Last week I took my whole family, and a friend, to the sign language church I've been visiting with my 5 year old son. I've been enjoying taking him there because I can watch all the speakers sign, and no one complains about how loud my son is, because they're all deaf. Well this time my son picked up a crayon and drew some lines on the back of my husband's shirt, tramatizing a nice little boy behind us, with a chochlear implant in his head. So I guess my son can't get away with ALL his behaviors, there.

We stayed for a few minutes, after the service, for donuts and juice in their basement. It's a nice, old, urban, small, Catholic church. My husband says you can tell by the decorations, that it was originally an Italian Catholic church. The priest stopped by and visited us. He asked us if any of us or our kids were deaf and if we lived in the neighborhood, but when the answer to both was "no", he left pretty quickly. Later my husband said, look, the priest is old, most of the congregation at our service were all old, and even the building is old. They're a dying church, desparate for new members.

Last night my husband told me that his sister had called him during the day. She's putting together a printed program guide for her wedding, in a month, and she asked him about me. She asked him, would I prefer to give the communion wafers to the preist, "presenting the gifts;" or would I prefer speaking to the congregation, to tell the congregation what they should pray for, "reading the intentions". He told her I'd "read the intentions."
I had to call her late last night, to leave her a voice mail and tell her , excuse me, I'm an athiest, I shouldn't be doing any of those things. I still wonder what made him say that. I wonder how well all my in-laws will take hearing I left someone a voice mail to say I'm an athiest. They've probably already figured it out, but I've never really said it out loud to any of them before. I hope they haven't printed those programs yet.