Last weekend, my family decide to come down to DC for the weekend to visit and celebrate Father’s Day. On Saturday, we ventured down to the Wharf for dinner and a boat tour of the monuments. Then on Sunday, my sister and brother-in-law who live in Maryland made the trip into DC to join us for a Father’s Day brunch! It was really nice to have everyone together for a day because it is so rare for all of our schedules to align. I felt pretty accomplished during their visit because I’m now so comfortable with the city that I was able to show them around and answer their questions (most of the time).

After my family left, Dana and I started our fifth week of research work. We continued our analysis of the individual sign language milestones our group are struggling with, and we made some tables and figures that we’ll include in our paper eventually. We also had a lab meeting this past week and explained what we’ve been doing and showed some of our data to get feedback from the other professor and graduate students. Their questions and thoughts were really helpful and gave us a lot to think about and consider when writing our paper.

But what was perhaps most remarkable about this meeting was how excited everyone was for our project. They are all really interested to see what our final results are, and they kept reiterating how this project can be an important stepping stone for the entire field of research about sign language delays and disorders in deaf children. One of the graduate students also told us again how incredible this opportunity is to conduct this level of research as undergraduate students, to which our advisor added, “You are doing graduate-level work. We’re not dumbing this down for you at all.” These comments just made me really proud of what we’ve accomplished so far and I can’t wait to show the final product!