Hello! I echo Cloggy's recommendation of CIcircle.org as a resource, there's an associated yahoo group that's invaluable.
Our 5yo is deaf, too, and received her first nucleus freedom at nearly 2, and then went bilateral at nearly 3years old. Two years later, and she's testing at age level or above using spoken English and she's fluent in ASL. This, despite having no language input during her first year ( we adopted her from china, where her profound hearing loss went undetected at the orphanage ), and only visual input during most of her second.
She's been at a bi-bi school for the deaf for 4 years, inculcated in Deaf culture, and yet she LOVES her CIs, we get no cultural push back and you'd never know the controversy and opposition you see here even exists in her real life.
She really didn't like the various HAs we tried for almost 6 months. Because of her level and type of hearing loss, they gave her no benefit, just pounded her head with amplified noise. But, for years she has insisted on wearing her CIs from morning until she falls asleep. You can imagine how happy we were to find that her upgraded N5 processors can be worn while in the pool, at play among sprinklers, while kayaking, etc. -- we've certainly tested their marketing against reality, and they keep on ticking. We like the Freedom inside / n5 outside combination: my daughter is taking increasing responsibility for using the remote now, changing over to her music program when she's at piano lessons to hear every note, shifting to "noise" program in a crowded gym when doing Kung Fu and gymnastics to dampen down the environmental sounds and keeping to her "everyday" program while in class so she can fully access the teacher, incidental conversations with the other students, etc.
I'm not into the brand wars, frankly I think any of the 3 manufacturers would provide you with a great product and service. In our case, I've found the company and their service has been amazing -- and we liked the reliability record , our surgeon's preference for it, and the familiarity our ciclinic audi staff has with it: great audiological services after the surgery are so critical. If I could do things differently, I would, though: we'd push to get both CIs much sooner! They say it's just an incremental improvement, but we've found in practice that wearing two, going bilateral, makes an ENORMOUS difference!
Best of luck with whichever product you choose! Happy to answer any questions about the freedom /n5 combo if you are considering that approach.
