In Which Connor Feels Iffy And I Think About Ellen Some More

The little guy had two seizures today, though he didn't seem to be running any fever.  The heat may be lowering his threshold a bit, or he may be getting sick.  Or it might be time for a medication adjustment; who knows?  We'll see how he does tomorrow.  He went to physical therapy today anyway and did pretty well, so I'm hopeful that maybe these were just his usual once-every-week-or-two seizures and we won't see any more for a little while.

The translation of our letter for Ellen's latest care package came back today, so we should be putting it in the mail this week.  We're already working on another care package for her to send off in late August.  By that point we'll hopefully be less than four months from travel.  Crazy!  Now that we're really counting down I'm starting to go absolutely nuts waiting.  There isn't too much more we can do on her room, but I still need to add some shelving to her bathroom and finish a few odds and ends.  I'm trying to stretch things out so I won't be left twiddling my thumbs for the last few months, but it's hard not to just plunge right in and finish everything now!

When Ellen gets here, at some point we'll be enrolling her in Signed Exact English classes so that she can learn Connor's language along with English.  We're actually thinking we might enroll her fairly early in her language learning process, because it might be easier for her to remember English vocabulary if it has a sign hand motion to go along with it.  There's science behind this; some studies have shown that hand gestures help improve learning and retention of information. 

While Ellen has had seven years of English in school now, that doesn't necessarily mean that he English is very advanced.  Heck, I had seven years of Spanish in high school, and about all I can do is ask where the bathroom is and sing some song about all these chicks saying "pio pio pio" when they're hungry or cold.  And I'm pretty sure I only remember the song because it had hand motions.  So learning sign at the same time as English might help give her a leg up. 

Or instead of helping, it might give her strange habits like me.  Because I sign to Connor all day, every day, it's kind of become ingrained.  I unconsciously sign at anyone Connor's age or younger, anyone who says they can't hear me or asks me to repeat myself, and whenever a particularly good song comes on or I'm riled up about something.  Oh, and sometimes in a weird sort of Freudian slip I say one thing and sign what I'm actually thinking at the same time.  I also practice signing at stop lights, which sometimes freaks out people in the cars around me.  I think they mostly believe I'm doing some sort of interpretive dance. 

At any rate, we're pretty sure Ellen already knows some Thai sign language, which has its base in ASL, so maybe it won't be too big of a stretch for her to start learning some SEE shortly after she gets home.  I guess we'll just have to wait and see!

~Jess