Birds....

I am making such progress with the CI that I am trying hard not to get ahead of myself. My speech and language therapist at the RNTNE Hospital tells me not to run before I can walk, but the running ahead is fun. Now that I can hear conversation after one mapping session (one delayed courtesy of an illness for me that kept me confined to bed and off work), I've been consciously pressing the boundaries - listening to speech radio (BBC Radio 4 has the most wonderful afternoon plays), listening to spoken word recordings and following the text in a book and watching TV with the subtitles off, all with the intention of pushing me be less reliant on visual clues.

However, I have hit a small stumbling block in the mottled, feathered form of a bird regularly chirping outside my window at home. Now I know that birds are loud and that the human ear has come to, as it were, recess the sound; but the CI can't do that on it's own. At the moment I am trying to get to grips with a world in which the sound of a bird chirping can prevent me hearing other things and find a way of getting the brain to recess the sound. It'll come. I know it will. Until then, if anyone knows of a humane, efficient bird silencer, I am in the market for one...