King of the Hula Hoopers

We just found out from one of Charlie's v-phone buddies that Charlie is on YouTube! Apparently there was some sort of contest this summer while Charlie was at Lions Camp to see who could hula hoop the longest....this clip is the last two or three contestants.

Check it out here.

Charlie Chan

Well, Charlie apparently wasn't kidding back in Letter #12 when he said he wanted to learn martial arts. He started in mid-September. He has a professional interpreter, and on the nights the interpreter can't make it, I interpret for him. I prefer to sit and watch him, though.

The way it works in our association (where I used to teach) is that the kids stay at the white belt (beginner) level for the entire first 13-week course, and then if they sign up for the second course and have learned everything they need to know, they take their first "belt exam" a couple of weeks into the second course to get their yellow belt.

At least, that's how it works with normal kids. I'm learning very quickly not to be so surprised when I find out that Charlie is not normal.

Charlie walks in and makes it very clear he means business. He is very focused, and learns really fast. He practices at home and it is obvious when he goes to class each week that he has been working on what he learned the week before. We normally don't start teaching forms until they've practiced kicks and punches and basic motion for a month; Charlie started his first form the first night. He learned the second and third forms on his second lesson. Took him two weeks to get the third form down; it's a little tougher.

I mentioned something about needing to buy a gi (the white uniform they wear) to the head instructor (who knows me from my teaching days), and he said, "Oh, don't worry, he won't need that until he tests, which won't be until the February session." I snickered. The female black belt who was working with Charlie said something about me needing to get Charlie a gi, and I told her what the head instructor had said. She said, "I'll just have a little word with him." She came back later that night and said that he was going to work with Charlie the following week so that he could evaluate him and decide whether he was ready for the test or not.

Sure enough, last night the head instructor informs me that I need to buy a gi. Charlie is going to take the test on November 14.

Mr. Charlie Chan is feeling very pleased with himself.

Normally a white belt will get a yellow belt on the first test. But now that we all know Charlie is not normal, would anyone care to take bets on whether he will skip a belt, too? If the student isn't quite good enough for the yellow, he gets orange (which is a half-belt). If he does a really outstanding job on the test, better than any of the other students, he gets promoted straight to red. That's what he's aiming for (mainly, I think, because he found out that's what I did, and he has a very competitive streak in him).

Online Surveys & Market Research

Imperfect Understanding

It's been a while since we've had a truly funny misunderstanding, since Charlie's sign is getting so good. The tables are usually turned these days--it's me who doesn't always understand what he's saying.

But tonight was a good one. I was grilling some chicken on my Big Green Egg (if you don't know what that is, check out www.biggreenegg.com) and my parents had stopped by, not to eat but to sit and gab a while before they left on a trip and watch us eat. I told Charlie to find some veggies in the ref (refrigerator) and cook 'em up to go with the chicken since the chicken was almost done. He said okay and disappeared into the house.

A couple of conversations later, the chicken was done, so I went into the house to see how the veggies were coming along. Kitchen is empty. No Charlie, no veggies.

Checked the videophone. Nope, he's not chatting on that.

There's a light on in the basement. I flashed the lights from our level to get his attention, and he comes to the bottom of the stairs where he can see me. "I thought I told you to find and cook some veggies?" He got this stricken look on his face and signs "sorry" and runs into the utility room to get a bag of veggies out of the freezer. Told him too late, we were going to eat just chicken. So he gets his plate and we load up on chicken and start eating, when he confesses, "I thought you said 'get some fruit or veggies to go with the chicken' so I got some strawberries and took them downstairs to eat them while I was waiting for my chicken."

My mother just about choked on her glass of wine at that one.

So Dependent on Technology (AKA Bad Dog!)

I've corrupted the boy, no doubt about it. He was living a nice, simple, uncomplicated life in China, and I had to go and bring him to the high-tech West where machines throw our lives into turmoil.

I came home from school late last night to find Charlie still up (no biggie, it's summer) and frantic to show me the remote to our videophone. It looked like it had been used for target practice or something--little pieces of it were gathered up and stuffed into a ziplock baggie. Closer examination revealed bite marks. Charlie caught one of the dogs chewing it up. Greyhound jaws can bite at 55 pounds per square inch. It looked sad. And when I looked at the TV that displays the videophone, there is a message bouncing across the screen that says "2 missed calls." Charlie, with a look of extreme concern on his face, is pushing buttons on what is left of the remote, showing me that it won't answer the videophone or bring up the menu.

A lot of machines have buttons on them and can be worked manually if you lose the remote. Not so the videophone. It is a very simple and sleek-looking machine, and the only button I can find is on/off. No remote, no videophone. It's that simple.

This would just ruin Charlie's day, not to be able to use the VP. It's amazing how quickly he has become accustomed to our high-tech world. He spends a lot of time chatting with his friends on the phone, and now he is tutoring someone by phone, so he really is dependent on it for communication.

After sending him to bed and saying a quick prayer, I decided to go to the company's website and see what I could find. Nowhere did I see anything about replacement remotes, but they did have a tech support team. Thank goodness they had e-mail support, because the primary way to reach them is by videophone. (Okay, follow me here--if you need tech support for your videophone, how do you contact them by videophone?) I dashed off an e-mail to tech support.

Then I started thinking--I have the e-mail address for the man who came out and installed the VP and taught us to use it. Maybe he would have spares he could sell? So I dashed him off an e-mail, too.

Turns out, both got back to me. (What a great customer service company!) Tech support is mailing me one, but the guy from training says he has tons of 'em, they're free, and since he works near my house, he will drop one off to Charlie on his lunch break.

Now that's service!

If only I could videophone Charlie and tell him the news....

Bad dog!

A Happy Camper

Well, Charlie and I just returned from West River deaf camp. We were at opposite ends of the spectrum. He got Camper of the Week, and I got kicked out. Yup, you heard me right.....

He had an absolute blast there, and everybody loved him. One counselor even asked (seriously) if he could hire Charlie to tutor him in ASL by videophone! Whatever. They've been at it every day since we got home. All I heard all week was how unbelievable he was, what a good kid, how incredible that his sign was so fluent already, blah, blah, blah.

Well, that's what I heard when I wasn't hearing them yelling at me, anyway. I was co-director of the high school deaf camp, and we just couldn't seem to do anything right this week. We started off by busting a drug-dealing effort and sending home a roomful of 4 boys. This tainted the image of the entire high school camp in the eyes of all the other groups and their directors, so they carried a rather dim view of me and my co-director to start with. (No, we weren't considered heroes for busting the druggies--no good deed goes unpunished.) Then our kids got into a food fight.....

They were making gingerbread houses from a kit in teams. My co-director became much-beloved by standing up and telling them, "The rules are--NO RULES!" As those of you with older kids know, you just don't say that to a bunch of teen-agers (46 of them, to be exact, minus the 4 we sent home) without expecting dire consequences. It starts with one person who has sticky icing all over his hands touching another person on the nose, whereupon this person smears a line across the first guy's forehead, and the next thing you know you've got kids chasing kids, kids chasing counselors, counselors chasing kids, etc.

The counselors were up with the kids until 2 in the morning cleaning the dining hall.

Co-director and I got hauled on the carpet the next morning.

Then the girls and some counselors entered the boys' cabin while the boys were gone and turned all the furniture upside-down, stacked up the cushions, took some of it outside on the lawn....all a harmless prank, except for the fact that that camp manager had come to the cabin to deliver a message and was standing in the middle of the cabin looking around in amazement and glaring at me as I'm looking about in dazed confusion, having just awakened from a one-hour nap which came nowhere near to catching me up on my 16-hour sleep deficit. (I had been averaging just 2-3 hours per night since we'd gotten there.)

He says to me in a sing-songy voice, "Don't let it get out of haa-aand...." and walked out.

We had a counselor conference.

I got to bed at 11:30, determined to get some sleep this night. At midnight, co-director bursts into my room, giggling and shrieking, "We are SO gonna get kicked outta here...."

I turned my back on her and went back to sleep, knowing that whatever it was, we were going to be hauled on the carpet again in the morning.

Indeed. Seems a group of girls were talking about sneaking out and jumping off the pier for a swim at midnight, and a counselor "oversaw" them and convinced them if they were going to do it to at least take some counselors with them. So our girls and 4 counselors (one of whom was a certified lifeguard) went and jumped off the pier. Problem is, another camp director (someone who didn't care for me and my co-director to start with) saw them and blew the whistle on them, proceeded to have a loud argument with co-director, and then burst into the boys' cabin to awaken a sleeping male counselor and demand a head check, when the boys weren't even involved. (Can you believe this is a church camp? What a Peyton Place it turned out to be!)

Anyway, we did get berated for all of this the next day. They made it pretty clear we weren't welcome back.

Can't keep us down for too long, though. We're planning to start a new camp next year. It'll be for deaf people (maybe not just kids) with concomitant disabilities, both physical and mental. We figure this population is a lot less likely to sneak out in the middle of the night and jump off the pier. And the great part is that a number of our loyal counselors have said if we start something new, they want in, so we're already partially staffed.

How does Charlie fit into this? Not exactly sure yet. He doesn't have any other disability to go with his deafness, so he can't be one of the campers. He isn't old enough to be a CIT (counselor-in-training). I'm wondering if he can maybe be one of the one-on-one helpers. He is so patient that I think he'd be great at that, helping someone with a major disability to do crafts and activities that they normally wouldn't get a chance to do.

Happy Birthday Baptism

Charlie's birthday fell on a weekend day, which was fortunate, because he has been at one camp or another pretty much all summer (which is why I've been so bad about updating anything--he just hasn't been here to provide his usual antics!). The celebration was fairly quiet, just Charlie and Rick and me, Rick's dad, my parents, and Charlie's godfather's family. He got the Lord of the Rings set in Chinese from me, and Eragon and a book on transportation in Chinese from my parents. Rick gave him a set of cross earrings. His godfather and family gave him some money, a coffee mug that says "Got Jesus?" and a Hero T-shirt (which Charlie later told me was a total hit with the kids at camp). The best brownie points, though, go to Rick's dad, who gave him a silver/blue/black softball bat to go with the glove and ball I got from someone in my freecycle group. We got to see one of those split-your-face-in-half grins flash across his face at that. Ted had written Charlie's name on it in both English and Chinese in metal glitter paint. Very cool.

The other thing Charlie got from me was a cross necklace. He'd been bugging me for one, since both Rick and I wear a cross, and I had told him he could have one when he'd learned enough to know what that cross really meant--it wasn't just a fashion statement. So he's been studying once a week with our pastor (who is a deaf Korean--I think the fellow deaf Asian bond makes Charlie feel very comfortable with him) and his baptism was planned for the day after his birthday. He was really tickled to be getting his cross necklace.

Funny episode during the baptism, though. Rev. Joo Kang did not rehearse ahead of time with Charlie the exact questions he would ask and the answers expected of him. Keep in mind, Charlie's only been here 6 months. His ASL is really good now, but not totally perfect. So when Rev. Kang asked him if he renounced the sins of his past, Charlie grinned and signed, "No." Not once, not twice, but three times. I heard Charlie's godfather (who is a pastor himself), standing next to me, draw in a sharp breath and whisper sotto voce, "re-word it, re-word it...." There were a few giggles out in the congregation, too. Rev. Kang eventually re-worded it so that Charlie gave the right answer, and the rest of the baptism went on without further incident.

The minute the baptism was over, Charlie and I jumped in the car to head for yet another week of camp.

Just a cute picture

Just a cute picture I got of him while walking around a nearby lake one night. Is it my imagination, or have his facial features matured dramatically over the past 4 months?