Challenged.

Thursday was the official start to Graham's summer vacation (which luckily for me is only three weeks long as his school has a 5 week summer program).

Friday morning, the sun came out for the first time in 12 years and I took the kids to prison. Seriously, the prison in town has an agricultural program and a fantastic (free!) petting zoo. We go all the time.

As long as we steered clear of the scary ass chickens, Graham was fine. The baby goats were so freaking cute I wanted to steal one. The sheep were freshly sheared and also wickedly cute, the alpacas were gorgeous and the pigs...

Not cute pink curly tailed little things. These were enormous, gray, snaggletoothed monsters wallowing in ten inches of mud and....we had the pleasure of watching one of them unload its bowels and proceed to roll around in it. Graham loves poop and even he was grossed out by it.

We left the animals and since the sun hadn't run away yet, we headed to a playground, one we rarely go to, right on the ocean with lots of sand.

Dottie found some kids with buckets and shovels, plunked herself down and started playing. Graham took off onto the big jungle gym.

A woman with a girl around Dottie's age watched Graham walk by her and I noticed her eyeballing the hearing aids. Everyone eyeballs the hearing aids. I sat and watched Dottie play, and felt the woman staring at me. I wondered if I knew her, but couldn't place her. After a few minutes she walked up to me;

"You're Cristin aren't you? And that's Graham?"

"I know you? I don't think I know you."

But I've known of her for a couple years. She lives in my neighborhood. She has a five year old son. He's deaf. The director of Graham's school was seeing her son for speech therapy when he was a toddler and she'd told us about each other, but we'd never managed to meet up.

And here we were, finally meeting and chatting nicely. She was very nice. Much nicer than me.

She ended up choosing a different kind of school for her son. An all oral school. She chose not to teach her son to sign. She didn't get into the reasons for her decision too deeply, other than the mention of it being a very difficult decision to make.

I mentioned the choice we'd made for Graham was an easy one. We'd looked at all the options but never seriously considered anything else.

She seemed genuinely happy to have met me and promised to call and set up a play date to get the two boys together (he was still in school that day.)

I thought, how interesting it will be to get to know this very nice person (much nicer than me), who was presented with the same challenge, and chose to send her son down a completely different path.

I also saw a challenge placed before me. To not feel like I'd made the better decision for my child. To not consider myself the superior Deaf kid mommy. To allow myself to know that she'd made the best decision for her child.

Which I'm sure she did.