My Willing Hands: Ministering

Sunday, we invited one of the sisters I minister to for lunch. She's a new student at Gallaudet who is married with 3 children (the youngest is 18). She left her family back home to go get her degree. Obviously, it's tough. I enjoyed having someone other than kids to talk to on Sunday afternoon, and she seemed to enjoy getting off campus and talking to adults. Ha. I was a little worried about being hospitable, since it's hard to cook and sign at the same time. But the kids volunteered to make lunch so I could talk. They were having a lot of fun, and decided to do a restaurant. So, our friend got to experience the gourmet food at Tropical Klondikes, which is the name all our pretend restaurants have. It stems from the first time the kids ever did a pretend restaurant for a date night for their parents, maybe 7 years ago, and I have no recollection of how we came up with that name. Maybe we were having stir-fry and ice cream on the menu? (Maybe that was the time we tried Baked Alaska for the first time? It didn't turn out really great...) This time, the restaurant specialized in grilled cheese and tomato soup. We both had the pesto monterrey jack. It was pretty amazing stuff! The first time we went to Tropical Klondikes, I pretty much did all the cooking, and the kids just put the food on plates and brought it out. And that was about as much as they could do handle! This time, the kids did everything except for slice the bread. They made homemade tomato soup, created various grilled cheese sandwiches, made a menu, mixed juice, and everything. They're getting so big and capable! And they did it all in ASL, except when they wanted to ask a question without our visitor overhearing. (Mom, are we allowed to have dessert?)

After we ate lunch (which really became dinner, we didn't eat until almost 5) and Marriner made it home and we sat around and talked some more while Marriner ate, our guest said and old missionary from their deaf branch in CA had just texted that he was in town, and was actually staying at a hotel close to our house, so he came over to visit. He had a close female friend with him, who is hearing and learning ASL (because, you know, she's really likes this guy, as she put it to me later on...) Well, it turns out that SHE served in the Cauayan, Philippines mission. So we had one group signing and another group speaking Tagalog. As we spoke, our hands were naturally filling in words we couldn't remember in Tagalog with the sign. No need to throw in any "kuwan" or conjugate the word for what (mag-ano ka ba?) Both our brains were clearly working through the 3-languages-at-one-time thing in the same way. All-in-all, the evening was a blast, and I was glad to meet some wonderful new friends!

Oh, speaking of brains processing languages - this is from our two-year old, as reported by Marriner. He says that when he helps her pray, when he uses the sign for "now" or "today" -