Sunday, June 8, 2008

Black Boot

Friday I spent the day preparing for the 3 of us to drive over to Black Butte to spend the weekend. I had told Jake that we were going to Black Butte -- I said it out loud in addition to making the sign for black and fingerspelling b-u-t-t-e.

We were getting ready to get into the car to go, and Mike was helping Jake to put on his black crocs. Jake signed "black boot". We signed back, yes, you have black shoes. He just looked at us. Again as we were putting him in the car -- "black boot". No, black shoes.

The next day the 3 of us were walking back from the pool. Jake signed "black boot here". We signed back, no you have black shoes, and blue boots but the blue boots are not here. Another blank look from Jake. And then it dawned on me. He meant Black Butte!! Butte sounds like boot, and he's unable to fingerspell yet, so he'd simply signed boot. So I signed to him, yes, we're here at black boot and got the BIGGEST smile from him. We finally understood. My brilliant sweet boy. How clever to sign something that sounds the same, even though we'd never signed "black boot" to him. Wow.

Anyway, we had a fantastic weekend.

Walking to go swimming. It actually got up to 74 degrees which felt totally warm after being in the 40's and 50's!


Happy in the water.

2 comments:

i'll close my eyes said...

lol a great story to document

Elizabeth said...

An ASL homophone - brilliant!