Deafness

I know that I am not usually a blogger of issues of seriousness, but this morning while I was drying my hair, I was thinking these thoughts and I was wondering if anyone could answer them for me.

When I go to sleep at night we leave the door to our room and the baby's room open so that I can hear him if he cries. Then, when I wake up in the morning, I close our door and turn on the baby monitor so that I can hear him when he wakes up. This morning, I got up and got into the shower before he woke up. Right about the time I started to get ready to dry my hair, I heard him wake up and start "talking". Our baby monitors are really sensitive and I can hear him breathing at night. They also have this feature where there is a light bar that lights up with the amount of noise that the baby makes. So, while the noise of the dryer is going, I can see that he is talking, but not crying, because the noise isn't a sustained noise, just an every so often noise. This is where the thought comes in...

How do deaf parents hear their babies cry? How do hearing children of deaf parents learn how to talk when they don't have a bunch of talking noise to model their sounds after? This is just the kind of things that I think about when I am listening to the best sound in the whole world... a child learning to form words. The only other sound that is better than that is his laugh.

So, anyone else ever thought about this deaf issue or is it just me?