This past week was quite eventful, for both our work life and our social life!

Our weekend started with a trip to the United States Botanic Garden, where we saw so many beautiful flowers and plants, and even got to try some raw local honey (it was crazy sweet!) We then made a little detour to the US Capitol Building, which is beautiful and huge and has an incredible view down the mall all the way to the Lincoln Memorial.

The view from the bottom of the Capitol— the little white rectangle in the center is the Lincoln Memorial at the opposite end of the National Mall

The next day, I attended the DC Pride Parade, which was my very first time celebrating pride. It was so much fun and just a really incredible experience to see everyone celebrating together and being so kind and loving to complete strangers! My pictures don’t do justice to the spirit of the parade, but just know that it was really energetic and fun!

On Monday night after work, Dana and I attended an ASL trivia night at a local brewing company. We were invited by the other students and were very excited to experience a real Deaf culture event. When we showed up, the place was packed! Every table was completely full, and some groups (read: us) had to stand in the back. At Gallaudet on a daily basis, we see a few people but it is mostly the other students we have already met. But here, we could really see how large the Deaf community is in this area and how interconnected they are— everyone knew everyone else and they were all happy to see each other. When the trivia actually started, the hosts would be signing the questions on stage and an interpreter would voice the question for those who use English (again, read: us). However, it was very loud and hard to understand the interpreter, so Dana and I ended up mostly relying on our ASL skills to understand the questions— and we even got a few right! Overall, it was a really great night: we got to see our friends from Gallaudet, experience some more Deaf culture, brush up on our ASL knowledge, and play a fun game of trivia! It sounds like there will be one more trivia night before we leave DC, so you can look forward to that in one of my future blog posts!

ASL Trivia Night— the host is onstage signing the rules while the teams converse

Now, onto our research. This week we continued working with the new data set we received last week, and it looks like it’ll work really well with our research questions. We are making more associations with some of the behavioral milestones that our group of delayed signers are having the most trouble with. And we are trying to figure out a way to group these items into different language areas (morphology, phonology, etc.) to determine if there are any patterns that could give insight to whether these kids have a language disorder or that could present indicators in the future for potential delays/disorders. We also began writing this week for our research brief. We only worked on the methods section so far, and it is still a work in progress, but it feels really good to put on paper how much we’ve accomplished and how far we have come in these few weeks.

Four weeks down, four to go!