Handwritten

There are things I do well and things I do poorly and things I don’t really care about doing and then there are things that just hurt.   One of the things that hurts is handwriting.   It’s not writing a little not on a scrap of paper saying, “Trash Day” so we don’t forget to put out the trash bins in the morning.   It’s the writing of paragraph-length or longer text that starts to get to me.

It is either one or another thing or a combination of two things.   The first thing is I don’t think I learned how to write well.   I seem to hold a lot of stress in my hand when I write.   Given today’s computer/phone/tablet-based society there isn’t a lot of call for my handwriting muscles to be flexed, so my hand gets tired easily.   The other part that I think is the more limiting factor is my spinal cord injury.

There are things I can do that seem easy to me, like running a marathon.   It’s fun, it’s exhilarating.   It’s not painful in that regular, “you’re going to pay for this” kind of way.   Handwriting little notes at the bottom of formal letters, however, yells out, “stop, this is going to hurt later.  no really, quit now.”

I don’t know why running for hours at a time, swinging my arms the whole way is fine, but sitting with a little, dinky pen in my hand for ten minutes causes me to cramp up.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is totally potty trained.  He however doesn’t seem to be wanting to take a break to go lately because for the last three nights he’s said when it was time to get his pajamas on, “there’s a yiddle bit of poop in my pants.”   And yes, it was a just a ‘yiddle’ but a yiddle is too much.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   My husband and I picked out this dress we really liked in a catalog.   We don’t buy from catalogs much, getting most of my children’s clothing from hand-me-downs or used clothing stores.   But in this case the dress just looked like something she’d love.   It arrived and we were disappointed to discover it was in two layers: an under dress and an over dress, both made from very slippery material.   My daughter did like the dress, but she kept lifting up the top, colorful layer all day.   At some point I just took it off her.   When it was time to get dressed for bed she told me, “mom, my topping’s gone.”