Supernanny

Sorry for not writing in a long time. I've had lots of things going on, including recovering from a very bad cold.

So, I am deaf, and I have an 11-year-old hearing son.

I told my son about the Supernanny deaf parents with hearing children episode, and he was very eager to watch it with me. Last evening was very pleasant. This episode gave my son and I an opportunity to talk about communication in our family.

My kid is perfectly normal. I was worried that he was a bit behind in ASL because I do quite a bit of talking (have to - my entire family is hearing, and I work in a hearing environment.), but I was relieved that he's not behind at all. If anything, he knows plenty of sign language for his age. I really identified myself with the parents. I was surprised at that, but also relieved that I was not the only one. I was impressed with the Supernanny's insistence in that the kids learn sign language. If you don't have communication, you don't have anything. Of course I knew that 90% of deaf parents have hearing kids, but I thought it was a nice tidbit of knowledge, a great educational bit of information for the hearing audience.

I offered to send my kid to sign language classes, but in his typical 'tween boy attitude, he's like, "eh, I don't think so." At least he knows enough fingerspelling to communicate with me.

My son and I talked about the fact that the three girls were taking advantage of the parents' deafness. I told him that I thought he was taking advantage of my deafness last year, and he was like, "nah, I did not". (We went through family counseling last year, and it really helped a lot).

Anyway, even though sometimes I think that my kid can be really bratty at times, he's still a good kid. And I'm glad that he always wants to go to deaf events with me, etc. That's embracing his deaf culture :-) I take him everywhere with me wherever there's a deaf event. If I ever went on a Deaf Cruise, I'd take him with me to that one too!

I'm sure these are not my only thoughts on the Supernanny episode, but I need to sleep on things and get back to you. I'll edit this post until I'm happy with it.

Thanks for reading!