Meeting our new ASL mentor

Ah, here I am again, unable to sleep at 3:30 in the morning!  Some of it is pregnancy, it's getting mighty uncomfortable no matter what position I sleep in, but some of this is me unable to turn my brain off!  I've tossed and turned a bit tonight thinking about a meeting we had this (last?) evening.  We have decided to resume our lessons in American Sign Language, in particular because Jordy will be starting at the DCS pre-school in January and we want to be able to keep up with his signing.  It's been over a year since we had lessons and our former coach, Ritva, has since retired.  So Tuesday night we got to meet our new ASL mentor, who also happens to be a teacher at the pre-school, her name is Maggie.  You can read her DCS profile here: but we found her to be young, friendly and energetic.  And though Jordy was a little shy at first, it didn't take long for him to warm up to her. 

It really was amazing to see him watching her face and hand movements and almost immediately copying her language!  There was one moment when Daddy got one of the scarier Halloween toys out that I use as a decoration (it's a ball shaped like a scary head, and when you squish it, orange "brains" come out; when J-man sees it he shakes his head, "no," and backs away.)  After Dad put it back on the shelf, she signed to the toy, "stay away!" a couple of times and he imitated the sign right away! 

It just blows my mind how much kids pick up and how quickly at this age.  And this example really reinforces to me that we are making the right decision for Jordan, to put him into the DCS pre-school program.  He just lit up last night, and though he always signs a bit with us, he just went off signing all over the place last night!  It was great to see him excited that someone was speaking his language!  For me, it is thrilling to think that his personality could open right up, if given the right setting where his choice of language can be allowed to flourish.  Now, there may be some of you that are concerned that we don't want to encourage his speech, and that is not the case at all, we do and we are.  Whenever he exercises speech we tell him enthusiastically how great it is that he said whatever word he has said.  But I believe one of our greatest desires as humans is simply to be understood, and in particular for a child Jordan's age, there is so much that they want to express that they do not have the vocabulary for; this is even more true for Jordan than most un-impaired children.  He seems right now, to be more inclined to sign than speak, and Chris and I simply wish to give him all the tools we have within our power to learn with.  We are trying to follow his cues.  I attended a brunch put on by DCS early this month, where I got to meet, and hear the stories of, other veteran mothers of deaf / hard of hearing kids, and a common piece of advice was, "give your child language."  That's what we are doing.

That being said, this time around, learning ASL with Maggie is going to be a whole lot more challenging than it was with Ritva.  We could pick up on Maggie coming from an educational background right away, there was structure and agenda even in this informal meet-and-greet situation.  I really had to pull out my best ASL chops.  That isn't saying much but at the same time, my signing skills are more than Chris' and I need to watch in future that I am not hampering his learning by translating for him when I know what is going on or usurping the conversation, both of which I did a lot in this meeting!  And we really had to be very observant to not miss anything Maggie was trying to tell us, asking for a lot of repetition and fingerspelling; by the time we were done, I was a drained mentally.  I'm excited and we know we are doing the right thing, but it is a bit intimidating to be a couple of old dogs learning new tricks!  We'll see her again on November 8th for our first real lesson.

On a completely different topic, Our photographer has sent us a link to her blog and a sneak-peek of my belly pictures.  If you are so inclined, you can find it by scrolling down to the bottom of the blog page to the Fun Links section, it says Sneak Peeks, etc.  But be forewarned, (old-fashioned grandpas in particular probably want to skip checking out this link,) I am far from fully-clothed in most of them; as I have told my facebook friends, Barbie-doll I ain't!  But it was fun to take the time to celebrate my "baby bod'" and I look forward to having something to remember this special time in my life, which I will never experience again.  And despite my series of complications this time around, it really is an amazing feeling to carry life within.