Originally Posted by GrendelQ

Wow, sound like you've come a looong way in less than 2 months of "deaf awareness" -- initiating ASL, making a lot of significant decisions that will impact the rest of your daughter's life and how your family interacts within the home and with those outside from this point forward. Taking action with a sense of urgency is very good, because you are at such a critical point in terms of language development, and if your daughter has been deprived for nearly 2 years, there's a lot to be done fast.

You probably have realized that by choosing ASL, you'll need to provide an immersion environment for all of you quickly so you attain fluency and can make the shift to using sign at home as your primary language and your daughter can begin to catch up all that missing language. Do you have access to such an environment (for her, a local deaf school may have an intensive program and for you and any other family members, throwing yourselves passionately into classes and the Deaf community)? Can you get the whole family on board quickly and fill your child's life with fluent signers? That's important.

I don't mean to make the ASL route sound more difficult than not choosing ASL -- although it will be very hard for your child and you, it's not more so than if you chose a CI (although you would have a head start on knowing English well enough to teach your child). As others have said, no one who knows anything about a CI thinks it's "a fix" -- that's only ignorant people who aren't familiar with CIs who parrot that line, pay no attention to them. A CI is a tool to provide access to sound and doesn't come "preprogrammed" with language. If you started the CI route now, you'd be coming in late, as well, so you'd have to provide intensive language immersion in English, too -- either way, you've got a lot of time to make up quickly otherwise your child will face a long struggle ahead.

3X weekly early intervention with an ASL language specialist was the first critical step for our daughter, and we expanded that to 4X weekly ASL-based daycare. Family sign for our whole family was the first critical step for my husband and me, followed by formal ASL classes and a lot of interaction with other Deaf families. Wishing you well!