I Love You

Noah is still poorly and we have no internet connection. I'm uploading this using mobile broadband...which in our village is the equivalent of using 1980's internet speeds! I hope this all uploads successfully. Excuse the poorer quality image but anything bigger and I think the system would implode!

I love sign language. I began to study it not long after I first qualified when I realised that Leicester (where I worked at the time) had a large deaf community. I've found it useful but I also find it beautiful. It's a graceful, fluid language with complex grammar. I used basic signs with my first baby, before baby-signing became fashionable, after I'd noticed deaf friends with babies being able to communicate with them. We use it with Noah now but H has gone on to learn more and he and I still use it ourselves as a private language between us. It's a little bond neither of us want to break.

The I Love You sign is actually an American sign which has been adopted over here. It's made of the (American) letters I L and U, all held up together, so it's a kind of shorthand...like text-speak. When I drop H at school he flashes that sign at me before I leave and he flashes it at me again when I tuck him up at night. I've never captured him doing it before because I never thought to but now I have it on record and when he's a big lairy teen, too cool to tell his mummy he loves her, I'll still have a record of his six-year-old self to remind me of our special bond.