Yikes, I arrived home on Tuesday and my Kai completely rearranged our room while my mom had a nap! He can be quirky like that at times.

The bed was oddly placed, his table and chair in the middle with tea settings and the works! I boldly moved everything back to where it was before…everything has its place in my space…if you’ve read my about page, then you would know that I’m odd like this!

A few minute later though, all hell broke loose. Seems my son, okay I knew this would happen, couldn’t deal with it. Two strange people at odds with their needs! Now, I know when he moves furniture around it’s because the environment doesn’t feel right, but I honestly didn’t think it would be such a big deal if I moved things back! Never mind that watching tv would require us to have our heads at a 90 degree angle!!

He stomped his feet, broke down in tears while pushing the bed, “MOM NOOOOOOO!”, as if I strangled someone’s cat!!

I couldn’t deal with how my inability to adapt to what works for him affected his state of mind and promised to move the bed back to the way he changed it before I went to sleep. Later, much later, like 10pm, I moved the bed back into the odd position and crept in beside him. A promise is a promise after all, especially since we came to a compromise…

I wish you could have seen his face when he woke up in the middle of the night and looked around him, doing a double take, smile that smile that’s says “yay, awesome she kept her promise!”, turn around and went back to sleep.

Anyway, in the morning I asked him to move the head side of the bed against the wall ’cause our pillows kept falling off the bed during the night. I explained to him where to place the bed, how to move his desk, and allow for lots of space on the one side of the bedroom so that he could bounce around on the exercise ball and ride his bike, etc.

Arriving home from work, I was impressed with the new arrangement of furniture, an improvement from having the bed placed at a strange angle in the middle of the room!

This new move however, was not a good idea! Sitting in bed, talking to him, he kept looking at me a bit blankly, we kept having to repeat ourselves, “sorry, what, huh?”. OUR VOICES WERE BOUNCING OFF THE FREAKIN WALLS!

Flip! Never underestimate the impact a “small” move can have on the quality of your listening environment.

“Kai, this is not going to work! Our voices are echoing too much!” , “Huh, sorry, what did you say” It literally sounded like we were in a cave, with our shadows repeating everything were saying!

Acoustics are paramount when you live with hearing impairment. This has been my first experience at home where our placement of furniture did not work well. Never mind that I never really paid any attention to how our furniture arrangement impacts on reverberation at home.

Needless to say, we moved everything back to the way it’s always been, no tears, but a promise to paint our walls at the end of the year and maybe look at creating his own little space in our room – a partitioning with dry walls! Our new exiting project 🙂

You learn something new everyday!