We meet one morning at the Mt Drury playground. Her kids climb and spin while she describes her migration from silence to the universe of sound.
"At around 2 or 3 I had chickenpox and we think that damaged my hearing," says Josie.
"There's no definite cause, but I had chickenpox really bad and Mum noticed I wasn't responding."
Josie says a doctor told her parents their little girl was deaf.
"Without hearing aids, I can't hear a thing," she says.
Josie starting wearing hearing aids at age 3. She says footsteps in the corridor and the sound of a car door shutting initially made her cry. But she learned to read lips, which is how she has "heard" other people most of her life.
"I'm so grateful for what my parents did - put me through mainstream schooling and got me speech therapy and mainstreamed me the whole way. They didn't know sign language. They didn't put me in a deaf school. It's enabled me to live in the hearing world."
Josie's mum, Pam Clark, says, "I never considered anything we did extra work at all. It was just what we did to get on. She always had lots of friends. She was very vocal about her hearing loss, telling everybody she needed to see their mouths."
Josie met her husband, Stefan, while attending Rangitoto College in Auckland.
"I tell everybody I married him for his cars. He used to have an RX-7 [Mazda] that would wink at me because the lights are angled down. I'd be sitting there in my school uniform and he'd be winking with his blinker, and I'd think 'Was that at me?'"
Stefan asked Josie on a date when she was 18, proposed four months later, and married her when she was 20. That was 19 years ago.
Josie started working as an assistant at the Wilson Centre for Children, a rehabilitation and respite facility in Auckland for kids with neurological, orthopaedic, spinal and other conditions.
"That's the place that really helped me to grow and accept my disability. I looked at these children with really severe disabilities and realised my hearing loss was nothing."
Josie got into nursing school, eventually working at Starship Hospital in Auckland.
The idea of a cochlear implant surfaced before the birth of her first child 11 years ago, when an audiologist suggested it. But Josie says it wasn't until the birth of her third child, Jensen, four years ago, that she started considering the procedure seriously.
"With three children, you've got more people talking to you.
"I struggled. Even my husband and I used to have the odd argument because I couldn't hear him. And there were times at the hospital when people would speak to me and I didn't hear them."
Her husband says Josie would mis-hear him, and " ... this could sometimes start friction between us as Josie may have been upset by what I've said, but I really didn't say that at all."
Josie coped with deafness because she'd had it all her life. Her muffled world was a familiar, thick-walled cocoon.
The family was living in Palmerston North in 2012 when Josie was referred to the Southern Cochlear Implant Programme. In a Christchurch clinic in March that year, she was told to expect a two- to five-year wait for government-funded surgery. She was told the cost of paying privately could be more than $50,000.
"I got more and more frustrated by then, because I'd come to the realisation I could do better, and I had to wait. I remember taking my hearing aids out and throwing them out of frustration from not being able to hear," she says.
The family moved to Papamoa in August, 2012. The new location meant Josie transferred to the Northern Cochlear Implant Programme. Within a month, she was notified she had an appointment for the operation in October. After a short surgery in Auckland, followed by several weeks of healing, Josie's implant was switched on on November 1.
At first, she says she didn't recognise noises. People sounded like Martians who spoke in sharp, "beep-beep, beeps." Her youngest son's voice was extremely high-pitched.
Josie reaches up to the cochlear implant processor behind her right ear as 9-year-old Lucy shouts, "Hi! Hi!" beside us.
"If I switch this off ... I can barely hear that," Josie says - the hearing aid she still wears in her left ear barely registers.
"All I hear with my hearing aid is an echo voice. I used to say I can hear the birds and my children. And I could, but I was coping. To me it was normal. I didn't know what was normal. I was hearing tweet, tweet, but not all the little sounds in-between."
Josie has chronicled her transformation on a public Facebook page called "Josie's Cochlear Implant Journey." She writes about being able to talk on the phone, hearing new instruments while listening to music, listening to Rice Bubbles pop and having her device tested shortly after surgery.
On November 20, 2012, she wrote: "Wow. I cried when they switched the sound back on. It was better again. I made the therapist and student weep too ... Oops. I'm getting some of the low sounds I wasn't hearing before. FANTASTIC!"
I was lucky enough to attend what Josie called her "Sound Party" to celebrate one year of hearing last year. You realise how you take noise for granted: loud children, whistling wind, footsteps, the radio - everything - when you listen to a deaf woman share her story.
Her daughter, Lucy, says she's noticed changes in her mum: "We don't have to be in the same room. She doesn't have to look at us all the time. I'm used to her looking at me when I'm talking."
Stefan says the "kids get away with less" and everyday communication between him and his wife is easier.
"We just wish she were eligible for the second implant," he says. A second implant would mean she could hear with both ears.
As of this year, the Ministry of Health has started funding a second cochlear implant for people aged under 19 who are newly assessed. In addition, children under 6 who've already received ministry funding for one implant can receive an implant for the second ear if their specialist recommends it.
Ministry spokesman Kevin McCarthy says, "A limited amount of funding is available for cochlear implants. By only funding one implant per adult we ensure we can help as many people as possible. This is not likely to change."
Each year, the ministry spends more than $8 million on cochlear implant services, which funds 40 adult implants, 30 children's implants and up to 16 implants for newborns. The Northern Cochlear Implant Programme has 68 adults on a list, with an expected wait time of 14 months.
Josie says it's awesome children can get a second implant, because they're still developing. She hopes one day for the same chance.
"It's my dream. I'm a very accepting person. Before I had my cochlear done I thought, 'Oh, I can cope. I can accept it, this is how it is ... it's beyond my reach. I've accepted it, because it's so much money'."
Even though she still reads lips, Josie says she's pleased how much she hears. She can finally talk on the phone, take notes with her head down and hear what someone's saying behind her.
"I don't cry about not hearing anymore."
