Saturday was ASL temple day. We have them once a quarter. One of the sisters I minister to was going for her own endowment, and I really wanted to be there with her. Marriner is an ordinance worker, and had planned to go up without us, and give a bunch of the car-less people rides. In the end, the best solution was to leave all the kids home while Mom and Dad went to the temple. This was a big deal - we left at 7am and got home 9pm. I would like to shout out to the world that We. Have. The. Best. Kids. EVER. We can't believe how fabulously they did. We came home to a house perfectly clean, and a cheerful Lige (who was the only one still up) telling us how good everyone had been. Oh, and a typed shopping list for Dad with the things they needed him to go buy for Mother's day. Sam, especially, was a super-helper. Our hearts are full of gratitude for the kids sacrificing their own interests to allow their parents to both go to the temple!
We took 3 people to the temple with us: Abby, who was receiving her endowment, Jackie, who was doing baptisms for the first time as a fairly recent convert, and Jeanette, who took the train from Fredericksburg, stayed at our house Friday and Saturday night, then went home after church today. Marriner remembered interviewing Jackie recently, but somehow the recommend hadn't been printed, so he did what any good branch president would do - he interviewed her in the back of the minivan on the way up! :) Quiet language for the win! Actually, at one point, Jackie was having a hard time understanding something Marriner was trying to explain and Marriner tapped Abby and asked her to help interpret.
This, by the way, is called a "CDI" - a certified Deaf interpreter. (Except Abby is just a DI, not CDI...) When someone has a hard time understanding a hearing signer, they will understand a Deaf signer better. So you'll go through a chain of 2 interpreters to get the message across. It's a fascinating thing, and it was interesting to see a situation where it was useful! This was a concept I didn't quite get for a long time - why a hearing interpreter wouldn't be good enough. But I get it now. Hearing people are always going to think of language as words. People who grew up deaf think of language as pictures, and sometimes all those words are hard for them. Just like talking in images is hard for hearing people!
The temple experience was fabulous in a lot of different ways that we won't gush about here. On the way home, Marriner sat in the front with me, so we got to talk, and everyone in the back fell asleep - we were tired. I tried to talk to the people in the back a bit, but I got car sick from turning around (Marriner was driving) and eventually had to just ignore everyone in the back. I will confess that I feel really guilty talking in the car when we are with Deaf people. It just seems so rude! But I made a rule to not sign and drive, and if I'm not driving, I get so car sick. Driving is just not meant to be a social thing for me.
We called Lige to let him know when we would be home, and had a funny conversation with him:
Phone: ring, ring
Lige: No! You need to put away the silverware in the drawer, not in the dishwasher. Nope, that one over there. Ok, now get up on the step stool and
Mom: Lige??
Lige: Oh, hi, Mom.
Mom: Why were you talking to someone else when you answered the phone??
Lige: I thought it would take longer for you to pick up.
Mom: But we called you....
Lige: So?
(note: on my to do list this week - teach my children about how to use a phone.) (Ok, in his defense - he explained that sometimes cell phones take a long time to connect. So he was thinking of that. Not totally ignorant about how phones work.)
We will move on to Mother's day now. The branch was very creative - instead of giving the women flowers, everyone took a flower to represent their own mother - red if she was still alive, white if she'd passed on. I think it helped us turn our focus outward on a day that can be...a little self-centered.... The Primary kids sang two songs, and they all sang like angels, and signed so clearly. It was fabulous. As Sacrament meeting started, Ellis leaned over and whispered (because that's more discreet) "I forgot my piano music!" I'd totally forgotten that she was playing the piano for the Primary! She could use the Children's songbook to play one song, but the other one she'd learned a simplified version. She looked through every copy of The Friend magazine in our church bag, hoping we'd brought the one with her song in it, then finally we decided to just do her best playing the full version. It was good enough. The kids sing so much better when they have piano accompaniment instead of recorded! They're so much more engaged. So it was worth it to me, and I'm grateful Ellis was brave.
My talk went really well. I'd struggled trying to express some of my thoughts in ASL during practice, and I prayed for my hands to be loosed. It wasn't perfect, but it was a hundred times better than where I'd been earlier in the morning! I paid tribute to all the mothering contributions women without children make, and talked about how to be a mother when you don't have any children. There were a lot of wet eyes, including mine. In the second hour, the YM/YW taught Primary so the teachers could go to RS. Lige and Ellis did a great job teaching Sam's class, and Marriner made it through singing time, pausing for a heart-to-heart with the big kids about learning ASL - the language of their fathers.
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