deaf education

raising our deaf son, Ellis

Parenting a Deaf Kid as a Hearing Parent: Four Years In

E09

Ellis runs ahead of me in all his four-year-old boy vivacity. As I lumber along with the baby on my back, lugging our little bag full of snacks and water bottles, I watch him, waiting for the moment, just before he disappears around the corner, when he'll turn around and make eye contact. I wave him down signing WAIT FOR MOMMY! but he's already plopped down on the park bench and signs WAIT. As I get close, up he pops again, and I watch the back of his head bounce, jump, and dash along.

Cut to later. Ellis is picking up his fifteen-month-old brother. Again. He adores his brother, but sometimes his love is a bit too lavish. I kneel down, fully intending to affirm his love, but to talk with him about more appropriate ways to express it, while firmly prying his arms away from the baby, who is screaming his head off. Ellis drops to the ground, flailing and squeezing his eyes shut.

Four years ago, when we learned that our brand new baby was born profoundly deaf, we knew our experience as parents would be different. We got a kick out of being able to vacuum in the same room as a sleeping baby. We cheered at his vocabulary of ASL at such a young age. We stomped the floor to get his attention.

However, I feel like it's only been this year that I've really begun to get a glimpse at what it means for Ellis to be deaf, and deaf in our hearing family. I've started to see how he settles himself socially. Personally, I'm starting to see the particular ways I fall short as a parent. True, nobody is a perfect parent, but I'm speaking of the ways in which I struggle as a Hearing Parent of a Deaf Kid.

The primary aspect of this unique experience is communication. We are settling into the bilingual dance between spoken English and ASL. Two years ago Ellis got a CI. He's doing pretty well with it, his receptive language is stronger than expressive. I can talk to him without signing through the simple aspects of our routine and that works out fine. He doesn't like to wear it at home. We don't press him to, but, I will admit, I may or may not have bribed him with chocolate milk to wear it at home sometimes. He wears it at school or usually any other time when we're not home. He is most comfortable with ASL, and that is the language we use with him primarily, even if we are speaking, too. This is especially true in discipline situations, where I need to use whatever language we have to its fullest, and since ASL is his preferred language, that is what I use.

From the beginning, we've pursued our education in ASL vigorously. We've taken classes, lived in the dictionary, had Deaf Mentors. But we are far from native signers. We get by. We can communicate fairly effectively with our four-year-old: we can read books in ASL and talk to him about the world around us.

I have found lately, though, that my ASL is starting to fail my parenting needs. It's taken me awhile to figure out what the matter is, because I know the signs and how to use them, but somehow I'm failing to communicate. I think there is a Deaf presence that I don't have. I'm not really sure how to describe it. A way of using my body that transcends the actual signs, that enters into his space, meets it, communicates with it. Connection is a key part of my parenting philosophy and to be so defeated by the basic communication that I need to make it happen is beyond frustrating. It has deeply discouraged me in these past few months especially.

It's not all a total big Fail. We do get along, after all. We do connect. I give him as much physical presence as I can. I give him as much language as I can. And we are a happy family. But sometimes I look at my hearing friends with their hearing kids--parents and children who speak the same native language--and wonder at the ease of it all. To just talk, effortlessly.

He shuts his eyes. Bam. Communication stops. He glances away from me, focusing back to his play. Communication stops. Sure, he might pick up more than I think peripherally. But it is unnerving to have the eye contact lost. The conversation could just be small talk about his play, but it is lost mid-sentence. Is my signing that weak? Do I not have the persona to indicate that I'm talking to you? Ellis seems to think that I can only hear him if I'm looking at him. He screams my name while I am driving until I glance back giving him the visual acknowledgment that I hear him. (Dang! We need a mirror!) He also thinks that if I don't acknowledge him the split second he says my name that I must not hear him, so he repeats it at blood-curdling volumes, until I can turn to him. I'm rambling a little. This summer has been a roller-coaster. My nerves feel shot from his screaming my name, though it's getting a little better.

He's changing socially. We were at a birthday party with all hearing kids, kids he's known since infancy. Another guest, another little boy, ran up to Ellis, hi! what's your name? Ellis didn't know what he said. How much do I step in to intervene? Do I translate for E? Let it go and watch him slip into isolated play? Do I go through the conversation for the bazillionth time? oh, hi. His name is Ellis. He can't hear you, so we talk with our hands. can you say 'hi' like this? Some kids get into it. Some feel awkward and back away. Bless the little British kid at the park the other day who made fast friends with E despite his curious quality.

How do I balance it all? As a mother I want to protect him from all this. I want to make a world that fits him perfectly. I don't want to have to teach him how to negotiate through languages and worlds. I wish I had more to offer him. Yet at the same time, he's doing a pretty good job. Sometimes, I just have to stop and let go. Let him run ahead, trusting that he'll turn around. After all, I am not in control. The God who gave me Ellis also has Ellis perfectly in His arms.

spelling, counting, and politics

I've gotten some fun movies of Ellis recently. These are taken roughly around eighteen moths post CI activation.

In the first, Ellis is fingerspelling the title to his bedtime story--and saying the letters as best he can (though he's not wearing his CI in this one, because he's going to bed). He loves to spell out the title of the books before we read them. Bedtime story is 98% of the time in ASL, because his CI is off for bed by that point. Every once in awhile, he wants it on. Anyway, he's just picked up the letters' spoken names, it's not something we've been working on in particular, though I'm sure they've done it some in school. We usually do say the letter when we sign it. Here is Ellis signing "A Pocket for Corduroy."

Ellis's favorite thing right now is counting. Here he is counting his cars with Daddy. I was trying to take the video surreptitiously, so sorry if it's not the clearest.

And, of course, what's a blog without a little politics? Hey, E, who's the new president?

Discovering Deaf: Our journey

In June of 2005 our son, E, was born. E's birth was the bright spot in a very difficult year. In the wake personal loss, regret, and tragedy, E's arrival brought us joy and peace.

We had just moved from New Orleans, only a few months before Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. Our move had been precipitated by my growing dissatisfaction with my teaching job, plus the folding of the little mission church into which we had invested nearly five years of our lives. Feeling that our life there was coming to a close, I had begun to look for another teaching job. I had interviewed at several schools, but nothing had come through. With one school still in the air, we set a date for our departure. We would place our belongings in storage, since we didn't really know where we would end up. We decided to move to Philly, since our family was there. The day before our move, the final school responded: I would have a job teaching English in Philly.

My first order of business on arriving in Philly was to make my very pregnant wife as comfortable as possible in my parents' house, and, second, to make contact with the folks at my new school and get set up with curriculum, etc. Third, I had to work out how to get our belongings moved up from NOLA. Well, things didn't happen in exactly that order. One week from moving in, someone noticed that Jeannette didn't look great. They suggested I take her to the hospital, which I did. And that was the day E was born. Four weeks early, though, thankfully very healthy, a good weight, and needing no special care. That is, except for the off-hand remark the nurse made about his being "referred" on his newborn hearing screen-- a detail that got buried with all the other details of checkout from the hospital.

A few weeks later, about a week before the start of the new school year and all aglow about my new son, tragedy struck. We heard that Katrina was bad and watched in horror as it headed straight for the city that still felt like home. The morning after the storm we called all of our friends to make sure they were OK. That evening, I saw my city on the news, drowning in its own filth. I sobbed uncontrollably for nearly two days.

I'll never forget that year. I'll never forget those few months. I suppose I could say that I'm still living it, in a sense. It's been just that hard to move on. The job didn't work out. We did get out of my folks' place. Financially, we're making it work. Barely. But what makes it all livable is my son, E.

Discovering E's deafness

Discovering E's deafness was not so much an event as a process. The realization trickled in, bit by bit. We knew something might be wrong, insofar as we knew that a "refer" was not a "pass". But we had no idea what that meant. Thankfully, a couple of weeks later, the hospital made a follow-up call to see if we had taken further steps in getting him tested. Our pediatrician didn't think there was a problem, but my wife thought E wasn't startling as he should, so we got a referral to an ENT.

Our visit to the ENT at a local children's hospital marked the start of months of confusion. The audiologist did a few tests, including an OAE and an ABR, which confirmed his hearing loss. But he did not give us a clear understanding of the extent of E's loss. The ENT advised us to wait until E was older and then come back for further testing. No mention was made of hearing aids or cochlear implants. Just a blank wait-and-see. It was hard to even understand whether or not he was deaf. We just had no idea. And not knowing was harder for us to deal with than the prospect that our son might be deaf.

While we waited for more definitive information, we went ahead and contacted our local Early Intervention agency. After some phone tag and some machinations over dates, a social worker arrived at our house. She made some basic observations of E, and asked us whether we had thought about communication options. We didn't even know whether he was deaf. So, no, we hadn't thought about it. "Do you want him to sign? Or do you want him to speak?" Tough-nut oldest children as we both are, we immediately responded, "Why can't he do both?" This woman was clearly pushing the auditory / verbal approach, but that didn't seem to make sense to us. We reasoned, if a tool is available, he should have it.

That was the first time we heard the term, 'total communication'. The 'total' part sounded good to me, since my personality is to do everything to the extreme. We also liked "bilingual." We both have scholarly backgrounds, and have a handful of languages between us. We're the type who would try to teach our child French and German, along with English. So, yea, we said we wanted him to be bilingual. We had no idea what a fateful decision we had just made. We made it in almost total ignorance, and on intuition. We haven't for one single moment regretted it, and even now we marvel at the providence that brought us our next significant encounter, with S.

S came to our home regularly from Pennsylvania School for the Deaf. Slowly, she began to open up to us a whole new word of deafness, giving us invaluable information and resources. She encouraged us as we began to learn ASL and to teach it to our son. In the Spring after E's birth, we got a Deaf Mentor added to our ISFP, who was also a teacher at the school. Even with our meager signing abilities, we began to see how successful a Deaf adult can be, and we had our first glimpse of the richness of Deaf culture.

Through the winter after E was born, we began to learn more about what ought to be available to him. By the time he was 8 months old, we decided to go to a different hospital. Within two days they were able to give us the diagnosis of sensorineural, severe-to-profound, bilateral hearing loss and had him fit for hearing aids. We diligently continued to sign with him, because we believed that it was of vital importance that he have access to language. The hearing aids turned out to be of so little help to him, that for the following months he wore them only occasionally. Truthfully, we didn't see the point. Why push hearing aids when he seemed so happy signing?

Coming to terms with Deaf

We had, of course, heard of cochlear implants, and we knew that E might be a candidate. Our philosophy had always been that E should have every tool we could provide. So, we agreed that if E were found to be a candidate then we probably would implant him. But we didn't want to make this decision blindly, so we began to do some research. We researched not so much the medical aspects of implantation as much as the cultural and educational aspects. We continued to value the idea of bilingual education, to which we added the idea of bicultural education. It seemed like the implant, should E be a candidate, would facilitate those goals. Still, we had serious concerns.

Would E be accepted by the Deaf community if we implanted him? We knew that the Deaf community was diverse, and that it was divided over the issue of CIs, especially in young children. We worried that CI wearers might be labeled as not truly Deaf ('think Hearing'). We worried that E would some day regret our decision to implant him. We worried that we would come to rely too much on his audition in communicating with him, and allow our commitment to signing to fall by the wayside. In the end, we decided to stay true to our original commitment to give him every tool and every opportunity.

Parents always want to give their children every opportunity. Lots of parents push their children academically, so that they will be well positioned for college and the workplace. Other parents push their children athletically, encouraging strong leadership skills and discipline. Parents will sacrifice everything to give their children the best school, the best clothes, the best home, the best food, and so on. And yet, many children grow up deeply resentful of their parents. Why is this?

"Dad," they may say, "you gave me all of this stuff, but you never had time to take me fishing." "You always pushed me in school, but you never took the time to find out what I think about things." You never had time. You never valued having a relationship with me. I believe that is the source of most resentment. What makes the difference for our children is that we work hard to maintain our connection to them, on the deepest levels. That we listen to them. If we do this, then they will trust us, and love us even when we make mistakes-- which we are bound to do.

Will E resent his CI? I think that's up to us. So far, we haven't lost a bit of our momentum with signing, and we are working hard to connect him to the Deaf community. I suspect that many CI kids grow up completely unaware of the Deaf community. All they know is Hearing, and in that world they are 'disabled.' No matter how many assistive devices they access, they still are 'other'. They are deaf kids pretending to be hearing. And that raises all kinds of self-esteem issues which can easily translate into resentment against hearing authorities, including parents.

I believe there is an ethical issue here. If you were white, and you adopted a baby with black skin color, wouldn't you be obligated, for the sake of your child, to tell them that they are Black? Wouldn't you explain to them that you love them and want to give them all the best things that White culture has to offer, but that you also want them to feel at home in the Black culture that is their birthright? Why deny your child the benefit of community with people that share not only his color but also his social challenges? Why deny your child the support, the encouragement, and the resources for success that his 'native' community has to offer him?

Being Deaf is like this, I think. We realized early on that E would always be deaf, with or without a CI. With or without the CI, then, we would teach him that he is Deaf. ASL would still be his language, the way English is our language. Forging and maintaining a close relationship with our son would mean that we continue to learn and use ASL as a way of reaching him in his world, on his terms, even as we ask him to reach into our world, by learning English.

It's hard, that's for sure. But whenever I feel frustrated with my poor ASL skills and feel like giving up, I remember an image I saw in a movie once, of a deaf child. It was a family photo, projected full screen. The child was in the far corner of the back yard, tiny in the frame, sitting alone on a lone swing-- not swinging, just sitting, and looking blankly off into the distance. What an image of isolation, of alienation. In the past, deaf children typically headed off to a residential school for the deaf. There they learned ASL, were taught in ASL, and developed close cultural ties with other Deaf. This, of course, is a good thing.

Then come the Christmas holidays. The kids head back home to their hearing families. There they find that life has moved on without them. After all, they never did have any real connection at home, and they find that now they have even less of a place at home. They can't really communicate, because their parents don't know ASL. Thus, Deaf children feel more and more alienated from their biological families. They respond by clinging all the more tightly to their cultural family back at school.

We couldn't bear the thought of losing our son. We determined that if he were going to be Deaf, and if ASL were to be his primary language, then we would follow him into that world. We would make a place for ourselves there. We would learn ASL, make it a part of our lives from the beginning.

Welcome to Ellis Island!

This blog is in honor of our 3 year old son, Ellis, who was born congenitally, profoundly deaf. I've been blogging a bit about it here and there on my my personal blog. But as we have gotten to know more about Deaf culture and even CI culture, we've decided to create some space devoted to our experiences. All the previous blog entries have been imported here, so we are picking up where we left off with my former blog, "Moot Thoughts and Musings."

Briefly, Ellis was born in June 2005 and failed his newborn hearing screen. This came as a bit of a surprise, since we're a hearing family with no history of hearing loss. As soon as we realized what was going on and got hooked up with early intervention, we began to sign with him, to seek out Deaf adults to learn from, and to become involved in our local School for the Deaf. When Ellis was two we made the difficult decision to get him a CI. He has one CI in his right ear and does pretty well with it. He attends preschool at the local Deaf school, where he is part of a bilingual classroom. He gets instruction in spoken English and in ASL. He signs very well, if I do say so myself. He also gets weekly speech therapy sessions at our local children's hospital, and we totally heart our therapist.

We're still working out a few design aspects to this blog. But we're happy to have you begin reading!

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Dad speaks

Though I almost never post on my wife's blog, I almost always read through the comments she gets re. d/Deaf issues. Mostly I tend to stay away from commenting, because I have a tendency to take things personally, whereas she is much more measured in her responses. However, I feel like taking this opportunity to reiterate for those not familiar with our story, some of our reasoning about the CI.

It seems that most of the negative reactions to Ellis' CI center on the accusation that we are doing what is best for ourselves, and not what is best for Ellis, because:

1. We made a decision on his behalf, without his knowledge or consent
2. The decision we made significantly alters his experience of being
d/Deaf; which is to say, we have interfered in the development of his
sense of self.

The irony here is that if we really had done what was best for ourselves-- that is, if we had made what for us would have been the easy decision, then Ellis would not be implanted. From the get-go, we had the following concerns about the CI:

1. If we implant him, will we get lazy and stop signing to him?
2. Will he be 'classed' or even rejected by the d/Deaf community?
3. Will bilingualism really work, or is it a fantasy that we can give him
the best of both worlds?

Here was the argument we made to ourselves about these concerns: every one of these worries is really a worry about our own commitment and our own sense of who Ellis is now and who we want him to become. The truly selfless thing to do would be to put aside our own anxieties and our own pride in his d/Deafness and choose the thing that will give him every opportunity to be successful in either or both worlds, as he chooses.

The fact of the matter-- and this comes from years of research, training, and experience as an educator of ESL students, is that there is no substitute for acquiring language at a young age. If a child misses the opportunity to learn language at a young age, it is almost impossible to catch up. Not that many haven't done very well, but they can never equal the ease and skill of the early learner.

To not implant Ellis, but to wait until he is an adult, would leave him at a disadvantage should he decide to keep the implant on. His choice would therefore not be between the best of either or both worlds. It would be between the ease and familiarity of deafness and the labor and discomfort of hearing. Not really a choice, is it?

(A deep breath) I can already hear the critics. They've stopped reading already, and they are already preparing their rants about how the devil parents have ruined their son, made him into a moron (?) etc. Maybe we did make a mistake. Shoot, we've made plenty of those already in the two years of his life and we expect to make a few more.

Thank goodness that Ellis doesn't have to be ruined by them, though. For all the talk here about identity, sense of self, etc., I have to say that our view of Ellis's personhood is limited neither by his deafness nor, should he have been born otherwise, his hearing. I hope that Ellis is a full enough person that whether he hears or not, whether he thinks of himself as Deaf or not, he finds a way to live an honest and honorable life in whatever circumstances he finds himself.

There is no way to save him from suffering. There is no way to avoid limiting his choices in some fashion, try though we might. In the end, whether hearing, deaf, blind, paralytic, male, female or neuter., we all have the same basic choices to make about how we will live with respect to our limitations. The choices that Ellis makes in this respect will determine the quality of person he is, and whether or not he merits our respect (he will always have our love).

UPDATE: (Mom here) We just want to clarify that by "acquistion of language" we don't mean, that in order to have Language he needs a CI. He already has a language: ASL, but a CI will help learn English more easily. Sorry. We gotta run, or I'd try to make this clearer.
Dad meant by "acquisition of language" the acquisition of English, treating ASL as a given, since that is already part of our lives.
In other words, BIlingual.

More deaf blogging

I wanted to post a link to a blog that I guest blogged on yesterday. Amy and I have had some exciting conversations and we wanted to share some our dialogue, which we did on her blog. It's been an incredibly encouraging to me as a parent, yet unsure how my crazy kid's life is going to go. :-) I'm totally pumped, writing the blog entry and VIDEOchatting later. How exciting!!!!

The greatest irony

When we had a baby and found out that he was deaf, one of the first things we did was set about learning sign language as fast as possible. Signing was something I was considering anyway, because of the widespread popularity of baby signs to give babies early communication tools. And I mean, don't all deaf people sign? The answer, astoundingly, is NO!

There are a huge amount of deaf babies that are born and not taught sign language. It's ironic, isn't it? The professionals tell the parents that if they sign with their deaf babies, they'll never learn how to talk. Which is like the biggest myth ever. But it started with Alexander Graham Bell, you know, the American hero who invented the telephone? He actually had some really harsh things to say against deaf people and signing, bordering on eugenicsm. It's really shocking. But ever since there's been this ridiculous strain of auditory-ism in deaf education.

Why wouldn't you teach a baby using its strengths in those early language years? I tell my friends that so many people don't sign with their deaf babies, and they are so surprised! But we sign with our hearing babies!

Amy Cohen Efron, a Deaf blogger, made a great essay vlog (videoblog) about this Great Irony.

The AG Bell Foundation national meeting is this weekend, and many Deaf adults are protesting for the rights of deaf babies to sign. I've appreciated the polemic they've taken, promoting bilingualism, with the emphasis on teaching babies using their strength, their visual and manual senses, early on.

It doesn't seem like the protest is going very well, given the report on the blogs. It's kind of sad, because the conference hotel is very hostile, when protesters planned very carefully how to be peaceful and positive.

Are we having fun yet?

It's raining and cold. The window is rattling. It's a little annoying, because it's this low constant rattle. Grr. I think I'll go stuff a towel in it. I'm sifting through Foucault. I was up 'til 2. I'm not NOT having fun. But it's not like a blast either.

Ellis and I went to Pa School for the Deaf this morning. There's a structured play parent-kid time for infant/early toddlers on Wednesday. We've missed the past two weeks, but made it this time, thanks to the city bus, which we rode for the first time. So all I have to do is ride the trolley, and I will have mastered Philadelphia's public trans system. It's a little bit of a novelty for this girl who grew up in the country. I enjoy public trans, probably because I don't have to depend on it, but find it useful on occasion. Since we're down to one car for awhile, I'm finding it very useful that a bus stop and a regional rail stop are only a couple hundred feet from our house.

Anyway, it was fun to be back at PSD. Ellis needs to be around deaf kids his own age, and I need to be around deaf adults, with whom I can sign and watch them sign with the children, so that i can go home and be more effective in signing with Ellis. I met a delightful deaf grandma who was there with her grandson, two months younger than Ellis. Ellis and Alex ran around the room giggling. We had a great chat, and I felt the sweet exhiliration of beginning to actually communicate in another language, even though I didn't quite catch everything at first.

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Stripey ear molds and lighty chickens

We haven't had a doctor's visit in a couple of months, and man, I was gettin' complacent there. So we hauled off to see the audiologist today. Complete with arriving at the train station two minutes before the train and realizing that I forgot my cash and the ticket counter was closed. So we skipped that train, went to Wawa to get cash and snacks, and arrived at our appt 15 min late. Thankfully, our audiologist is very nice.

Ellis is such an amazing kid. He loves living. He loves riding on the train, he loves his snacks, he loves the audiologist, he loves his hearing test, he loves the little chicken that lights up when he hears a sound and looks at it, and he loves everyone that passes and smiles at him, which he rewards with a big cheesy grin. He was such a big boy today. He sat in the chair all by himself today in the hearing booth, and he didn't squirm or try to climb. He was focused and attentive. I sat on the floor in front of him, blowing bubbles and doing whatever, to distract him so that he would only look at the lighty chicken in response to a sound that was played through a wire stuck into his ear. He did so great! He kept smiling and signing chicken. Funny boy. Today he had two hearing tests, with and without aids, and he got new ear molds. Since this will probably be his last ear mold before he gets a cochlear implant, I ordered him one in fun colors, blue and green stripey. I can't wait until they're ready. And, man, they were expensive, I can't wait until this Medical Assistance thing goes through, so we don't have costs like this anymore. Sheesh!

When we had some down time waiting for a hearing booth or for the audiologist to calibrate the hearing aids, Ellis wandered around the hallways, showing off his new walking talent and waving at all the audiologists and passersby. He sure has a way of taking over a place.

After two hearing tests and new earmolds, we were pooped. Waiting for our train, we wandered around University City for awhile and went to Starbucks. He almost fell asleep in his stroller (which he NEVER does...and I mean NEVER)!

As we stood waiting for the train, the date "September 11" blazed on the lighty screen with the minutes of remaining wait for R2 Warminster, R6 Norristown, R5 Doylestown, etc. It seemed odd that we should all be standing there in our absorbed little lives with such an iconic date gleaming over us. I wondered what the platform looked like at the very moment five years ago, at 5:50 in the afternoon. Probably ominously empty as people, who would have otherwise stood on the platform in selfish impatience, clung to each other in their homes, on the street, in front of TV's. "September 11" in red lights over us, blazing its silent memorial.

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newsy bits

The last few weeks have been so busy.

* The last three weeks, Chris and I took an intensive ASL class that met three nights a week. Babysitting feat performed by my motherinlaw and a few great friends. It was a great class with just the right amount of what we needed to know at just the right level. Trying to write more on that in another post....

* Last Monday we spent the entire day with a researcher and two dissertators from Gallaudet University (the liberal arts univ for the Deaf in Wash., DC). The focus of their topic was newborn hearing screens. They interviewed us about our experience with discovering Ellis's deafness so early and how we've been proceeding since, interested in some of the choices we've made and motivations for decision making. They also videotaped Ellis doing various communicative play things. The people were very nice. We met at the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf (PSD), where we go often anyway, so that was fine. It was a good day of self-reflection.

* On Wednesdays we've been going to PSD for parent-kid play/support/information time. The kids play and have a great time, and they have someone spend some time with parents with lots of helpful issues and topics to discuss...like how to manage reading a book to a deaf kid. It's more complicated then you think. Visions of snuggling together and having the shared experience of reading a book are out the window. (But maybe because I also have the Wiggliest One-Year Old in the World.) I have to figure how to hold the book, sign, indicate to Ellis what I'm signing, get his attention to move from my hands to the book and back, somehow connect what my hands are doing to the printed word. Phew! I'm sure as he gets older, it will get easier. We do little bits right now. Mostly just labelling. Forget the story...that is a cow. What? you want to flip three pages? ok. Look there's a chicken. *sign "cow" sign "chicken"*

* Last Friday we went to IKEA. Again! Hey, we just moved. We needed a couple more hooks, a lamp, and picked up Ellis's birthday gift from C's g'ma, a little table and chairs with paper roll attached. Ellis is beginning his early forays into the world of Crayon.

* Chris started his new job at UPS last week. It's a parttime job from 4-9 AM! Aack. After he's been there the requisite amount of months, though, the benefits are amazing. Really great insurance. He's holding on to this job and trying to find a full time day job. So this past week we've had to restructure a few things. Definitely earlier bed times! (Well, E stays pretty much the same there) But I think we could both use earlier bed times. And now I lose his help at night. Bah. Especially since Ellis has been having really awful nights lately. He slept through the night a week ago Sunday night and again last Saturday night. It would've been great if we already weren't so sleep-deprived. I can't decide if he has a cold or if he's teething. Either way it's keeping us up, and it takes about 2 hours to get him settled back to sleep after that 2 or 3 or 4 am wakeup. Not. Been. Fun!

* Saturday Ellis and I zoomed off to Lancaster. We first went to visit my grandma, newly interned at a very nice retirement/assisted living facility in the southern part of the county in Quarryville. This necessitated finding a new route for my Lancaster trek. Google maps gave me TWO PAGES of directions for a 60 mile trip. Freaked me out a bit, but it ended up being straightforward, and after I got off the Route 30 expressway, it was a beautiful drive through the country, winding along streams, through the sentinel rows of tall corn fields tassels waving proudly, past bright green fields of tabacco. Gorgeous! Will enjoy future visits to Grandma.

After visiting the Aged Grandparent, I drove into Lancaster city (with it's delicious gas prices of 30-40 cents cheaper than Philly prices) to see my brother in his new house that he just bought. It's a great place. Totally the Bachelor Pad.

I took Nick and Mom to Costco, now that I'm on my MIL's family plan. Nick was after a dehumidifier. I got cute pinkness from Carter's for my new baby niece and snacks for my college-bound sister.

It's been so hot! We washed the day's sticky sweatiness off in our cousin's pool with a pre-dinner dip. I dragged Ellis around the pool on a kickboard. He wiggled his legs and grinned proudly.

There's always a cool breeze in my parent's backyard. My dad exchanged the weed whacker for tongs and grilled us up yummy steaks.

* Sunday we spontaneously invited seven people over for lunch. Amazed I had enough food, since I haven't been grocery shopping in two weeks. I love summer. Zucchini, eggplant, chicken, and tomatoes over pasta. It proved to be a very yummy dinner indeed. Our first full-fledged company in our apartment!

* Today.... I found a new produce stand--we passed it on our way to the DMV last week. We got frames at Target to hang a couple of pictures. Ellis screamed at his green balloon from Trader Joe's. I got a voter's registration card that says Democrat. It's hot, but could be worse, and we have window AC units that work.

Don't you think Ellis looks like a Calhoun in that last pic?

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