing child has no idea what they don’t hear. And that is fine. They improvise. They compensate. They are little four year olds who look at a sunset and say, “That is pretty,” in sign language. They are the little 5 month old babies who see a happy smiling adult and give the biggest sweetest grin back. They are the kids who watch body language closely and can usually sense what hearing peers cannot.
Which means, parents, they watch you closely as well. Do you improvise? Do you ‘make-do’ until you can either find the right tool or finish the job? Are you one of the parents that refuse to give up no matter what obstacle is put in your path?
Learn from your kiddo, improvise.