I had a brother-in-law who was deaf-mute. What a hoot! Fastest writer alive he was....only it wasn't complete sentences....if he was going to the store, he wrote "store" and left!
He came to live with us at our ranch in Montana. I was busy learning the new role of Super Suzie HomeMaker--canning, baking, churning butter, making cheese, the whole 9 yards. Sometimes when my daughters came in from school I'd be in the middle of making a batch of something and trying to get dinner going...and they would invariably ask a question or make comments and I'd come back with "yeah, well , uh, oh wait a minute...." sort of response and the girls always laughed and carried on that Momma stuttered or she couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time.
Anyhow, we had a rule that at dinner time, hubby, Clarence, the deaf-mute, my 2 teenage daughters and I would all use sign language--to develop our skills and to really make Clarence feel that we wanted him in our family. Daughters and I had to carry the little sign language cards. One evening I had cooked porkchops, biscuits, mashed taters and gravy, and he was antimated as he was describing how he felt about the meal.
To respond to him, I didn't want to just say, "thank you", so I had my little card and was forming the letters, screwed up, started over--this happened a couple of times as I was all flustered. My 14 year old daughter very quietly said, "Oh, God! Now she's stuttering in sign language".