To show my support of the ABH (Anything But Huckabee) movement, I would like to tell two stories that have brought me a bit of joy over the past weeks.

One was told to me by a friend and fellow faculty in another department. His daughter was having pretty serious eye surgery (in my estimation), which involved removing both her eyes from the skull and realigning them (by re-attaching the muscular connections). Believe it or not, this is an outpatient procedure, and the optical nerve can handle this just fine. Naturally, the orders were for her to relax a bit post-surgically. So my friend gets home from the U, and asks his beautiful daughter about her day. And the daughter replies, "Daddy, it's just so hard not to skip." And as Dwight said, "If skipping is the greatest of your concerns, it shouldn't be taken away from you." Incidentally, she's doing quite well--although I have yet to get a skipping update.

The next story actually came out of my time at a local elementary school. The kids get treatment in pairs, and this particular pair of boys are just plain fun. One stutters, and had such significant secondary stuttering behaviors that it manifested itself as an articulation disorder. (Past SLPs thought it was verbal apraxia, actually.) In time, I discovered the reality--and he's made great strides. (i.e., Treat the stuttering (or show him a better way to stutter) and the "artic errors" just evaporate on their own.) The other kid is in for pure artic. Anyway--the stuttering child asked me why we stutter. And I'm trying to provide a 3rd grade friendly (yet accurate) answer, something akin to "Our brains may get stuck when we're speaking" His friend puts his hands behind his head, leans back knowingly and says, "Yup, sometimes things don't go out the way you plan." I still laugh about it even today...