Sign Language Classes Coming

Mood: charged
Listening to: Salient - "Immortalize Me"

Jennie, Keisha, and I have a great opportunity to take some sign language classes this summer starting tomorrow night. This conflicts with some meetings we have with folks from church, unfortunately.

Here's an excerpt from an e-mail I just sent to fellow members of our family group:

Hey there, brothers and sisters! I hope you're doing well.

I apologize in advance for the length and personal nature of this e-mail, but I hope you'll understand by the time you've finished reading it.

As you may know, our daughter Keisha is hard of hearing, something we've known for over 6 years. Communication breakdowns are so common, and Keisha, even though she has an interpreter at school, isn't able to understand what's being said because her sign language knowledge is so limited.

We met with a deaf therapist last Saturday and talked about the frustration we've all felt from the communication hardships we've experienced. She said that the single-most important thing we could do to relieve this frustration is for all three of us to get some sign language training as soon as possible.

We are fortunate to have been contacted by the Cincinnati arm of Deaf Initiatives, and they are having free sign language classes throughout the summer. Unfortunately, the classes coincide with our midweek meetings on Wednesdays at 7 PM. The first class is tomorrow night, 6/14/06.

At this time Jennie and I both feel that the communication needs of our family outweigh our attendance at Wednesday family group meetings. I struggle writing this, because we all thoroughly enjoyed being with you guys. We want to participate in the family group, but we're going to have to do so, at least for the next few months, outside of the Wednesday meetings.

To that end, we would love to receive via e-mail the lesson notes and any other correspondence - especially via phone and in person. :D

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or comments. And please pray for God to use this time to enable us to superbless others, too.

Within 7 minutes, I got this reply from J., one of the family group members:

I believe that you are absolutely doing the right thing. Who knows who might meet and inspire as well? We will pray that this is a great time for you all as a family as well. I have been fortunate to be able to schedule most of Anna’s appts away from Wed, but things do come up from time to time.

I'll share more here or in another post later on.