And that's the story of my sign-language career. 
Your turn!
You weren't no angel like me, myself, and I:
I've always been into languages, quite ferociously when I was young. If I had an opportunity to learn a language, i would suck it down as fast as I could. So when I was about 20, a friend of mine in medical school decided to take a sign language class and I decided to join her. The class went too slow, so after a while I just studied it on my own, and my friend and I would sign to each other the best we could, laboriously finger spelling when we didn't know the sign for something.
One night I was walking down the path to my house in the dark and tripped over a tree root. I was pretty sure I had wrenched my ankle. It hurt like hell and seemed scarily out of whack. My friends who were in the house drove the car as close to me as they could and then supported me to hobble one-legged into the car and drove me to the emergency room.
I got put in an examining room, up on an examination table, and then was left alone for a long time, with my scary ankle that felt weirdly crunchy when I tried to put any weight down on it. Eventually another woman was brought in and put on the other exam table in the room. A doctor came in to examine her. Well, turns out the patient was deaf and the doctor was a moron. He quickly started exhibiting impatience for her communications limitations, and she was close to tears. So I spoke up, or, I guess, signed up. I signed to her that I could sign a little and that I would be happy to interpret if I possibly could. I still remember her look of relief and gratitude, probably only partly because I could help with the communication, but mostly because I was just nice. So anyway, I did actually wind up helping them quite a bit.
Right after they were done, someone finally came in to examine me (I had been on that table for what seemed like two hours, waiting). He gingerly rotated my scary ankle, and, for some reason, it didn't hurt anymore. Hunh. After a bit, I carefully stepped down off the table and tested my weight on it. My ankle was completely fine, just felt a little weak. But the scary pain and crunchiness was just not there. I walked out 95% fine. Hunh.
Fast forward 23 years. My daughter was born, and I had been reading about signing with infants. I got a couple of books, and found that the dormant signing was still in me. I started signing to her when she was about 6 months old (as the books suggested). I focused on the baby basics - eat, drink, more, all done, bottle, change (diaper), etc. One day, in her high chair, I suddenly realized that the spazzy knocking of the backs of her hands together was her signing "more." Holy shit! It was like the dog had just spoken English. I couldn't believe it.
She and I signed together a lot. Several of our mommy & infant buddies were too. At one point, right before she got really verbal, I counted 47 signs that she herself had used. Just like the books predicted, as she began to talk, the signing faded away as she didn't need it anymore. But she still has strong interest in it. We still sign together now, for fun, and use signs for more sophisticated concepts than we could when she was an infant. I consider it her main secondary language, more than the French and Spanish we also mess around with. The cool and unique thing about sign, is that you can speak it at the very same time that you are speaking English, so it is very easy to impart meaning.
Anyway, sorry for hijacking your thread, Diane. [Elle rubs palm over heart in circular motion.]
