The Family Stone

My last pick at the video rental shop was "The Family Stone." In this movie, Sarah Jessica Parker plays a rather high strung young city woman visiting her fiance's laid back, liberal family for the first time. At Christmas, no less. It was entertaining, but what I liked most about it was that one of the characters (the fiance's younger brother) was deaf. He was played by a deaf actor with a hearing aid. Everyone in the movie family was adept at ASL and signed whenever he was present, even if they weren't speaking directly to him. How ideal, I thought. If only our family was like that. As it is, Lilia has figured out that I am the official translator in this family and she looks to me whenever she doesn't understand what her dad is trying to say. I got him a hefty sign language book for Christmas. You can swipe a bar code for each sign with a cell phone and view a video clip of each sign. Hopefully we'll all become better at communicating withour hands.