Primary

 Hi, everyone,

We reached one year of coronavirus this week. 365 days of various restrictions, disappointments, upheavals. There have been so many good things, too. But I just want to take a moment to pause and acknowledge that this been hard for all of us in various ways on various levels. I'm so grateful for light at the end of the tunnel!

I like what someone posted on Facebook. Instead of wishing things would get back to normal, hope for things to go forward to better. 

I think my kids are getting better at sign language in one regard - they're learning to pay attention when people are signing. Sunday in Primary, we usually have two options: have class in English, or have it in ASL with a treat at the end. They generally pick ASL, but then they "forget" and talk, or don't pay attention, etc. Yesterday, I told them if they wanted to do ASL, they had to lead it. If they talked or didn't pay attention, then I'd just go to English. Boy, the really rose to the challenge! We had a really amazing lesson all in ASL! We discussed some scriptures from D&C 25, which would be tough enough for kids in English. It was funny and interesting watching the kids try to sign the scriptures we were discussing. It was funny and interesting watching me try to figure out how to explain words they didn't know without talking. (Cleave? Wherefore?) Anyway, I was impressed by them. And then we went to English to sing, because we wanted to sing lots of "songs of the heart" and English is, like, you know, our language of the heart.

But the actual cute part of my life that made me sit down and write today is Jane, for whom the Primary lesson was completely over her head, but she sat nicely (ish) on the couch anyway with her special blanket, sucking her thumb. She was especially cute signing the opening song with her thumb in her mouth. :) Go ahead and try that, it's not really easy! I think that pretty much represents this whole experience for her - she can do hard things, but really, she's still a little kid.

Codenames

 A funny thing about this pandemic - when it comes to date night, I usually feel like inviting friends to play games by zoom, but Marriner usually feels like bumming around together and being off the computer for a bit. We found this out a few weeks ago, after several weeks of me planning game nights and Marriner planning movie nights or walks. I guess Marriner gets more social interaction during the day - and definitely more zoom time! So now that we've figured this out, of course, I've been planning very nice, computer-less dates, and this week, Marriner planned a social activity! Ha! He set up a game night with friends from the Branch. This, of course, requires some creative thinking, because not only do you have to be able to play remotely, but you have to be able to still see each other to communicate while you're playing. Marriner decided to try Codenames, which is one of our favorite games. And some friends had recently shown us how to play it online. Woohoo!

Codenames originally had a grid with different words on it. One person on each team takes turns giving their teammates a 1-word clue to guess which words are their team's. Later, a picture version was invented, and that's the version someone gave us years ago. Marriner decided that pictures would match the ASL style well, so so much for the online version, and he set up a camera to show the tiles on zoom. 

Well, it turns out that it didn't really take on an ASL flavor. We said your clue could be one word OR one sign. But every time someone used a sign, they had to spell which word for that sign they meant, because the sign was so ambiguous. For example, one person signed "statue" and the rest of us thought he meant "shape." They're the same sign, you figure out the difference by context. I thought about this contextual nature of ASL while we were playing. I wonder if a group of all-ASL people would play different than we did? For us, there were many English-speakers, and the deaf people were strong English users, so the ASL didn't match the specific thing we were trying to say. But I wondered if another group, say, of people who grew up just using ASL, would really jive with the visualness of the game and be really amazing at it? But as I thought about it, I decided that the contextuality of ASL would kill that - because there are such huge differences in meaning based on the context. Which, of course, there is none in a 1-word clue!

So, we played a very English-y game of Codenames in ASL, and had a blast. We played girls against boys, and it was very evenly matched. At the very end, after 4 games, it all came down to the last tile, where the girls guessed the assassin instead of the secret agent, and the boys won. It used every bit of technology all of us had - zoom on the computer, the game board on another device. But it worked!

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Saturday, Ellis and I took the kids of my ministering sister to the park, just to do something nice for her. The idea was to give her time to get some work done, but we stayed and chatted for like 45 minutes before we left, so I don't know if we came out net-zero or not. :) While we were chatting, I just felt a big emotion bubbling up that I can best describe as...I dunno, gushiness? I just wanted to blurt out to this family, whose oldest is in Kindergarten, that they're just amazing, and they're doing awesome, and I'm so happy and proud to be their friends. And I totally had this flash back to when we had young kids, and how baffled I was by people saying things like that to us. But it's for real! (Though seriously, it made me feel old...) Maybe once you've been through the fire of young parenthood, you're pretty sure it's so hard, nobody else in the world will want to do it. So when you see someone trying, you're just so happy that the future is going to happen, after all? Or maybe you're really gushing to yourself, as you see yourself in them, telling yourself to keep going, you're going to make it after all. 

This happened again this week, as I watched Marriner's counselor and his wife passing off their baby as he conducted the meeting and she led the music. These young families, they're doing amazing things. And they're doing it in two languages, and navigating all the extra obstacles that deafness brings. And I just have this urge to gush, and tell them I just think they're amazing. Which, really, means I'm getting old. I'm ok with that.

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A few months ago, we required all family prayers to be in ASL, because the younger kids would never sign. They'd just sorta stare at their plate during dinner, hoping the conversation would happen over their heads. This worked very well at getting people to sign, but the next step was getting the little kids to pay attention to what people were signing. So one day, I asked the kids if anyone could tell me something someone said in the prayer. Of course, they couldn't, but the next prayer, they could...

It worked very well for a while, then Martha got tired of it and zoned off. Sam is still doing ok at paying attention, depending on the day. But Jane LOVES this game. Generally, about the time someone starts signing, "In the name of..." Jane signs "AMEN!" (or not...) and then shouts, "I can tell you what was in the prayer!" So then we tell Jane she has to wait until the WHOLE prayer is over, make the praying person do the end of the prayer again, in which Jane waits about 3 seconds longer, then yells even louder, "I CAN TELL YOU WHAT WAS IN THE PRAYER!" Ok, Jane, what was it... Sometimes, she says something simple like, "I saw missionary!" But sometimes, she actually understands waaayyyy more than we thought she could. It's fun seeing her, with her little kid inherent language learning capabilities.

Actually, she did this on Sunday - they were announcing a branch activity with popcorn on Saturday, and Jane shouted out, "I saw popcorn!" Ha ha!! I'm glad she was paying attention...and I'm sure everyone else who heard her was, too :)

We figured out how to sign coronavirus today!

 Guys. Ten and a half months later, my little kids FINALLY figured out the sign for coronavirus today. Despite seeing it pretty much daily for the last....probably nine and a half months...

It took a while for a sign for coronavirus to come about. There were a few different signs we saw at first, and it probably took a month before the consensus was formed. So the first month of the pandemic, we just used "CV" as our shorthand (ha!) for coronavirus. But once we learned the actual sign, all the old people switched over. The little kids doggedly stuck with "CV" until this week. And for some reason, Martha started using the actual sign. Today, Sam saw it and joked about Martha praying for cheese (the signs have...some...similarities...sorta....) (But Sam has never been bothered by things like that, his main goal is to be silly.) And BOOM - the sign is now popular. Everyone used it in their prayer. 

Kid psychology on display here :) I wonder what other signs I should joke about to get my kids to use...hmmm....

Snow Day

 Do you know how long it's been since it snowed in DC? That would be 711 days, per the Washington Post. (As measured by at least 0.5" being recorded in the District). (Because less than a half inch really doesn't count if you want to play in the snow, which is what we want.) So today was a great day! We had a good solid 2 inches of snow, at least on the grass. The sidewalks didn't accumulate much on our side of the street, though our neighbors across (north facing) got some snow to shovel.

Snowy weather is a complex thing in DC, which I know most of the country doesn't understand. But despite owning snowplows and large silos (sheds?) of salt, DC strongly prefers to just shut down if it snows. We know it is very Southern behavior, but the truth is, snow is like Russian Roulette around here. The forecasts are tricky, and if they're wrong, lots of people get in trouble. Because it's a huge metropolitan area, and it only takes a few crashes on the freeway before millions of people are stuck on the road for hours. Believe me - about 5 years ago, we had several friends spend the night in their cars when a snowstorm ended up being much worse than expected, the roads turned to ice, and cars that got stuck were abandoned on the road. Thousands of people waited for the sun to come up and melt the ice, because the police literally couldn't do anything. Oh yeah, and there was that one friend of ours who drove to work, but couldn't drive home because the roads were so messed up. So he took the metro to try to get to where his wife could pick him up. But then the metro shut down because it was too dangerous to run the trains, stranding him close to our house. He called and asked Marriner for help. Marriner drove a mile towards the metro, got stuck and couldn't move, pushed his car off the road, walked home, and called our friend to say sorry, couldn't help. The friend ended up walking several miles to the church and sleeping in the clerk's office. For a few hours, I think he got in like at 3am. 

The thing about DC is that the temperature is often close to freezing this time of year. If the air is just a little above freezing, we get rain. If it's below freezing, we get snow. But if it hovers right about freezing, we get ice, which is literally the worst. Sometimes we get snow that melts, then re-freezes. Sometimes we get plain rain that freezes. Either way, it's going to turn into ice and be nasty to drive on. Just today, Marriner and I were remembering what it was like back in UT when you make sure not to drive too slow on the snow so you don't get stuck. Because the snow doesn't automatically turn into ice the minute you touch it. Those were the days.

ANYWAY, all of this is to say that things tend to shut down here on snow days. Especially now, where we're sorta shut down anyway, there's pretty much a don't go out attitude. 

Today (Sunday) was a snow day. We woke up to a coating of snow, and it was supposed to grow throughout the day. Now the forecast had started as 4-12 inches and been downgraded to 3-5 inches, so the storm seemed to be under-performing. But I was sorta in the "Why not shut down and just not worry about it?" camp. Marriner maintains his true Utah roots. He didn't think things looked very bad, and we could get to church just fine. Especially since we hadn't met in person for 3 weeks in a row (covid exposure and stake conference) and some people had been waiting for a long time for the sacrament. I did not like this idea - I had planned my schedule for the morning around leaving for church (the family room) at 10:20, not 9:45. But Marriner was right - the roads looked completely fine, snow was barely sticking at all. So we went to church. And the roads were absolutely not dangerous. There was just us, the missionaries and one elderly person there. We watched the service on zoom in the chapel, then had the sacrament together. Marriner was really touched by the unique service. I confess, a non-related issue related to some children's behavior kept me from enjoying the moment. Why do some kids hold grudges for so long, anyway? But in the end, I was glad we went. I was even glad we took the grudge-miesters. 

Tomorrow is back to normal life. Despite having 100% distance education right now in our school district, we get a 2-hr early dismissal tomorrow because of the snow. Now that's more like what I expect from this area :) 

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Can I just muse for a second about why my kids rub their tummy to sign please, instead of their chest? Are kids' chests just so small, they can't easily access them? Do they just not distinguish between the two, since they're flat all the way down? Are their cute, protruding tummies easier to reach? Does it have to do with their arm-to-body-length ratio being different than an adult's? Whatever the reason, my little kids all rub their tummies to say please. Sometimes they get going so fast when they say "Please bless" that they catch their shirts on their fingers and pull them up to their chins (both the fingers and the shirt!) It's ok, they're little, nobody minds a 3-year-old belly button. Their funny location is even funnier when they're blessing the food. It looks like "Yummy, I'm so hungry - bless the food!" :)

Ok, ok, enough musing, Marriner finished his work, and I'm going to bed. Happy Snow Day, everyone!

Sunday at home

 We stayed home for church this week. Not because of the coronavirus pandemic, but because of the political outbreak infecting our area. We live far enough away from DC that we are rarely affected by downtown drama. We just stay home and act normal.  Except now, our church building is downtown, so Marriner had to consider whether it was safe to go to church. I never thought I'd be in a situation like that, but here we are with so many reasons to consider whether it's safe to go to church, we don't even know what to do with ourselves! Ha ha. And Sigh. And Groan.

ANYWAY. We had a lovely zoom church - Jane loves those. Right at the beginning, Marriner got a text from someone at the church, who hadn't seen the announcement that church was canceled. So with some consideration, we invited him to come to our house (which is one of the closest in the branch to the church building) and at least get the sacrament with our family. He showed up right as the talks were ending, then we went straight into the sacrament. But with all the bustle, we'd forgotten to plan for a sacrament song, and we felt some urgency to get the sacrament done quickly (just trying to minimize risk). So Marriner grabbed Ellis to play the piano and Lillian to lead the music - Lige had just washed his hands to pass the sacrament. And then, oh yeah, we need to do the song in ASL...that means we need a music stand for Lill, and oh yeah, does she know this song in ASL? And she didn't. But she acted very professionally, and just quietly looked over the song, then interpreted it herself. And guess what, it was really lovely. She did such a good job. I have no idea what good this talent she's developing will do her in her life - it doesn't come up much except in unique circumstances. But at least it will be something interesting to tell her kids. "Did you know that when I was a kid, I was a pretty good ASL music interpreter?" Ha ha!

Martha had a funny moment covering up a mistake the other day. You know those moments when you go to pray, and you automatically say, "Thank you for the food..." and then remember that you're not eating right now, and feel silly. Martha totally did that. She started to sign food:

www.lifeprint.com

And quickly catching her mistake, she pivoted immediately, flinging her fingers up into the sign for "mom":

www.lifeprint.com

 She carried on as if nothing had happened, "Thank you mom's finger is getting better..." Not bad, Martha, not bad at all. :)

Comprehension vs recollection

 We were driving today and Lillian asked a question about something going on in Young Women. Ellis said, "You know the answer to that! I told you about it at our meeting last week!" Lillian claimed no memory of it.

What Ellis doesn't yet realize is that there are levels of language proficiency. At first, you don't know what the heck is going on, then you sorta get the topic, but not the details. Then you get the details, but it takes every ounce of your brain power to get there. Then you finally reach the point where you get it all without intense concentration.

Lillian was operating in level 3: get the details with all the brain power you have. I think I spent most of my mission there. And the reason I think that is because I'm a lot like Lillian - I understood what was going on around me, but there are a lot of things I don't remember now, years later. I think when you're using all your energy to understand, you don't make it to a deeper level of comprehension that tucks that information away for future use. 

This is useful when you're the Branch President's wife, which is a phase of life most people don't really want to remember. Just kidding - that was 100% a joke. All the parts of this job I want to forget are the parts not conducted in ASL, so it doesn't even apply. :) 

Sam was baptized yesterday, and I've been pondering if he'll remember his baptism better or worse because it was in ASL. I'm pretty sure he'll remember the messages worse - but do any of you actually remember anything about the talks or blessings given at your baptism? If you're lucky, you remember the treats at the end, right? But maybe the novelty of watching his brother and dad sign the prayer and confirmation blessing to him will help him remember the day a little better, if not the things people said. Or maybe the novelty of wearing a mask the whole time, dealing with Zoom, or being the only people in the room... So you know, lots to make it memorable :) Maybe all those things cancel out to make one fairly normal baptism...hmmm...probably not!

The big meltdown

 Yesterday, I started new year - new me. I'd fallen off the Primary bandwagon a bit because of adding in Sunday School to our schedule and the fact that getting the kids to do Primary is a lot of energy, and I was sorta tired. So we skipped it (or did a really lazy version of it) for a few weeks. But yesterday we had a real Primary, and we even did it in sign language! The kids were excited because they got to move up to their new classes! Yes, Jane is actually officially in Primary now! She's out of nursery, and a proud Sunbeam. Not coincidentally, we've sung "Jesus wants me for a Sunbeam" like 10 times as a family since Sunday...or, as Jane called it, "You are my Sunbeam". 

Martha was already in the CTR class, but she didn't know that was the name of it. Sam moved up to the Valiant class. So they're all in "new" classes now. Which makes absolutely no difference in home church. But it still made people excited to be growing up, so we celebrated. We taught Sam and Martha the theme songs for their classes. (Choose the Right Way and I will be Valiant) on the drive to church. So in Primary, we let kids pick what song they wanted to sing, and Jane of course picked Sunbeam. Then it was Martha's turn, and she said, "CTR!" and I signed, "Voice off - how do you say that in sign language?" And to my astonishment, she just melted down in a huge tantrum. "I don't know how to sign that!" Uhhh.... Ellis came upstairs right then and looked at me like, "What's up?" and I signed back, "Martha can't figure out how to sign 'CTR.'" Of course, Martha did not see this clue, because she was busy crying. So then Jane blurts out "C (signing C while saying it) - T...Mom, how do you sign T? - R (with the sign)" Martha also ignores this clue, and starts throwing a real fit, so she gets put in bed, and we sing the CTR song without her. Cuz Jane asked for it, in sign language.

If it makes you feel any better, Martha came back about 10 minutes later, much calmer. She never asked for the CTR song, but Jane asked for it again, so Martha got to sing it. If you hadn't noticed, Martha's in an anti-hard-work stage right now, and even if it's NOT hard work, she'll get mad if she THINKS it is. I think this is mostly just from the stress of online school, and I'm sure it will work itself out soon enough. But in the meantime, it makes for some pretty funny situations in the house - like melting down over how to sign "CTR." Well, she'll look back and laugh at it someday - which is why I'm writing it down :) Love ya, Martha! Even though you make Primary tough right now!

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On a related note - fingerspelling. We should do it more with the little kids. But when a kid can't read, it takes a mighty leap of faith to think they'll figure out what B-R-E-N-T means, since it's not a word that comes up all the time. To be honest, I'm not sure that a hearing kid will understand fingerspelling before they learn to read. I know deaf kids do. It's just the difference between primary and secondary language. So, we don't emphasize fingerspelling a lot. As you can tell by my terrible fingerspelling :) The best fingerspeller in our house is probably Sam, who upon learning to read suddenly found it wayyyy easier to just spell everything. My friends tell me this is pretty normal, and just the worst when it's your kid doing it. Fortunately, Sam is growing out of it (though Martha clearly is not growing into it yet!)

ANYWAY...we have a lot of friends and family with coronavirus right now. So we're praying for a lot of people. In the past, we've just used their first initial instead of spelling their name, and everyone just knows who we're talking about. But we're getting enough people on our list now that it's becoming more and more impractical. I'm thinking at some point here, we're going to have to break down and spell people's names! Either that, or just use their initial and mouth their names really big :)