I Seeketh After a Sign

Carlene and I have been talking a lot about this subject lately, and she keeps saying, "If I were still blogging, I would write a blog about this, because this is the greatest thing ever!" Or something like that, anyway. So I thought I would do it for her. What's she so excited about? Sign language, of course!

Before Carlene and I had a baby, we talked about doing the whole baby sign language thing. Once the baby came, we waited until she was 9 months old or so to start. We went to the library and got some books and videos on teaching your baby to sign. Most of the books and videos used methods that contradicted one another, and the signs for the same word were different from one book or video to the next. So we picked the book that made the most sense and decided to use some good ideas from that, and the rest we kind of made up as we went.

That was all less than two months ago. Contrary to what many of the books said, we didn't just start with three or four signs and wait until she learned those before teaching her more. We decided to show her the sign for pretty much anything that caught her attention. That's probably why her first two signs were "Milk" and "Airplane". Before long, we were throwing more signs at her than we even realized.

Tonight I made up a spreadsheet to keep track of all the signs Carlene and I know, which ones we are teaching Charity, which ones she's making attempts at performing, and which ones she really knows. Carlene and I were pretty stunned to realize that we currently both know, and show Charity, about 100 different signs. That covers everything from obvious objects or people like "Mommy" to somwhat hard-to-grasp concepts like "Where".

Even to me, 100 signs sounds like an awful lot. Were I to follow the methodology laid out in most of the books, I would have figured that her poor, underdeveloped baby brain would be overwhelmed and unable to cope with it all. Is that the case? Not even close! After less than two months of signing, Charity is able to perform about 25 signs. For an 11 month old baby, I'd say that's pretty darned impressive. The greatest thing is that she is constantly looking to us to show her more signs!

It's been a really amazing experience to teach sign language to our baby, and it's one I cannot recommend highly enough. I used to think that there wasn't all that much going on inside those little baby heads. Boy was I ever wrong. She's a signing machine, and she's recently started using signs, not just to identify things and ask for stuff, but to learn more. Last week she started putting signs together. Now she'll ask things like "Where's Mommy?" Or "Where's the book?" Granted, most of her questions involve asking where things are, but it shows how much she's able to communicate. Carlene called me at work today to say that Charity had asked, using her adorable signs, "Where's Daddy?" After spending a four day weekend together, Charity wanted to know why Daddy wasn't there to play with her today. Wow, the feeling that gave me cannot be described. It was pretty special. And it wouldn't have been possible without sign language.

Take That, Mr. King!

Stephen King is widely regarded as the preeminent writer of scary stuff. I've even managed to read a couple of his books, despite the fact that that isn't really my preferred genre. on the whole they were creepy enough, though some of the frightening bits were closer to being silly than terrifying. And the endings! He would have been better off publishing his books without the last ten pages, leaving his readers to wrap up the story themselves. Believe me, the average reader would have come up with something much more fitting.

I just finished a book that is far more terrifying than anything Stephen King's imagination could have conceived. It's titled One Second After, a novel by William R. Forstchen. Unlike Mr. King, Forstchen doesn't rely on things like demonic sedans, grumpy dogs, or (for goodness sake) haunted shrubbery. Forstchen's book is the most frightening book I've read for the sole fact that the premise wasn't cooked up in his imagination. This is a book about how America could easily meet its ultimate end.

Here's the poop. Terrorists, in a well planned and executed attack, detonate several nuclear warheads over the United States at high altitude. The resulting EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) fries anything with an integrated circuit. That means computers, cell phones, automobiles, radios, noisy toys that jiggle and play music that you wish were broken anyway. All of the technology necessary for American society to function becomes landfill. And that's where it gets scary.

Although this is a story about a small town's struggle to survive, Forstchen doesn't pull any punches. Integral to his plot is a rundown of just what would happen to American society in an event like this, and it is really, really ugly. I'm sure some people (maybe even some reading this) might think that if we no longer had computers and cell phones, we'd go back to living at one with nature and live a peaceful, happy-go-lucky existence. Dream on.

Think about it for a minute; without computers we have no electricity, nor do factories produce products, including medications, foods, clothing. Trucks can no longer move those goods, if they were being produced, to where consumers are. Stores cannot now function without computer systems, and our computer-controlled cars can no longer get us to the stores anyway. Money is essentially worthless, so forget buying what you can find. Without medications, untold numbers of people, like diabetics, cancer patients, the elderly, die. Without antibiotics, simple infections become life threatening. Without food being delivered from distant farms and factories, people starve. Law and order break down after only a few days, as was proven recently in Haiti, and not so recently in Hurricane Katrina. Life essentially reverts to how it was in about the 15th century, but in a society that is wholly unprepared for it, and with no knowledge of how to function in such a state. And with no television, radio, or internet, most people would have no idea what's going on. Until I read this book, I could not even imagine what an event like this would have resembled. Thinking about it now makes me want to take up thumb sucking once more.

Forstchen does a good job of hiding the likely sequence of events in the plot, but it is easy to pull out the most gruesome highlights. He gives a good account of when people would begin to die (very quickly), what types of outbreaks and long-forgotten diseases we would be forced to cope with (too many to list), and how many people may die in the end (as many as 250,000,000 [and yes, that is two hundred fifty million]).

While Stephen King scares us with such memorable plot devices as dead, bossy bartenders and bathing specters, William Forstchen terrifies with events that can come to life all too easily. Perhaps the worst part of it all is that, as pointed out in the fore- and afterwords, this scenario is entirely plausible, and all too possible. The technology exists to carry out an attack like this, and America is entirely unprepared for it. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has put preparation for this type of attack on the back burner, or ignored it altogether. Some experts say it is only a matter of time before something like this is visited upon us, and instead of facing it head-on and getting ready, we're searching old ladies at airports and forcing us to take off our shoes to get on the plane. Excuse me if I say that those measures don't make me feel secure.

So if, like me, you want to read a really great book, lose a lot of sleep, and perhaps become slightly paranoid, I would highly recommend One Second After. After reading it, it feels very good to know that I've got a little food put away, a couple guns, and lots and lots of ammo.