Hanging out with my sisters

Three of the four siblings in my family now live in the Metro DC area, and it's really quite fun. Because we're all very careful about minimizing our interactions with others, we feel comfortable getting together and doing fun things together. We've sorta formed an social life pod. We miss our other sister in Utah, but it's been a big blessing to have family nearby.

One of the funniest things to me about when we get together is the language connection we have. 

My sister Nicole served a mission in the Philippines, like me, and we both speak Tagalog.

My sister Ashley took ASL in HS, and has stayed involved with the language. So we both speak ASL.

So I can talk to my sisters in different languages....just not at the same time... :)

ASL usually wins. Because many of the kids know at least a little, as well as Ashley's husband. And because both Nicole and I are rusty on our Tagalog. And because Tagalog isn't super useful for talking when there's food in your mouth, which is 90% of the time I use ASL at home. Just kidding.

Look at that handsome group of multi-lingual people! We have ASL, Tagalog, Spanish and Russian. Languages that we dabble in: German, French, Russian Sign Language, Japanese, and Brittish :)

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I spoke in church on Sunday. It wasn't a particularly brilliant talk, but it was a landmark - first time in 3 years that I haven't come home feeling glum that my talks are so bad! Yeah baby! I felt like I was able to explain some thoughts and feelings with enough sophistication that they didn't sound like a Primary kid talk. My last talk was awful, my hands just did not work with me. This time I prayed pretty specifically for the gift of tongues (er, hands) to be able to express myself freely. It was way better. Definite confirmation of God's hand in my life there!

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We got a giggle out of Jane's reason she couldn't tell us what people had talked about in church today: "Everyone was just being too noisy, so I couldn't understand!" Uhhh...Jane....it was in sign language....

We have an Eagle Scout in the room.

 So...actually, we've had an Eagle Scout for years, Marriner earned his award back in...1992? But Lige earned his back in January, and never got to have his court of honor. It was scheduled for March 15th. We all know how that turned out. That was the day after the kids came home from school for a "2-week break"...

Last week, Lige's Scoutmaster, Brother Scott, texted, "Hey, I have the day off on Wednesday, what if we do a drive-by court of honor for Lige?" So we decorated the driveway, bought some donuts (cuz they sounded good) and had a little private ceremony. Grandma joined by zoom and a neighbor cheered from her car. 

Here he is!

Here's our big crowd for the ceremony...

With his Scoutmaster

Pins for his parents and mentors

This is what happens when you give your 7-yr old the camera and tell him to take pictures....

Sitting down to a birthday dinner, and realizing we'd probably better take at least one picture of him without his mask on....

Preparing for the Primary Program

This week was all about Primary Program prep.

The Primary Program is an annual event where the kids take over the worship service. Usually they work for months in Primary (Junior Sunday School) to learn songs in ASL and practice talks. The weeks before, we go to the chapel and practice using the microphone. It's sorta my main job at church.

Not to say the same thing in every. single. thing. I. write - BUT....this year has been different!

Despite not having any Primary meetings since March, we decided to go ahead with a simplified program by Zoom. We gave each kid an assignment (a song, talk or scripture, depending on age) and asked their parents to record their contributions. Then our local tech-genius will put them together into a program to be played at our worship service on October 18th.

It seemed like a great idea on paper, but getting the kids to record their parts was more than I bargained for! Sunday afternoons, my kids turn into....wiggle worms.... We got one song recorded, but hadn't been able to learn the second song well enough to record last week. I was really nervous all week about how to get my kids to show up on camera this week!

The answer came in the form of...revelation! I had a little voice whisper that my kids might do better if they had an audience to perform for. Hmmm....so one night, I got my parents (who were up really late in France) to watch my kids show-off their songs. The kids totally took the bait. Everyone was so happy. Family ties were strengthened. And I got my precious video!

The last thing I needed was a video of Sam playing the accompaniment for one of the songs. I thought that one would be easy, but it ended up being the hardest of all, as he hadn't practiced the song much lately and kept messing it up. After an agonizing hour of trying to record it and messing up, we decided to make it into a duet - he played the top hand, Lillian played the left. And that worked out. We got the video. They got cake in a mug (b-r-i-b-e....) 

I can't wait to see the Primary program in its fullness in a few weeks! I know some of the other parents were resorting to b-r-i-b-e's too, but the idea of having a normal, cute, perhaps hilarious Primary program just makes my heart happy, and I think the difficulty of extracting normalcy-on-camera from a kid are all worth it!

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In another observation, Martha has been praying for her extended family lately. Some aunts, uncles and cousins who live close together all got coronavirus from one of the high school students, so they were in our prayers. Only I didn't realize Martha was praying for them. She's always prayed for her family, but she's started doing family REALLY big. 

Family in ASL, from www.lifeprint.com

 

Martha will do it so big, she'll almost fall off her knees reaching in front of her. Sometimes she bonks her mom or dad kneeling across from her. I sorta laughed at her gigantic family sign, and noted to myself that we need to hang out with more Deaf people, so she can stop doing weird things. Then the other day, she bonked me, and I mentioned that she didn't have to do it so big. "Oh, no, mom, this is how I sign my big family - all my aunts and uncles and cousins. The little one just means the family that lives here with us." First off, I love the way kids use lots of descriptive language to express things they don't have the vocabulary for. Second, I love the way she gets ASL - that's exactly the way it works. You draw it with your hands. I don't know if an adult deaf signer would ever do that exact thing, but the principle was sound.

Back to School!

 It's late summer!! I know some of my readers call this "fall", but not around here. We're enduring our last heat wave of the year (knock on wood...pretty please!!_) and then hopefully we can have just normal late-summer days....but for right now, I'm hiding in my house. Except, of course, for when I go out to pick stuff like this:

But the big event of the week is school starting! Here's what everyone looks like so far this year:

Most of the kids have been using two computers - one from the school, and one of ours as a back-up, because the internet is struggling with all the stuff they have going on. One of Lige's teachers wanted them to run Zoom and 3 different Chemistry apps at the same time on their little Chromebooks. That didn't work... But things are starting to calm down as teachers, students and parents get a feel for what works.

We have the Junior/Senior High School downstairs in the family room, and the Elementary School on the main floor, in the dining room. We found that 5 people on Zoom in the same room, trying to interact with their teachers, was too chaotic. So we spread out a bit. Marriner is upstairs in his room, where is office is. Jane gets the living room to play (quietly!) That leaves the kitchen and the kids' bedrooms for me :) 

Being quiet isn't as hard as I thought it would be - if Jane doesn't have anyone to play with, she doesn't feel a need to scream. Hmmm.... :) But we do use a lot more sign language than we used to, just so we don't disturb people. Today I realized that this is actually really good for Jane! So I've been taking the opportunity to coach her on how to respond in sign language, and we've sorta go our secret code going on. That's the best part of ASL - it feels so secret-code-y!!

Of course, our attempts to be quiet don't always work. Today, I realized I needed to grind wheat to make sandwich bread (and no, don't give me any of that "why don't you just make white bread" stuff. Only wheat bread will do for me today. Jane even suggested we make cinnamon raisin wheat bread. Yum!) So, I waited until 2 kids were on break (that's the maximum number at any time. Have you guys seen my schedule yet? I must show it to you, it's exciting) and told everyone else they couldn't make any comments for a few minutes. It worked out.

(Here's the schedule. It's great. I love how nobody has a break at the same time. I also love how the middle school kids have way more breaks than the middle schoolers. *sarcasm)

I've got one more good ASL-related story from the start of school. Martha had a one-on-one meeting with her teacher yesterday. Mrs. Elumba was quizzing Martha on her letters and numbers, to see what she knows. I guess the teacher said to hold up the number of fingers of the number she saw on the screen. I saw Martha say, "two" and hold up two fingers. "Five, " and 5 fingers. "Six," and hold up her three middle fingers...a pause..."Well, Mrs. E, that's the SIGN for six!" Fortunately, her teacher had already heard that she knows sign language, so she got what she meant. Made me chuckle, though. And Martha was pretty funny trying to figure out how to put up 8 fingers, instead of signing 8. Turns out, she doesn't actually do that much. But my mom-self was laughing that it would have been just as hilarious if she'd tried to sign 8, because she can never remember the difference between 7 and 8, anyway :)

Going back to church

 Guess what - we went to church last week!

Confession: if it was up to me, I'd rather stay home.

Not that I don't love church - I do! But right now, I can take the sacrament, watch sermons, and discuss the gospel from home. When we go to church, it's the same...only we have to find everyone's shoes. And we have to worry about staying germ-free. What does that spell? Stress!

Further confession: I know it will get better. For example, we'll find everyone's shoes eventually. And as we get used to our "new normal" we'll do a better job of figuring out how to make it less stressful.

So I'm not really THAT sad about going to church. But I seriously need to buy some new shoes. We had two kids worshiping in crocs last week.

The worst part was the music. Of course, in an ASL branch, singing isn't a central part of the experience, but for me, it is. When we walked in, there was no prelude music. That's usually my job, but I know that everything we touch, we have to sanitize, so I stayed away from the organ. Also, I wasn't sure if my kids could sit on their bench without touching other stuff or running around. So, no prelude music. It made the stringent sanitary procedures more stark. After a bit, I felt a bit on edge. I suggested, "Why don't we sing a song, to help us feel like we're at church?" So we started to sing...then we were reminded that singing isn't allowed. Sigh. We had a signed opening song - the quietest song ever - which helped me feel a little better. But I MISS SINGING! Sigh again.

After church was done, we were excused one family at a time, and left without talking to anyone. Tripple sigh.

I think it would all be ok for me if we could sing. Maybe I'll talk to the branch president about at least getting some prelude music. 

And thank heavens it won't stay this way forever!

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This week, we had church at home again, and I decided to start pushing ASL back into our church routine. Of course, the most effective way to do this is with incentives. (Cough, bribes...nope, actually, they're different. Even though they look the same...) ANYWAY...I told the kids we could have Primary in English, or if they wanted to do it in ASL, we could have an Otter Pop at the end. They voted for ASL, but it was hard for them to keep it the whole way through. Again - signing and comprehension are not nearly so much of an obstacle as the difficulty of just keeping their eyes turned in one direction! Sam got grumpy in the middle - I think signing makes him grumpy - and got sent to his room to cool off. Everyone else had their Primary lesson and enjoyed their popsicle. Sam tried about 15 more times to get through the Primary lesson - each time getting frustrated, yelling at his Mom, being sent to cool off, and coming back to try again. But guess what - he finally did it! Two hours later, he ran off with his popsicle. 

It was a long day of trying to be a calm, kind mom. I made it, but only because bedtime was observed strictly...maybe even a little advanced.. :) :) 

Coronavirus

 I've been pretty quiet since coronavirus hit the world 5 months ago. I remember one Wednesday night, looking at the news and realizing that my spring break plans to visit my parents in Paris for a month from then were just not going to happen. And the next morning, waking up to find that indeed, international travel had been forbidden. That night, the schools announced they were closing, and students would come one last day to pick up lessons and posessions before they closed for 2 weeks, to clean. One of my biggest questions from this whole period of uncertainty is is, why on earth did I not tell my kids to bring home everything of theirs from school? Did I really think the school was just going to be closed for 2 weeks? I don't think I expected 2 weeks, but I sure didn't expect school to close the entire rest of the school year. And now, here were are 5 months later, and we still don't have Lige's graphing calculator out of his locker...

So many things have happened in the last 5 months, and so many more things HAVEN'T happened! After a few weeks, I started deleting things on my calendar, to prevent grief at what we were missing. Sometimes, I missed something, and then I'd feel sad at what we weren't doing right then. But in a lot of ways, I like my quiet, family-centered life. I like not having the stress of getting 8 people all the places they need to be (together or individually) at the right times with all the right stuff. Definitely a lot of mixed feelings as I look back. 

As you all know, one of the biggest changes has been not going to church. This was a big change for all of us, but we had some unique considerations. Do we have home church in English? Do we keep going in ASL so our kids can learn better? 

It was a bit of a flexible policy. We liked having the kids play the piano, so they got experience in accompanying. That meant singing instead of signing the songs. We like teaching lessons in ASL, but guess what - the little kids do NOT pay attention in ASL. We fought that one for weeks. We tried all sorts of incentives and motivations, of the positive and negative sorts, but finally decided that learning the gospel was more important than learning ASL at this time. But the sacrament prayers are still in ASL. Lige has never even done the sacrament prayer in English. I'm sure he could do it, but... 

When you suddenly have more free time, you realize that all those things you'd always wanted to do, but never had time, you can do them now! Here's what popped onto our list: music practice, exercise, and ASL. A couple of my kids started practicing music 1-2 hours every day, and loved it. We all started jogging, walking, doing yoga, etc. A cousin sponsored a 5k race (remote) that we had a blast competing in. And, we knew we wanted to practice ASL more, but language practice sorta needs other people, so that was more tricky.

We tried some creative things to get us to practice. There was a church devotional that we watched only in ASL, then tried translating it. We. Were. Horrible. But we got the gist of it. It was good to really delve into it, and try to recognize the signs we didn't know. It would have helped a lot if we could ask someone about them. But we were stuck at home. 

Our next challenge was to watch 2 hours of ASL by native signers. After that, we had a challenge to do a voice-off day. The older kids did great at that, but the 3 younger kids hated it. They felt really isolated and ignored all day long. They picked fights, yelled at people, refused to sign, and basically made the day really tough. I think we tried doing the voice-off day too early, while people were still dealing with the stress of life upheaval from the sudden quarantine. And basically, it flopped. 

We tried another voice-off day a few weeks later, taking the things we learned from the first time and changing the rules to make things more attractive to the little kids. And that one worked a lot better. No tantrums, everyone engaged. We did it on a Sunday, when we already do a lot of signing, anyway. After the day, I thought maybe I would just do ASL-only every Sunday. So the next few weeks I tried it, but what I found was that the little kids just ignored me all day. If I was teaching a lesson, I spent 3/4 of the time trying to get someone to look at me. It was really frustrating and dull for everyone else. Who wants to go to a church lesson where the only thing the teacher says is, "Hey, look at me" for 45 minutes straight?

So, we backed off the ASL for a bit. We did find something that works with the little kids recently - we quiz them on our weekly devotional broadcast, so they are rewarded for paying attention. Because if they'll just watch the darn stuff, they'll be able to learn it. They just have to pay attention! 

Once again, our experiences remind us that this is just a little taste of the complexities that deaf families face every day. We have a lot of sympathy for our friends that battle kids not wanting to pay attention to sign language! 

One of the biggest blessings was a member of the branch offering to teach us some ASL lessons. They only lasted a few months, while she had some downtime between semesters, but I was able to ask a lot of the questions that had been holding me back, and I also got some good recommendations for YouTube channels to watch for language study. Big blessing! 

Anyway, I think we're all better at ASL than we were 5 months ago, which is something, considering that we haven't actually gone to church in that long. We've felt really blessed, even with the challenges that certain kids have presented! :) Some of us love the challenge of learning languages, and some others are ONLY doing this because God told them too - they would have preferred to take some time off while we're stuck home. But I'm proud of my kids being supportive and cheerful with their parents' antics!

Grief.

I'm going through all the stages of grief right now, sort of all at once. We've lost a lot of friends since the quarantine started. We can't mourn or grieve or comfort in the usual ways. And I feel sad. And I want to tell someone about it. So, I'm here typing to the world in an incredibly private way :)

Back in March, our friend Patricia died. She's deaf and black and had a lot of health problems. Communication with healthcare providers was always a challenge - not only was there the language barrier, there was the poor person barrier. It made me angry sometimes. But I don't think she died because of that. Actually, I don't think we'll ever know just why she died - she died just as COVID was getting bad, and they didn't have a lot of time to evaluate. No visitors were allowed at the hospital, and her brother wasn't able to talk to someone about retrieving her body for weeks. Marriner spent a lot of time on the phone, trying to help or at least make sure that the family remembered her spiritual concerns in parting. But as far as we know, two months later, she has still not been laid to rest. Maybe she has been, and they forgot to tell her pastor about it. Which would be so sad for all of us who loved her and served her since she joined the church two years ago. 

We gave Patricia a ride to church, since she lived pretty much on the way for us. She was so considerate of us - always punctual and always let me know if she was sick and couldn't come (which was often.) Before we picked up Patricia, we parked in a parking lot a few blocks from the church and walked, due to the scarcity of parking in the church parking garage. Patricia used a walker. When we started giving her a ride, we went to drop her off at the church, then drive back to our usual parking spot. But there, right in front of the church, was an open parking spot. The kids thought we'd won the lottery. They jumped out, experienced 5 seconds of sweltering heat, and were in the church. But the funny thing was that this happened every week we gave Patricia a ride. One week when she was sick, we went for the front of the church and couldn't find a spot anywhere. We ended up back at our old parking spot. God clearly loves Patricia - he reserved a special parking spot for her himself!

She was called as a Primary teacher. She cheerfully did whatever she could. When she was sick for 6 months once, the rest of us all assumed she was done being a Primary teacher, but the first week she came back, she was there in Primary, helping the kids cut out crafts. I asked her once if she thought she'd like to hear when she got to heaven, or if she liked being Deaf. She didn't have to think about that one - she'd rather be hearing. I hope she's enjoying it!

Last week, our friend Tracie died. We knew her from when Marriner served in the Anacostia ward. She grew up with all the disadvantages that poverty and a messed up family life bring and joined the church as an adult. She was the most loving, cheerful and optimistic person I know. She's like a ray of sunshine that draws you to her. She had MS, and her body was deteriorating. But she was fighting it. She tried to raise money to buy a MS therapy machine. Rich people get these all the time, and they help a lot with symptoms. But she wasn't rich, and medical bills became more urgent, anyway. There was one time we gave her a ride to a Stake choir practice. I put her scriptures and purse on top of my car while I loaded her walker...and you can guess what I did - I drove off with everything she owned being left on the street. It wasn't until we arrived 45 minutes later that we realized what happened. She was not angry or frustrated at me. We drove back and searched the area, but everything was gone. She was not angry or frustrated, just so kind to me. We bought her some new scriptures, since that was the only thing we could really replace. Then, a week later, the police called that they had found her wallet and scripture, all in good shape, only minus the cash. That was an actual miracle. We gave the scriptures we ordered to Ellis for her 8th birthday, instead :)

We haven't talked much to Tracie in the last few years, but she met a wonderful kind man who joined the church, married her, and took her to the temple. They were beautiful together. But, she was diagnosed with cancer, and the two of them had far too short of a time together. Why does it seem like the sweetest people always get the worst bodies? I know she's enjoying being free from MS. but I imagine she must be missing her sweet husband as much as he's missing her. Fortunately, they have eternity to look forward to together.

Today, as I was still feeling a lot of sadness for Tracie's passing, we got an email that just put me over the emotional edge. One of Lige's best friends at school died. Her name is Davee, and she played the clarinet. I know Lige really looked up to her, and she was a wonderful friend. And this one made me mad. It's one thing for me to work through some grief by myself, but really, does my teenager son have to do this in isolation, too? I grieve for Davee and her family, and any fear or pain she went through (she died from an accident, but we don't know the details.) And I grieve for my son, who is such an odd duck at his school, and doesn't fit in with a lot of people, but does have a few really good friends - and now one of them is gone. And it just doesn't seem fair, and it makes me want to go punch walls or rip up papers or something. (Don't worry, I'm not going to!)

So, today I did a lot of crying. (Did. Hah. I'm bawling me head off right now.) That's ok - I thoroughly believe that crying makes things better. I hope that writing these memories will be a good substitute for a memorial service for me. I just wish their whole family could know how much good their lost loved one did in the world. They were all such wonderful people. Love you, Patricia, Tracie and Davee. Until we meet again.