We went on a tour of the desert and the San Andreas Fault area yesterday. We took two red jeeps, circa 1988, and had two tour guides give us a nice rundown on everything remotely related to the area including agriculture, misspellings of map names and types of dirt nicknamed “mashed potatoes”.
We spent over three hours on the tour and saw and learned lots of interesting things. We had made several stops and it (to me) was apparent our daughter wasn’t able to see well because she couldn’t see the step stool to get in and out of the back of the jeep, amongst many other things that should have been a red flag to anyone paying attention.
At one point when I’d just watched my daughter piling sand over her legs instead of looking at the things the other people were paying attention to because they were things you needed to be able to see, I made a comment to our guide and jeep driver. I told him she didn’t have much sight but it didn’t seem to bother her because she always found something to entertain her.
It is always a judgement call if I tell people about my daughter’s vision impairment. It is almost always not necessary, but sometimes against my better judgement I do say something. In these cases the person I’m telling is always interested, always sad to hear the story and usually wants to know with hopeful questions if there is a way she will get her vision back.
It’s after that that I find out if I should have said anything or if I could have done without. Yesterday I wished I hadn’t said anything. People who aren’t familiar with a vision impairment get concerned with the capabilities (or limitations) of a child who can’t see. It’s hard to imagine a world with limited sight if you’ve never tried.
Yesterday I heard the tour guide pull another one of the group over to tell her to watch out for my daughter because she was blind. The other person had already figured something was going on, she said. It was a kindness, something they were doing to try and help, but I did wish I hadn’t said anything. I’m always proud of my daughter for not needing help and being able to navigate successfully in a sighted world.
The Big Boy Update: Not only was my son interested in writing our dog’s name last night, he was particularly interested in drawing the Japanese characters he saw on the dinner menu on a piece of paper with his chop stick. He didn’t want to let his menu go with the server so I took pictures of the Kanji characters and let him keep copying from my phone onto his paper.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter notices things the rest of us don’t pay attention to. I’d like to say it’s because she’s so observant, but I think it’s really because she absorbs the input she gets from her environment and that amount of information is more limited considering she’s not seeing full scenes all day long. Tonight she came into our room in the condo and told me our door locked with a handle and a button in the middle of the handle. She followed that statement by saying Uncle Bob and Uncle Brian’s door had a bolt lock (demonstrating how the lock was turned) and there was a flat plate on the other side of their door. Their door separates one half of the condo from the other and she was completely correct on how the two doors locked differently.
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