That's Fit

I'm a bit of a sucker for memoirs. I even read A Million Little Pieces after James Frey was deemed a fraud. (He's still working, by the way. No such thing as bad press, right?) I just finished The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan.

Jacki Donaldson read and posted about the book a while back. But I read it after a new friend of mine recommended it. She recently went through the excruciating experience of losing her mother to ALS while living an airplane ride apart. I am currently going through the same thing.

The Middle Place instead involves dealing with cancer, but the themes involving parent-child relationships, distance, disease, and faith are the same. Kelly, who survived her cancer, struggles with all of it, but particularly faith. She is baffled by the Buddhist truth of detachment, "even to people." She still struggles with faith to this day, several years later. I struggle with it a bit as well and I suspect all of us do to some degree. It's the very nature of faith, after all. It's transparent, intangible.

If you're a parent, you have undoubtedly been in the position of trying to please a whining child before he or she can spit out words describe desires. There is a way to stop the whining without guessing.

My baby was learning sign language before she was a year old. The practice has become rather popular, trendy in fact, as simply another mode of communication and learning. But our family was inspired by my mother's diagnosis with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, when her grandchild was just a few months old. As a result, my mother has became speech-impaired. Almost two years later, she can't speak at all. But she and my daughter still use sign language to communicate along with a special speaking device my mother types into. My daughter can sign types of food, colors, walking, dancing, different emotions, bathing, clothes and sleeping, just to name a few.

She learned all of it from Baby Signing Time DVDs. I am not a big fan of TV for kids. I severely limit my daughter's time in front of the tube. But these DVDs were amazing. And it's all she watched until she was almost two. They feature children of various ages signing to songs sung by Signing Time's creator, who has a daughter who is deaf. I will be forever thankful that they existed, especially when I see the joy my daughter and her grandma get out using their hands to say "I love you."