Saturday, September 30, 2017

Zip Line

We went to a zip line experience in the woods today for a birthday party.   I’m going to stop right here and say I was disappointed it wasn’t a birthday party for the adults, because even the children’s area was up in the trees and looked like fun to me.   I loved being in trees as a child, spending far too much time in them, just ask my mother and you’ll hear stories.

And there was indeed an area for the adults but it was a three-hour circuit and we were with the children who were doing a one hour event.    We had to have someone go with my daughter, mostly because she was under six-years-old, but secondly from our perspective because we didn’t know what she’d be able to see in the wooded area where everything was shades of wood and brown.

My husband went with her and initially she was hesitant due in part because she couldn’t see well and didn’t know where to place her feet.    But once she figured out what to do she had a good time.    The circuit had two halves with each half ending in a zip line ride to the ground.   When I asked her what she thought she said, “I was scared at first but now I like it”.   And there was no stopping her after that.  

My son didn’t need any help.   He got his harness on and then did something a little out of character for him, jumping up and down saying, “I’m over-excited!”

They both had fun.   I took some pictures.   Next time I’m getting up in the trees with them, dang it.

The Big Boy Update:  My son explained to me with much authority the other day, “bald means old and old means smart.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was on the phone with her cousin, Coco.   I think Coco asked her what she was doing tomorrow.   My daughter told her, “I’m going to wake up super early.   Because my body wakes up when my eyes open.”

Longer:  Today my best friend and I were targeting twenty miles in preparation for the marathon we’re running locally on November 12th.  We had run sixteen last week and wanted to add a few more miles.   We ended up going over the twenty mile target and decided to round it up to twenty-one miles in the neighborhood before we got back to the house.   All the food I ate yesterday paid off.   It was a fairly easy run in comparison to last week’s less-calorie prepped run.

Friday, September 29, 2017

Riding Separately

For four years we drove my children to and from school together.   Every school day we’d shuffle them both into the car and at the end of the day we’d collect them for the ride back home.   Because of school and other activities we typically do as a family, the vast majority of time my children are in a car together.

This year it’s different for the first time.   My daughter has her own travel regime with her van driver and the other students.   It’s like the bus experiences I had as a child only with fewer people and at a much younger age.   It’s a long ride there and back but she’s getting used to it.

My son on the other hand has an entirely different travel day this year.   It’s just him and one parent on the drive from or to school.   I’ve noticed he has different facets of his personality come out when it’s just the two of us in the car.   Sometimes he’ll sit and just look out the window.   Maybe he’s thinking, I don’t know, sometimes I wonder if he’s fallen asleep.   Then he’ll ask for a particular song or want to talk to me about something.

My daughter doesn’t have the luxury of looking at her surroundings and the things passing by as we drive to places.   She’s also very verbal and wants to talk about everything.    I can’t figure out if we’re doing her a disservice by letting her almost demand to be communicated with all the time.   Playing Simon Says, deciding on what song will be next, playing another game called, “that game”, the list goes on.   She just needs to be stimulated.  Or at least we think she does.

I’m off topic on this post but that’s not atypical for me.   What amount of stimulation does my daughter need and how much of that needs to be from a person interacting with her constantly?   My son has learned to occupy himself for long stretches.  Easily with something digital, but he can get absorbed in other things for hours sometimes.  

So where’s the balance?   Too much interaction for my daughter, causing her not to be self-reliant?  What about not enough interaction with my son because we’re spending a lot of time making sure my daughter is being cared for?   Hell if I know.   But we’re figuring it out.   Thankfully we have some people who understand and speak “child” and can translate for us.

At any sidetracked rate…it’s been nice having time alone with each child in the car this school year.   Today was my daughter’s last day for her first quarter of year-round school.   She’s out of school for the next three weeks so she’ll get some alone time with us every day.

The Big Boy Update:  On the ride to school my son was looking at the houses in the neighborhood and said, “some people have a bad backyard.”   I asked him how so?  He said, “they don’t have a downhill.”   Our backyard drops off fairly steeply, but there’s a creek way down the hill.   Some might not find it preferable topography but apparently my son does.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter’s class has a t-shirt that was made for them.   The back of the shirt has each child’s signature on it (well, name in print).   My daughter loves to write her name.   She was learning some words and letters before she lost her vision but the only thing that’s really remained well is her name.   She loves writing it.   She came home today with the coloring book filled in with page after page of her name written over and over.    She’s working on her numbers too and likes to write 1 through 100, but the rest of the letters are largely a blur in her mind I think.

FULL:  We’re running twenty miles tomorrow morning starting at dark o’clock.   So I don’t crash three-quarters through, I’ve been eating all day long.   I had two lunches and haven’t stopped eating into the afternoon.   I don’t like overeating but I like feeling awful on a long run even more.

Thursday, September 28, 2017

Welcome to the Decade

Today was my husband’s birthday.   I’m older than he is by a number of years.   Not that many years, but enough to make me envious of his youth when I remember his age from time to time.   Neither my husband or I celebrate birthdays with much, well, celebration.    The only thing he asked for was to absolutely, positively not have a surprise birthday party.   

That birthday party not having part was fairly easy.   I’m mostly lazy and not coordinating something secretive for someone who really didn’t want people jumping out from behind the furniture and yelling at him on his birthday was an easy sell for me.   So I did nothing. 

I figured something would present itself for his birthday.   And it did in a round about way.    Through a series of unconnected conversations that eventually became a cohesive plan, we revamped our mechanical room.    Crap was cleaned out, thrown away and moved elsewhere.   The concrete floor was painted blue and sealed.   One concrete wall was painted adobe red and a second concrete wall was painted some green color I don’t remember the name of.   

We ordered a very colorful rug that covers two-thirds of the room and lights up in black light.   And then we moved the pinball machine and old arcade machine in the room.   My neighbor had a pinball machine that is now in the room and then—remember that birthday thing I’d hope would present itself?   Something presented itself.    

Phone calls were made.   Our neighbor and my husband went on recon missions to the retro arcade bar downtown.   Backordered stock was investigated and then shipment was made and delivery made to the house here.   We didn’t think it would happen, but we got the pinball machine my husband wanted one day before his birthday.   

It’s cool.   It’s fun.  It’s complex.   It makes fun noises.   It’s high tech (there’s even a phone app).   And it was the perfect birthday present for my husband.   Here’s what our mechanical room looks like from the door:  



My husband is forty-years-old now.   Welcome to the decade.

The Big Boy Update:  My son wanted to know what I was eating this afternoon.   I told him the little tin contained little tiny pieces of unsweetened licorice.   I told him I wasn’t sure if he’d like it but I thought it was great.   He held his hand out and asked for one saying, “I like to try new things”.   He did eat it for a bit but I caught him rolling down the window and throwing it out.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Guys, I had completely forgotten about this but apparently it still happens.    My daughter at dinner tonight launched into, and completed successfully, The Pledge of Allegiance.   She learned it in public school.   It’s just been a long time since I was in school and I have no recollection of ever saying it in all my school years.  


Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Neurotypical

My daughter had a troublesome day.   Strike that, I’m not sure it was that troublesome to her, but it was to us, her parents.    I got a phone call from the school transportation van driver saying she was going to have to write my daughter up for her behavior.

We don’t know the driver, Naba, that well, but we do know she cares for the children and does what she can to make the ride enjoyable. even though it’s long.   But today wasn’t good.    There is a very young child in the car some of the time and the “baby cries all the time” my daughter has said.   That has to be annoying.    But this was something more.

When Naba arrived we made my daughter stand at the curb with us and listen to what had happened.   She had called the driver stupid, kicked the back of the driver’s seat repeatedly, screamed loudly and then (and this is the best part) told the boys in the back seat that tomorrow she was going to bring a knife in her backpack and cut them up.  

It gets worse though, the children she was threatening were autistic.   They can’t handle the screaming and they were very scared my daughter would follow through with her threat and begged to be brought home first in the future.

As you can well imagine, this won’t do on several fronts.    Naba is very kind and said she didn’t want to write her up and ultimately didn’t (we didn’t try and dissuade her, this was write-up material if there ever was any).   She said in November she was out for some time with hand surgery and the other drivers would write her up easily and if she was written up three times she would lose transportation for the remainder of the year.

My daughter had to stay in her room and there was crying—a lot of crying.   She knew she was in trouble.   The word, “stupid” has been disallowed from the family from here on out unless you’re saying you can’t say the word, “stupid”.

I called our play therapist citing a, “minor behavioral emergency” if she was able.   And she was and in five minutes she had helped me.   Here’s what’s happening:  my daughter is very, very frustrated.   She is neurologically normal or, “neurotypical”.   She’s tired at the end of the day and she’s put in a car with “neuroatypical” or autism spectrum children.   Those children can’t interact with her in a way that’s mentally stimulating we got from Naba and the therapist.  

So bottom line, my daughter is acting out because she’s frustrated and bored.    We have a snack and activity plan for the next two days in the car and then she’s tracked out for three weeks.   If we can’t find a solution to the lack of mental stimulation we may have to pick her up from school for a while.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is getting the reading thing down faster than I would have expected.   There were issues with his class last year that caused his education to get multiple staggered starts putting him a bit behind.   He seems to be catching up quickly now.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  At bedtime my daughter said, “I don’t like you yelling at me”.   I told her I was sorry and I hated yelling at her.   I asked her to come up with some ideas for the ride home to keep her entertained and she came up with coloring in a coloring book “with big lines”.   She picked three marker colors.   We’ll see if that helps tomorrow and she doesn’t threaten to knife anyone again.

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Aural Psynapse

My son and I have similar tastes in music.   We’ve both liked an artist named Deadmau5 for a few years now and have a station programmed in the car that we listen to frequently.    This morning I was taking him to school and we had skipped through a few songs.    We got to Aural Psynapse and he said to keep the song on, this one he wanted to hear out.

He sat quietly in the back seat, listening to the song, and then he started asking me questions about the music as though he was hearing it in a different way.   I told him the artist (Deadmau5 is a man) made this music mostly electronically and the sound he was hearing was likely not a specific musical instrument but could be made like we could make different noises on our keyboard.

We then got into “tracks” and how you could make one sound, have it repeat and then make a second sound on top of that first “track” adding another layer.  We listened to the song through the rest of the ride to school (it was a long song) and talked about how some were drum-type sounds, some were melody and some were even like air swooshing sounds.

We have a friend, Nate, who is a musician and makes his own music.   My son used to play his drums every time we went to their house because toddlers think drum sets are the best toys on the planet.  Maybe, I told him, Nate could show him how to layer music sometime.

The Big Boy Update:  My mother asked my son what Parkour was.   She’d seen him bouncing and flipping about and knew he was taking parkour classes and hoped he could explain it some.   He told her it was like gymnastics but different.    She asked what he meant so he elaborated, “in the old days there was no parkour, only gymnastics” which I think he thought made everything clear.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My mother and I picked up my daughter from school this afternoon.   We were talking along while she was having a snack.   She pulled her water bottle out of her backpack and then said, “uh oh, I’m out of water.  I can’t live without water.”

Short Run:  Due to a miscommunication, my best friend and I were offset in running start time this morning.  The issue was largely due to me kicking off the iOS 11 installation on all my devices and promptly falling asleep resulting in me not getting her message about starting running earlier.   When my alarm went off she had messaged me she was already out, trying to fend off the muggers and hooligans in the dark with her deadly iPhone 6.   I got in three-and-a-half miles before we had to head in.

Monday, September 25, 2017

No Pajamas

Parenting can get you into some pretty dark places.  Last night my son had perhaps too much energy. This could have been in part because my husband and I had a lot to do during the day and my son can and will entertain himself all day with iPad this and Xbox that and Netflix here and Wii U there.   We should have booted him outside and locked the door to ensure he got some energy burned.   Only we didn’t.

My husband got a glimpse of the need at dinner and had promised the children he’d take them on a night walk in the woods with flashlights after dinner and homework.  Which did happen, only it wasn’t long enough because the children came back amped up and unable to focus enough thoughts to get their clothes off to get into the bath.

My son couldn’t focus on anything but being energetic.  He was warned.   He was redirected.   He was cautioned he was on his last warning and his butt better get in the tub stat or there would be consequences.   He did get in the tub but at that point but he was still out of control.   Defiant not listening kind of out of control, which isn’t really like him.    He was warned one more intentional splashing and that was it.

So of course he splashed dad intentionally again.   My husband doesn’t lose his temper often but he’d had it.   My son got pulled out of the tub and was told to go straight upstairs to bed—wet, unwashed and without pajamas.

I stood in the hallway and prevented my son from coming back into the bathroom while he wailed, “I want just one more chance”.   I told him there were no more chances, that he’d had double the share of chances he normally should have had.

He went upstairs crying and yelling and calling us all sorts of terrible names laying our deficient parenting skills.   I calmly followed him up and shut the door to the room behind him.   He wasn’t going to get any pajamas but I looked in the dirty clothes hamper and said, “would you look at that, there are still your pajamas from last night, maybe they’d work for tonight?”

He calmed down and got in bed after brushing his teeth.   He ended the night being the perfect bedtime six-year-old.   Hopefully today he’ll remember the lesson he learned last night.    Hopefully my husband and I learned our lesson too and won’t leave our son in front of digital all day on the weekends.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was in the house talking to me the other day.   I don’t remember how the topic came up but he told me, “I’ve been a tree before.”  I must have made a confused face because he ran out the front door and climbed up the tree in the front yard.   When I couldn’t see any of his body any more he cried out, “see mom, I’m a tree”.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My husband made eggs for breakfast.   My daughter was eating her eggs and said, “mom, I found a piece of egg that was shaped like a gun.”

Sunday, September 24, 2017

Being Charming Helps

I was talking with my daughter’s in-classroom Braillest the other day.   I had asked her if she would be with my daughter just this year or if she would follow her through each year in elementary school. She said she would be with her, but she wouldn’t make it for that many years as she was retiring.

I had asked because my daughter likes her Braillest quite a lot.   I found out that the feeling was mutual.   Mrs. Aagaard said she has a good time working with my daughter because she’s so happy and positive.  She said she is also diligent, flexible and learns things quickly.   She said she would do very well educationally because she was already getting everything in a format she could consume it, even though she couldn’t see it.   And then Mrs. Aagaard said something I hadn’t thought about before.

She told me, “your daughter is also very friendly.   And that will take her a long way in life.”   What she went on to explain was that blind people have no choice but to ask for help sometimes.   You can be as independent as you want but when you can’t see your surroundings and the vast majority of the world's media is targeted at the sighted, you’re going to need help.

Being friendly, having patience and a pleasant personality will get you far in life.  Having those same characteristics when you are dependent on other people, sometimes strangers, to make your way in life is even more important.   Fortunately for my daughter, I don’t think she’ll have a problem in the making friends area.

The Big Boy Update:  My son has this bear he got from Nana a while back.   I think it was my husband’s when he was young.  It’s named, “Cutie Bear” and my son has some intense feelings for this bear, even though it never leaves the foot of his bed.   He told me tonight, “I always cry when I look at Cutie Bear because I want him to be alive.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   My daughter and I went over to our Chiropractor’s house today to bring a laptop back we’d been fixing (my husband had been doing the fixing, my daughter and I were just doing the delivering).   There was confusion on the part of my daughter initially when I explained we were at their neighborhood.   She said, “they have a neighborhood?” and I realized she thought we were going to her doctor's office.   She asked, “so this isn’t where he makes the popcorn in my back?”  I said no, this was his house and there was a dog and he had two children as well that she could meet.    She did meet their dog and the two children all of whom were very welcoming and friendly.   The children had an unexpected surprise for her—three stuffed animals from when they were younger.   My daughter loves stuffed animals.   One was a huge black dog, named, “Black Dog” that she wouldn’t let go.   Actually she wouldn’t let all three stuffed animals go and was in danger of knocking things over as she held onto this large burden while wandered around the living room.    Tonight Black Dog is in her bed and has been given the supreme honor of having her, “soft blanket” put over him so he won’t get cold in the middle of the night.

Saturday, September 23, 2017

The Death of The Stick

This story goes back a good while and involves a colonoscopy.   I just searched old blog posts and it goes back before February, 2015 when I first wrote about it.    To catch you up, my best friend asked me to drive her to her colonoscopy.   To thank me for this small time investment she gave me an orchid.  

I don’t do well with plants.   I love them outside but I don’t want to have to figure out how to not kill them inside.    I tried my best with this obligation after the colonoscopy driving obligation.   In February 2015 the flowers fell off, leaving me with a tall stick and four leaves.   Apparently the flowers will come back.   They never did.

My mother-in-law told me I needed to cut the stick off because a new stick would grow if I did.   A new stick never grew.   Slowly, very slowly over time three leaves began to grow.   No new stick though.   I followed the lighting and watering instructions and this orchid just didn’t like me.  

But it was for the colonoscopy and it was a thank you and dang it, I wasn’t letting my friend off the hook because for giving me a stick that became a non-stick.

Last night my daughter accidentally knocked over the plant and the pot shattered.  In the process it took off the little leaves that had been struggling for a year to grow two inches.   My daughter was very upset.   But she wasn’t hurt, which was good.  

I cleaned up the plant and saved it for my mother-in-law to assess today as she is quite knowledgeable when it comes to plants.   She said it was time to let the non-stick go.   So it’s now down the hill with Lucy the dog.  

I asked her if I should mourn or celebrate the passing of the most challenging houseplant I’ve ever had.   She said it was time to celebrate.  

The Big Boy Update:  My son told me when he grows up he doesn’t want to throw away his stuffed animals.   As flashes of Toy Story went through my mind I told him he didn’t have to.   He said, “it’s a waste of money.”   Then he wanted to know if I had thrown mine away.   I said I didn’t have all of mine but that there were several in the pile of stuffed animals they had that were mine when I was young.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  When we were in New Jersey visiting family my daughter was interested in the Roomba that cleaned when we went out.    She didn’t like it going into the room they were staying in though and told Uncle Eric, “when you leave, make sure the door to the office is closed because I don’t want the Roomba to mess with my stuff.”

Longer Run:   We ran seventeen miles today.   I think we could have done eighteen but it was infernally hot and very humid.   I was eating base salts the whole run but I was still crusty all over from sweating.  Next week we’ll go for nineteen or twenty.    

Friday, September 22, 2017

Lost in the Grocery Store

Isn’t this some rite of passage as a child?  Every small child wanders away from their parent or the parent rounds the corner to the next aisle and suddenly you’re lost in a sea of consumables and your parent is utterly and completely gone.   Panic sets in.   Your chest tightens.   You start to run.   Maybe there are tears.   Then some adult helps you (go to the next aisle) and your mother is right there, not even realizing you hadn’t left the cereal aisle at the same time she did.

Today my son was going to a movie with my husband and Uncle Jonathan.   My daughter was invited to the Ninjago movie but she declined, saying what she’d really like to do is go to H-Mart with me instead.    And when she got home from school she didn’t want to go on the inflatable water slide next door, she wanted to go to H-Mart.

She and I looked at all sorts of things, the produce aisle being the most intriguing as there are things in this large Asian market we don’t have in our corner grocery store.   We picked up a large sugar cane stalk and some bean sprouts as well as some raw peanuts and then moved to the dried goods area.  Or really the aisle as there was a whole aisle of rice.   My daughter picked up large bags and couldn’t believe it was all rice.

We got samples and selected some candy.   She remembered we were supposed to get squid so she picked out two squid as large as her forearm and we put them into a bag for dad to later make into calamari.  

Then we went to the bakery to get a macaron for her and her brother with specific instructions to bring him a lemon one.   After that we were going to check out but my daughter decided she wanted to eat at the food court-esque area there.   It was confusing on where to order and where to pick up but I figured it out eventually and got our order placed.   I sat my daughter down and told her to stay there, I’d be right back.

It was at this point that I’d realized no one had carts of products in the food court area.   I figured I’d check out quickly and then come back to help get the food.    She’d be all right, right?

You know where this story’s going next I know, because when you’re in a hurry to check out, you always run into delays.   And there were delays.   I started to get a knot in my chest, waiting for someone to come over the loudspeaker saying, “will the negligent mother with the little blonde girl please come back to the food area to collect your crying child?”

Only that never happened.   I got back to the food court with my bag of groceries and large stalk of sugar cane to find my daughter had made friends with the family beside her.    It was a mother and daughter in high school and they let me know our number had just been called.  

I got our food and told them thank you for talking to her (my daughter was not upset in the slightest but I wasn’t sure if they were.   It turned out they weren’t.)   We had a nice conversation with them as we ate dinner and then when they left they made a special point of saying goodbye to my daughter.  

I don’t think my child will ever have problems making friends and getting help as a blind person.   I know the people tonight could tell she had glasses and if they looked closely they would notice her eyes don’t move normally, but I don’t think they had any idea she was blind.   But they definitely could tell she was friendly.

The Big Boy Update:  To some of you, this won’t make any sense.   To others of you, you’ll understand why I was so proud.   My son told another child at the playground the other day, “my mom has a TARDIS.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  I went to help with an apple event today at school and had lunch with my daughter—and found out something unexpected.   She loves coleslaw.   Really loves it.   Eats it every day they have it in the cafeteria.    She picked some out for dinner tonight too.

Thursday, September 21, 2017

Asking For Money

I don’t like asking for money.  Tomorrow I’m going to be asking for a lot of money and I’m anxious. Let me back up and explain why and why I’m okay with it even though I’m not comfortable with it.

Four years ago I got involved with my children’s school.   I was a chronic volunteer and stepped in doing anything there was a need for.   During that time we were getting ready to move forward with buying property and building a new home for the school that had been on rented property since its inception.  

During the initial year I was with the school I was asked to serve on the board and then got involved with the development committee and ultimately co-chaired the capital campaign committee in which we planned to raise some money to help fund the school.    At the initial point I joined I had no idea how much money we’d raise.   To this day I look at the small number of families at our school and can’t believe we raised over a million dollars.

One of the things I had to learn was how to ask people to give money.   People are motivated by different things but no one’s going to give money to a cause just because you asked.   You need to ask but you need to ask the right way.   In the case of a school it’s not that hard because your typically asking parents or grandparents and the thing they’re donating towards they see a direct connection to the benefit they’ll receive from their donated funds.

But whatever it is, it’s not good enough that the cause is your cause.   You have to make it their cause.   And that’s what the pitch is about.   Tomorrow I’m presenting to another family at our school.   There already on my “cool” list because they have a Tesla Model X (but I’m biased on that front).  They’re very friendly and understand philanthropy.   But that doesn’t mean it’s an easy thing to ask someone for money.

I know I’m not asking for them to give money to me.   I also know my husband and I have already made our own painful contribution to the campaign or I wouldn’t be presenting and asking for money (a tenant of fundraising).   Still, that doesn’t make it easy.

On the other side of this whole post is what happens when the family says yes and does make a significant contribution.    That makes your day, week, month, knowing you had a part in raising money for something you believe in.

The Big Boy Update:  It was thundering this afternoon and raining very hard.   My son and I like weather.   He had been outside laying on the sidewalk letting it rain on him.   He came in for a bit and was working on his school work before the music teacher came when it started raining really hard.   He and I looked out the window and I said if he wanted to finish the book he was reading he could go back outside in the rain.   He looked longingly out the window and said, “thank you rain.  When I go back out I’m going to thank you.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter’s night ended badly last night.   She didn’t want to work on her sight words.   I gave her three chances and after that I told her she had to go to bed.   Thus began the tantrum because I wouldn’t let her do the thing she didn’t want to do.   It went on and on— the wailing, the moaning, the crying and falling into a blob on the floor—all the typical tantrum components.   She tried everything to get me to let her try again.   The one that was the sweetest was when she told me, “my heart hurts because I can’t do my sight words.”   I told her if she wanted, she could have another chance in the morning after breakfast.   And this morning she remembered and spent a good bit of time working on the words.

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Sight Words

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Sight Words Work:
Both of my children have homework right now.   My son’s is mostly to catch up as he’s behind for several reasons, not all of which are his fault.  He’s catching up pretty quickly.   He went through the list last night and the way he’s been prepared at school it doesn’t matter what he doesn’t know because that’s just things we’ll work on.   He’s motivated by what he does know.

So he went through, ignoring the ones he didn’t know on the long list and being happy about the ones he recognized immediately.   We added a few to his memory last night and then he read some books together.   After reading two books twice he went back to the sight words and knew more on the list because he’d just been reading them.

My daughter’s sight words are a bit different.   There is that word, “sight” that doesn’t apply.   She can’t grasp the word all at once, she has to feel the words letter by letter.    But she can type.    So today she brought home a page of sight words.   She can’t read the sight words with consistency or ease, but get this—she wrote the page up.

She can type all the words easily.   So she prepared her own homework for tonight.    It’s interesting that she can write but can’t yet read.

Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Plus Plus

Over the past several years I’ve substituted at my children’s school in the after school classrooms.   On occasion I would notice some of the children playing with these little connector piece block things.   The concept was simple with every piece being the same shape and yet this single shape could be combined into all sorts of creative things in the hands of open-minded children.

One day I went home after substituting and decided to order some of these little Lego-esque blocks.   I think I even wrote a blog post about it because the search for what they were actually called thwarted me.   Typically if you can describe something to a search engine, the search engine can find what you want—it being much smarter than you are.

But I couldn’t find it.   I gave up after a few days and went back to the teacher at school and asked her what they were called.  “Plus Plus!” she said, realizing I’d been hunting for something I could have figured out if only I’d thought about what the shapes of the pieces were.

Each piece is two plus symbols connected together.   My son is really creative with them, creating three-dimensional things and more complex things all the time.   Just last night he created a series of these characters with helmets and swords for us to have some sort of family game time together with:


These are pretty simple for him, but he put them together quickly and was unfazed when his sister got upset because hers broke apart (they were suppose to in the game) and quickly put hers back together.

Some toys have a short life-span.   Plus Plus is going to be around for a long time to come in our household.   This week my son and two of the neighbor children have been making things with them for four days now and have used almost every single piece up, completely covering one of our tables.   I told my son it was time to break down and start again tomorrow.    I thought I might get some push back but he said, “okay” and ran upstairs to reset the Plus Plus back to unconnected pieces before running out to play outside.

The Big Boy Update:   My son did some reading tonight for school and then afterwards he wanted to draw.   He brought over his paper after a few minutes and said, “dad, I just made a helium atom.”   When we asked him why it was a helium atom he explained, “because it has two of everything”.   We told him he was right and nice drawing.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Wow folks, this was from out of my children's past.   My daughter told me yesterday, “you know there’s something special about today”.  I asked her why and she said, “because it’s Ghi Ghi and Ghadi’s birthday”  (These were my children’s imaginary friends.)   She wasn’t done with the important news about the day though as she followed up with, “do you know why it's special? Because they’re getting married.”

Monday, September 18, 2017

I Pied the Principal

We’re new to public school.   We have five years of experience at private school and after that amount of time we’ve figured out how things generally go, but its like we’re back in first year’s again, muddling through until we figure it out.

This year for my daughter so far there has been this thing called Castle Quest.   Stuff happened where the teachers dressed up I think.   Then there was Boosterthon which may or may not have been the PTA (I wasn’t sure).    There was also a “fun run” that the school was raising funds for.   I wasn’t sure what was related to our child’s classroom but I’d get snippets coming home from my daughter from time to time.

Then there was an email or newsletter that explained this fun run and boosterthon were in fact the same thing and the theme was Castle Quest.   What?  It wasn’t until today that I go the whole things straightened out.    Here’s how it nets out:

The school wants to raise money so they hire a company to help them (and take a cut of funds raised for their time).   That company was Boosterthon.    Boosterthon has a theme for the event that gets the children excited about asking Aunt Maurice and Uncle Suzy to pledge money.  The company has a lovely web site on which you can create a page for your small child and not only pledge per lap, but send via social media the link so Friend Fred and Cousin Clyde can add to the total.

Then there is the race.  Its set up so you can win.   The children get a t-shirt that has the event name on it and the teachers have a sharpie.   Every time your child runs around the little lap set up they get one box ticked off on the back of their shirts.   After thirty-five laps they’re done.

But back to the money raising part.    We come from the Montessori school background in which you’re asked to contribute to the Annual Fund to help with things not covered by the cost of tuition alone.   Public schools need help too.   So my husband and I pledged what we thought was a reasonable amount.  My in-laws and my parents also pledged per-lap to help.

That’s when the presents started coming home.    My daughter was hitting “tiers” of donations with the three pledges.   She got a bouncy ball and a fidget spinner and some dart game with feather darts and something else I can’t remember because it’s still in the box.    She also got a skateboard.   A clear skateboard that turns on with LED lights and is the hottest toy in our house after it gets dark outside.

So that was the fundraising part which I thought was a lot of presents going to our child and less money going to the school but perhaps people are incentivized in different ways.    It all culminated today in the actual run itself.

I’d like to say we sat on the side and waved at our daughter as she ran by.   But we didn’t.   We saw her come out with her class, holding her cane and the hand of her Braillist teacher.    We saw her line up and her Orientation and Mobility teacher join her at the start line with all the mass of excited children.    And then we watched him run around with her, holding her hand.    We talked a bit before and we all agreed she could run it without a problem.   Except there were problems.

The cones were far apart and were low contrast with the grass.    And then there were the children themselves who were all darting and weaving around as fast as they could.   It was tough to run with her—I should know, I ran about half the laps with her.

But she was happy and excited and not particularly upset that she couldn’t see (she never is).    After the event was over we talked to some of the other parents and then got into a conversation with her braillist and the O&M teacher, finding out he’d come to school today just so he could help her run as her braillist is close to retiring and said her running days were over.

My daughter, husband and I started walking back to the classroom with the two teachers because they’d announced we had to clear out for the third through fifth grade classes.    My daughter said as we were walking, “I won.”   We said something probably like, “you did, you did all thirty-five laps.”   She said, “no, I won” a second time.    Then we were caught by one of the Boosterthon staff.   My daughter was right—she had won.   She’d won the most donations of any child for all kindergarten through second grade classrooms.

What had she won?   She got to “pie” the principal.    I got a video of her very sweetly putting the shaving cream pie in her principal’s face.    She didn’t seem that excited about it but the very first thing she said when she walked in the door this afternoon was, “I pied the principal”.

My husband and I looked at each other.    We’d remarked to each other that we were surprised the fundraising goal was so low.  Maybe the culture of philanthropy is different in public schools.   Be that as it may, my thanks go out to my parents and in-laws for their support of our daughter’s school.

The Big Boy Update:  My son wanted me to come outside tonight so he could show me the four ways you could safely use a whip.   This sounded interesting so I followed him out through the garage to see him wield a toy fishing rod in a menacing stance.   This eighteen-inch wooden dowel with a string on the end was his whip he told me and then he demonstrated the four ways.   Each way was a method one of the other children had come up with, including his sister’s idea.   My son couldn’t play collaboratively not that many months ago and now he’s helping everyone play together.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was hoarding pool toys yesterday at the end of season pool party.   She complained to one boy who just wanted to throw the torpedo so he could dive for them, “you stole the portito!”

Sunday, September 17, 2017

Social Interactions

My husband coordinated, almost completely on his own, the end of season pool party for our neighborhood.   He was busy from ten-thirty this morning until  six o’clock tonight with the event.   I helped when and where I could but I mostly made sure the children were being fed and taken care of at the pool for the long hours we were there.

I watched them interact with their peers and noticed some significant changes in them over the past year.    My daughter is highly social and can get along with anyone.   What she lacks is the ability to tell what’s going on around her and sometimes that makes it hard for her.   She is a master at pretending she knows something she doesn’t.

For instance, she heard Jay and Claire seeing who could swim across the pool faster.   It was Jay’s turn when I asked her if she wanted to go to the bathroom with me.   “Not yet, I’m watching Jay swim across the pool.”   I said sure, I’d wait and then I watched her.    She said a few seconds later not in a particularly quiet voice, “where is Jay?”   She was really listening, not watching Jay swim, but people who don’t know don’t realize.

She had a very nice time with her friend, Zara, who was in her class last year.   They played for hours until Zara had to leave.   It was nice because my daughter didn’t need a lot of adult supervision and interaction for that period of time.

My son was almost unrecognizable from eight months ago.   He had a lot of trouble doing collaborative play, meaning working equally with his peers.   He wanted to either boss them around or do protective play, something he picked up from trying to take care of his sister after she lost her sight.

Recently I’ve heard from multiple parents how their child really likes playing with my son.   This is news I haven’t heard before.   They preferred to play with my son and even looked up to him.   This therapy with Dhruti was really working; my husband and I had been retrained and my son’s brain had been rewired to good effect.

Since my daughter’s vision loss I’ve spent far more time watching her in public settings mostly because I’ve had to.   Today I was able to watch my son intermingle with lots of children and effortlessly be friends with any of them without conflict.   They seemed to like playing with him and were interested in his ideas and advice as I heard them calling out to him from across the pool.

I sat back and watched him and was so glad to see the new maturity in him.   He wanted so badly to had friends that wanted to play with him in his own very domineering way not that long ago.   Now he’s playing with new friends and contributing as well as listening to how they want to play—and he’s having fun the whole time without a single raised voice or conflict.  

The Big Boy Update:  We went to H-Mart, a large Asian market that had lots of samples.   My son loved them all, insisting we get the duck and some squid and several other things.   At one point he said out loud, “when am I going to get a bad one?” talking about the samples as he moved from server to server.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We have to be careful with my daughter because she will easily gain a fair of things since she’s hurt all the time due to her inability to see things.   She is currently overly cautious of the water.   Last year you couldn’t keep her out of the water.   We’re going to have to work on this.

Marathon Training:  We ran fourteen miles today.   We were thinking about sixteen but didn’t have enough time.   Maybe next week we’ll run eighteen and I’ll feel better about where we are in our behind the gun training schedule we haven’t made up and aren’t really following.

Saturday, September 16, 2017

Back To School Social

I think this is our sixth year going to the Back to School social at our children’s school.   Or correction, our son’s school and our daughter’s old school.   It’s a lovely event that gets more enjoyable every year because we know more and more people at the school.  

This year there was an estimation miscalculation that involved not enough food being available for the event.   I don’t know if it was an error on the part of the caterers or the staff coordinating the event, but we ate everything and some people got no food at all.  

There was enough alcohol (there always is at our school events) and people didn’t seem to mind—most of our families are pretty nice and understanding about things not always going to plan.   There was a speech by our head of school and some introductions and welcomes to new people and those of us in the back who never pay attention and have a short attention span talked in quiet tones until the presentation was done.

I talk “shop” a lot and got a lot of time in discussing in more depth things I couldn’t have accomplished via a meeting or before & after board meetings.   So I was happy.   But my feet are tired.   Four hours in heels isn’t exactly the same as sneakers, which is what I wear the majority of the time.

The Big Boy Update:  We drove up yesterday afternoon to my neighbor’s house, stopping in to wave hello before getting home to school.   My son rolled down his window and said to my close friend who is my age, “Bryna, you look old.”   She asked if she was looking old today.   He wasn’t done though and said, “what’s that hair on your chin?”   She laughed and said she loved him.    She had the late afternoon sun right in her face and I suggested to my son that it might be the lighting and not that Bryna was looking any older or hairier than she normally did.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has explained to me that she doesn’t know how to make a “loose ball” of toilet paper.   She says she only how to do the “tight balls” which I have explained aren’t ideal.   A tight ball of toilet paper is a lot like taking a sheet of office paper and crumpling it up into the tightest ball you can.   It’s great if you’re looking for a ball to throw at the trash can, but doesn’t leave you a lot of room to write on.   So she’s now working on loose balls for her toilet paper needs.

Friday, September 15, 2017

Two Unexpected New Friends

I made some friends today.   I didn’t set out to make friends, but sometimes things just happen.   I’d been talking with a friend of my for some time about going shooting.   He has guns (a bunch?) and likes to go to a shooting range from time to time.   I have no guns and don’t know really anything about guns or shooting them.

A surprising number of our friends and neighbors own guns.   From time to time someone will talk about going to the range and mention (usually) to my husband about going.   My husband has been interested and would have potentially come with us today only there was his motorcycle that needed to be picked up from service and three cakes he had to decorate for two events.  So it was just my friend and me.

I’ve shot a gun before and at the time I remembered the gun safety paperwork/test/video was a protracted process that made you too tired to even bother shooting a single round of ammunition by the time you were done.   But we went to a new location that had opened recently.   It was nice and included a very large amount of firearms and gear for sale, four gun ranges and a restaurant all within the building.

And their registration and gun safety process was significantly streamlined.   The video was reasonably short and explained what I needed to know to load and shoot a gun safely within the live range.   It mentioned there would be proctors on the range and they would help with questions and enforce the range rules.  The video said these proctors were, “some of the nicest people you could meet on a range”.   It also said they might become your new shooting friend.

After the video we paid for an hour, put on ear and eye protection and entered the range.  My friend set up, putting some guns up on the little shelf thing, putting the target up (I suggested the one of space invaders, he picked the one in the shape of a man’s torso).   Then he shot some rounds.  He showed me what to do, and we immediately realized we had to mirror image some of the things because I was left-handed.   Only guns aren’t completely symmetrical.  

The people in the lane next us were shooting an AK-47 or something very boomy beside us.   The sound wasn’t too loud because of the ear protection but the percussion through my body was odd.  I managed to hit the target though (which at five yards I thought would be harder to miss than hit).

It was about then that I met my first new friend.   One of those very friendly range proctors.  He could tell I hadn’t a clue what I was doing so he told me how to stand, hold my arms and grip the firearm.   It was good advice.   I looked at my friend and he and I nodded the understanding nod that neither he nor I minded the employees stepping in and giving me advice.

The next gun I shot was easier because of that stance advice I think, not sure though because my experience was at about twelve rounds of total ammo.   And that’s when I met my second new friend, also a proctor.   He was a left-handed shooter.   He knew what to tell me.   He was confident that I should do it just that particular way.   And what he told me did make sense because I felt like I had a better overall grip of the weapon as it kicked back after each shot.

We shot some more weapons.  Ah good, I just got a text from my friend asking what guns we used today.   He said, “Small to large. .380, 2 different 9 mm, 45 caliber, 44 magnum”.   The 44 was mean.   The .380 I think was very hard to hold on to because it’s so small.   They were each interesting.  Especially with my two new range friends coming over and giving me more advice on grip and stance.

Then at the end as we were getting ready to leave the left-handed proctor tried to talk me into buying a gun.  He had some excellent reasons he  thought I should have a gun.   I didn’t share his reasons, which was fine, I was hungry and was more interested in getting some Mexican food at that point.

The Big Boy Update:  I was in the basement working yesterday when my son was having his music lesson with Chelsea.   She was playing music and he was telling her what kind of music he wanted to go with his flips and parkour or fighting or whatever moves he was making up.   As I was about to leave I heard him say, “I want you to teach me how to play some brainwashing music.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was being rowdy in the van going home today.   Her driver who is very, very kind told me today she was having troubles with my daughter.   We’ll see if we can find out what’s happening to make my daughter cranky.   It’s a very long day for her I know and a lot of time in a car.

Thursday, September 14, 2017

I Got Distracted

I had some sort of plan for a blog post tonight but my husband and I got distracted with this new craft die cutting machine that came in the mail today.   It turns out he and I were both thinking about getting one for different reasons.   Let us just say that ladies weekends with my girlfriends can be expensive when we get to talking.

So far tonight we did the exciting project called, “calibration”.   It was interesting once we figured out there was an important step we were missing.   But now it’s late and I’m tired so tomorrow I’ll try to remember what it was I was going to talk about tonight.

The Big Boy Update: My son got in trouble before bed tonight.   He went out on the front porch in an effort to run away but didn’t make it much further than the bottom step.   A minute or two later he came in and said he wanted to get the ukulele so he could make a wish on one of the stars.   We went upstairs and got the ukulele.   He went outside and was shutting the door when he said, “I want everyone to hear my wish.”   My daughter and husband were doing tooth brushing but I said I’d listen to his song.    For a bit he had a really nice song and strumming going but by the time I pulled out the cell phone to take some video I had missed it.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter had superhero day at school today.  I found out about this late but I was able to order it to arrive on time.   Only it didn’t.    We had to make up a costume for her today which included her special custom “R” cape from Aunt A.    Her costume of Wonder Woman arrived this afternoon and for the rest of the evening she wore the costume, including the slick red knee-high boots.

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Fire Ants

I hear about fire ants from my husband and his family from time to time.   I don’t know what the natural habitat of fire ants is, but I’d guess “Golf Courses” is on the top of their list given the number of times my father-in-law has encountered them.  I did see them once, on the putting practice green while my husband was trying to teach my son how to putt.

Or maybe he’d given up on trying to turn my son on to golf at the age of three and had gone back to practicing himself.   My children were running all over the green and assiduously avoiding the steep drop offs at the edges of the sand traps.  

Then someone yelled.  I think it might have been my husband, who rarely yells.    But in this case he’d spotted a large amount of fire ants, larger than normal because someone small in our family had just run through the nest.

I don’t remember if we all got away safely but I know I wasn’t bitten.   I don’t think the children were either.   We went home and aside from the fire ant stories I hear related to my father-in-law’s golf rounds I haven’t thought much about them in a few years.

I don’t really know what “fire ants” are.   Are they ants that bite or are they a specific species of ants that bite where the bite feels like fire afterwards?   I’m guessing the latter but since I refuse to take advantage of the internet while writing up one of these little posts, I won’t find out until after I press the publish button.

To sidetrack seriously on this post though, the thought has occurred to me that you might be wondering why I wouldn’t look something up in advance, prior to starting writing a post, so that I might be more knowledgeable about the subject first.   Only that would involve knowing what I was going to write.    Some times, some posts, I have a particular plan.   Other posts like tonight’s I had the two words, “fire ants” written as a blog post topic.    So I start typing and what comes out, comes out.   Even this little diversion into how I write posts I had no idea I would write until the last paragraph.  

But let’s get back to the subject…

I grew up with ants and those little ant hills they make all around me.  I poked at the hills and watched as the ants scattered.    I don’t remember getting bit by one ant ever in my life.   If getting bit felt like fire you can bet your life I’d have a specially seared part of my brain that remembered it.

Yesterday my daughter ran into the house yelling that her brother had gotten bitten by fire ants.   I don’t know where they were or what ant hill they’d poked a stick into but my son came in and was in distress from his lower calves down.

I got the panoply of anti-itch products we have out and helped him slather one on after another.   In my mind I questioned if it was really fire ants until I saw several large welts appearing after a few minutes.   So we dosed him with Benadryl and let him watch a television show until dinner time.

Today the welts are gone and he doesn’t seem to be itchy.   So were they just biting ants?  Or were  they fire ants?   I don’t know, but maybe next time my children will use a longer stick if they plan on poking at ant mounds.

The Big Boy Update:  As I was dropping my son off to school today he said, “I know this might make you sad mom, but you’re not going to pick me up after school; I have a play date with Kelly”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter came home with a light-up skateboard from school,   This is because we pledged money to the, “booster-a-thon how many laps can you run around the track” thing.   That may not be the exact name but the point is, you have people pledge money on a per-lap basis and then the child runs their little legs off trying to raise as much money as they can.   My daughter apparently reached a level of pledges that entitles her to a light-up skateboard.   Mind you, she has currently run zero laps because the event hasn’t yet happened.   But she’s excited enough that tonight she ran around the outside and the inside of the house multiple times, “in training”.

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

New Cane

My daughter came home with a new cane today.   She uses a cane at school going from class to the cafeteria, to PE, art, music and her daily VI time.    She has an orientation and mobility teacher who works with her for a bit every Tuesday, walking around the school campus, teaching her ways to discern her surroundings with the cane.

Adam, her O&M teacher, had mentioned he wanted to get her a longer cane.   She had a 30” cane with a white ball at the end.   Today she came home with a 34” cane with a red ball at the end…and get this, my daughter told us—it collapses!

Here’s what her child’s cane looks like.   There are different kinds of ends/tips you can put on them but the ball one works well for children because they don’t yet tap the cane back and forth and the ball happily rolls along as they push and pull the cane around in front of them.



Here’s the cane collapsed, something fairly easy to do as it’s held together with an elastic cord on the inside and you just pull it apart at the segments and fold it up.   When you need it again you let it go and it pops back into place all on its own.


My daughter is most excited about the red ball on the end of the cane.   I’m glad she’s liking using the cane, even though she doesn’t strictly need it in most situations.    Since her final visual outcome is still unclear, it’s good she’s learning the skills early. 

The Big Boy Update:   It is a sad day for me.    I got in the car with my son to go to school and I put on one of our favorite radio stations featuring Deadmau5.   My son and I both like Deadmau5 and he had one of the songs as his favorite song of the year for his class album last year.   But this morning he groaned and said, “Mom, Deadmau5 is so old.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter brought home some, “sentences she could read” the note said from her teacher.   I had known they were starting to use contracted braille, which is a bit like braille shorthand.   I’m glad I looked up common contracted braille words because the sentences were of three letters each and I would have told my daughter she was wrong (she wasn’t) had I not.   Think of it like this: how do you pronounce, “C D B”?   Did  you say something that sounded like, “see the bee”?   Contracted braille is something kind of like that.

Five or Six Miles:  I’m not sure, I forgot to start the tracking app on my watch.   It was something along those lines.  What’s more important is in the post-rain humidity and heat I felt almost dehydrated from the short run.

Monday, September 11, 2017

One Million Words

Every now and then look over on the left-hand column of Blogger when I’m don’t posting these nightly brain dumps and I notice how many posts I’ve done.    I started writing daily posts at the end of 2011 and even though I know I’ve been doing this for a while, it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long.

At this point I can’t imagine not writing a blog post every day, or rather every night.   I mostly write at night when the small beings in my household are asleep.   Although tonight my husband just rapidly ascended the basement stairs and I heard him yell up to the second floor, “I hear yelling, you should be quiet.”

Writing is something I never was good at in school.   I didn’t had the interest or desire to write.  I fought long and hard against learning typing and then complained bitterly about my hand getting tired writing out papers by long hand.   If the subjects weren’t math or science, they weren’t that interesting to me.   Writing and English being furthest away from “fun” as courses, the way I reckoned it.

My mother has always loved words and interesting facts about the English language.  To this day I get clippings in the mail from her with quizzes or articles about grammar, language and words.   As I grew older I did find a love for words, but not so much for writing.   Sure I could hammer out a slew of business emails (now having mastered typing) but creative writing I had little interest in.

Then there was the crisis of 2011 in which we couldn’t remember what my fourteen-month-old son had done a mere eleven months before.  My two-month-old daughter was starting to become interesting and the common question of, “was he doing that at the same age?” was seemingly something neither my husband or I could reliably answer with certainty.

Which is the reason this blog was born, mostly to document one thing about each of my children every day.   A little catalog of notables, milestones or funny things they say or do as they grow up.    And through writing here I decided I rather liked writing.   In the early days of the blog I would re-read a post after I’d published it and cringe as I stumbled through typos and awkward sentences.

Then some time and a large number of posts later I decided I didn’t feel like editing because editing to correct mistakes invariably involved overall editing for content and I’d spend three times as long writing my nightly posts, thus making a ten minute job a half-hour.   So I accepted the typos and unreadable sentences and figured if my three readers were sticking with me so far, they’d keep hanging in there.

At this point I’ve written over 2100 posts, that being the number I noticed on the left side of Blogger the other night.   How many words is that, I wondered?   So I did some very flexible math, taking some typical posts and finding out the word count for each and then averaging them.  I multiplied that number by 2100 and got a number well over a million words.   Then I rounded down, thinking a million words was a decent enough accomplishment to mark for today.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was given a Minecraft shirt from my chiropractor’s son, who had grown out of it.   This shirt has all the characters, monsters and animals on it—and my son loves it.   He wears it every time it’s clean from the wash and back in his drawer.   Tonight as he was getting undressed to put on his pajamas he took the Minecraft shirt off and looked at it longingly as he put it in the laundry basket saying, “I can’t believe I’m taking this shirt off…”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter had climbed up the bathroom door frame and was hanging by her fingertips, swinging back and forth (a frightening feat she does at least twenty times each day on door frames across the house).   She was silent for a minute—something that rarely happens with her—and then said, “we haven’t seen Mimi and Gramps in a long time.   They must’ve died.”   We reminded her how she had just talked to them on the phone the other day.


Sunday, September 10, 2017

Is Pain a Bad Habit?

This is one of those speculation posts.   It has nothing rooted in research or knowledge based on trolling the Internet for information.   It’s just me thinking to myself.   We pick up all sorts of bad habits during our lives.   For instance, drinking too much caffeine or chewing on your fingernails.  Some things are learned behaviors too like not being able to jump into a pool because you don’t like the shock of the cold water.

Then there are behaviors that go over the line and become phobias.   For instance, say I didn’t like snakes.   I don’t mind snakes, they’re beautiful creatures, just so long as we give each other a wide berth.   But some people hate snakes.   That hate can turn into abject fear and even become a phobia.   It can happen that way without even a bad experience to back it up, just the reiteration again and again in your mind that snakes can cause you to die and should be feared and fled from, even when they’re dead three days on the road.

I’m going to use my best friend here as an example, mostly because she doesn’t read this blog but also because she’s an understanding sort and would only whack me once or twice if she knew I was writing about her.   She hates snakes.   Her fear isn’t rational and she knows it.  When we’re out running in the park if I ever see a snake I gently run her out of the way and then twenty or thirty yards later I tell her.   And then I laugh, because she breaks into a high sprint and sometimes screams.   Which is funny, and even she admits it, especially when it was a ten-inch baby non-venomous snake. The point is her brain has made something small into something big to her.

So what about pain?   Is pain something that rolls around in our heads, something to be feared, something that the more we fear, the worse it becomes?   Can pain be an intentional bad habit?   I really don’t know,  but I do know the more I experience pain the more I fear it.

And by that I don’t mean all pain.   The pain of sore muscles from a good workout is always a nice sort of pain.   I might not be able to walk straight or lift my arms above my head or walk down stairs without holding on to the rail, but it’s a positive pain.    Other pains like tooth ache pain can be resolved at the dentist.   It might not be an inexpensive resolution, but the pain can be cured.

Then there is the pain that just won’t go away.  A bad knee, torn shoulder, arthritis, nerve damage, etc.  Pain that can’t be controlled or is persistent.   Do we make that pain more amplified in our minds because we can’t get away from it?

I don’t know.   I have no medical knowledge or statistical data, but I see people coping with pain every day—many decades older than I am—and they’re not complaining.   It makes me wonder about how different people cope with pain and if I’m the equivalent in handling pain as my best friend’s is in dealing with snakes.

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Vegetable Update:  My son told my husband yesterday, “dad, we haven’t had zucchini in a while.”  Then this morning my daughter said to dad as he was getting up, “guess what we haven’t had for a long time?  Broccoli!”   You can bet we went to the store to get their requests for dinner tonight.

Ten Miles:  We ran a bit faster today.   Strange run as we didn’t start until after 4:00PM.   I’m oddly tired but I think it’s more the time of day than the distance we ran.

Saturday, September 9, 2017

Scooter’s Shades and Bikes

My children wanted to go outside after dinner tonight.   It was nice weather and there were other children on the street out playing so I said let’s do it.   My daughter wanted to ride her scooter, which is great I thought, only I hope she can see where she’s going.

She got on her helmet (she insists on safety) and some crocs, which double as braking devices when necessary.   She got on the scooter and started to fly down the street.   And when I say, “fly” what I mean is, “go faster than I was comfortable with”.   I watched her careen down the street—and I do mean literally “down” the street as there is an increasing decline in grade all the way to the cul-de-sac and into the neighbors steep driveway.   The very same driveway that was the ten stitches in the chin driveway from a few years ago with my daughter.   So one minute into the scootering and I was already mentally bracing for carnage of some sort.

But my daughter was relatively proficient with the scooter brake and didn’t crash once.   She could also apparently see larger shapes around her because with the other children moving around on bikes, scooters and skateboards she never got close to running into anyone.

My son came out shortly after that—in shades.   He thought he looked pretty cool, smiling at nabbing his father’s sunglasses from the counter shortly before sunset.   He got his helmet on and pulled out his bike.   He wasn’t interested in riding a bike much last year and this spring and summer we avoided bikes because my daughter was completely blind for a good part of the time and we found other things to do with them that didn’t emphasize her lack of vision.

So when my son rode off immediately and then stood up to pedal and then let go with one hand to wave at me (all the while chewing gum) I realized he’d finally gotten the whole bike riding thing.   A few minutes later I told him to come back because I thought he needed air in his tires.   His tires and Whitaker’s tires were barely holding up the bikes.   I got tires and some ancillary balls inflated and then watched them all hoping for no scraped knees, busted faces or other injuries.

As adults we can see all the things that could happen—a lot of those things being bad things.   It’s why we say, “be careful” and a litany of other warnings.   I wish I could go back to that unworried age where I didn’t know what could happen because I was too busy having fun.

At the end of the night no one was even mildly scraped and everyone was tired, including me.  Only they rallied and are still up for some reason at almost ten.   Maybe they’ll sleep late?

The Big Boy Update:  My son told dad the other day, “I think dark-skinned people look better bald than light-skinned people look bald.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Color differentiation with my daughter is questionable.   But sometimes she surprises me with what she can see.   Tonight after reading some braille letters and numbers (dutifully rewarded with M&Ms by me) she started to eat them, looking at the color of each.   Note that she is heavily influenced by her brother who likes a lot of super hero things that involves colors and powers associated with those colors.    She picked up each M&M and remarked on it before putting it in her mouth.   This is a sample of what she said:  “Ooo, red—fire.  Ooo, orange—desert.   Ooo, blue—water.  Ooo, green—poison.  Ooo, yellow—lightning.”   Those were her M&M powers tonight, she told me.

Friday, September 8, 2017

Pleasure Is a Relief From Pain

Have you ever been so sick you felt miserable, thinking you weren’t going to make it through the night but when the twenty-four hour stomach bug has passed you’re exhausted and feel strangely good just because you don’t feel bad anymore?

Have you ever had a headache that was so bad you could hardly function that went on for hours?   When the headache finally subsides doesn’t it feel wonderful to just be out of pain?

I heard the saying, “pleasure is a relief from pain” not long ago and I’ve been thinking about it.   I have a friend who suffers from a lot of pain not unlike I do.   Our pains are different, but we each work through them as best we can.

I had been having a very bad time recently for about three weeks.   I just couldn’t get normalized, couldn’t get on top of the pain.   There are different kinds of pain, mostly in two categories: those I can manage and those that seem unbearable.  Interestingly enough, some of the pain I can manage is actually worse than other types of pain I can’t tolerate.   It’s about where it it and how it impacts me that makes a difference.   That’s a terrible job of explaining what it feels like in my body and brain, but it’s the best I can come up with.

I was taking multiple medications my doctor prescribed for use as needed (and I needed it) and doing all sorts of things like going to the chiropractor, icing, stretching, whining, moaning and complaining—the last three I have to thank my husband for listening to.

Then a few days ago things just got better.   Milder.   And I could manage again.   It’s hard to explain—I’m not out of pain, I’m just in less and more manageable discomfort overall.   I’m not waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to go to sleep until nerve medication helps over an hour later.   And I’m able to bend over and pick up things without making a terrible groaning sound.

So I don’t know what changed, but it almost feels like pleasure just to be out of pain.

The Big Boy Update:  I made my son mad today because he didn’t put on his socks and shoes in fifteen minutes after multiple requests.   He was so mad in the car he told me, “I don’t like you anymore.  You mean nothing to me.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  It was past bedtime, the door to the children’s room was shut and yet it kept opening as my daughter tattled on her brother.   One time she said, “Mom, Greyson hit me.”  I said, “okay, go to bed.”   She irritatedly replied, “whatever” and then slammed the door.

Thursday, September 7, 2017

Marathon

I have a marathon to run in early November.   I’m not trained for it.   I think I can get trained for it but it’s going to take a lot of running—running I’m not sure I’m committed to really doing.    It’s not so much distance, but frequency and distance.   Short runs, medium runs and long runs.    The last two marathons I ran I was able to do them, but I slowed down fairly dramatically after about eighteen miles.   Meaning I wasn’t really trained beyond the eighteen miles.

I think I need to do some speed training too.   Typically my running buddy and I run and talk at the same time.   We can easily run a whole marathon, never stopping talking all the while.   This makes the marathon distance go by more quickly and we have a lot of fun talking (she’s my best friend), but it means we’re not really pushing ourselves for speed.

I ran ten miles a few days ago without much issue.   I wasn’t sore the next day and I wasn’t tired at the end of the ten miles, but ten miles isn’t even close to 26.2 miles, isn’t even half-way there.   I know the signs of when I’m getting to the edge of my trained distance and it’s clearly beyond ten miles.   But those ten miles weren’t particularly fast either.

We’ve been talking about doing shorter distances and working on speed but so far we just keep dropping into the same habit of, “what marathon should we do next?”   So I’ll see in the next few weeks if I’m really ready for a marathon in November.    If not, I might get kicked out towards the latter half of the race for being beyond the cutoff time.    That’s never happened so far, but I can see it being a possibility if I don’t get serious about the running soon.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is starting to care about reading things.   He reads in school, but he’s not particularly interested in what he’s reading.   Then sometimes, like related to Minecraft or in the case of a random sign he saw the other day, he wants to know what something says.    Tonight he wanted to search for something on Netflix.   I wouldn’t do it for him but I told him I’d help if he sounded it out and looked for the letters on the screen.   He was happy when he figured out how to find Power Rangers by himself.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   My daughter bashed her head tonight and got one of those heavy bleeding cuts to the scalp.   It wasn’t related to anything blind, just her not paying attention and falling into the dresser knob while she wobbled around on the floor.   It took us a while to find out how bad the cut was because she was wanting to alternate between the ice pack and touching it herself.    After it had stopped bleeding she and I were working on reading braille.   She would feel the cut from time to time (and then get residual blood on her braille alphabet cards) and say in a quiet voice, “oh, that’s not good.”

Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Seeing or Pretending to See?

No one really knows what my daughter can and can’t see.   It would appear that she saw my son across the bedroom on the floor the other night when she came out of the bathroom, but had she been listening to footsteps and had mapped where he was on the floor based on that?  My husband said she pointed to where he was with no difficulty, but was it just a darker (or lighter) area in the room in a location she thought he might be?

At school with her new bifocals and correct prescription, her teacher said she raised her hand to say which one of the letters was that was being held up (on a large card) and she was correct—and that was from a good distance away.

Perhaps if she was older and more willing to be “tested” on what she can and can’t see, we could do some experiments to determine what distances she could see best from and find out what she was seeing (terribly blurry blob to I can see the hairs on your nose).   But she doesn’t even want to talk about what she can (or can’t) see.    So we’re left guessing.

If she weren’t so infernally good at using everything else she can glean from the rest of her senses to put together a mental image of what her surroundings probably look like based in the almost four years she was sighted, we would probably know more.   But she’s clever.

She’s also clever at lying.   Tonight she was in the tub and there was a knock on the front door.   It was a certain kind of knock after dinner on a week night which even I knew meant it was Rayan and Keira from next door to play.   I went to tell them it wasn’t a good time and could they come back tomorrow?   They headed home and I went back to the bathroom.

My daughter, without looking out the window above the tub—the window Rayan and Keira would walk by on the way home—told me, “I see Rayan and Keira heading home”.    She alone saw them and did so in her mind because they weren’t there yet.   But my daughter was confident that’s what was happening so I just let it lie and didn’t belabor the point.

Another example was on our drive home from dinner when we passed the new building at the hospital.   They have the ability to light up the perimeter of the roof with bright LED colors.   It’s rarely on but it was the other day and my son called out, “look mom, it’s blue!”   My daughter, in a position in the car where she could not possibly see the building’s roof said, “I see it too”.

Someday, hopefully with possibly some more sight returned and a little older child, we might get some kind of description from her on what she can actually see.   For now she wants to be normal like the rest of us and does her best to show she can see everything we can.

The Big Boy Update: Okay, my son has now gotten my husband playing Minecraft.   He’s gotten me playing Minecraft Story Mode.   And my daughter is interested in playing too.    This morning he was expelling to his father how if you didn’t have enough red stone you could just go into “Creative Mode” and get whatever you needed.   My husband said that he was only playing in “Survival Mode” and that going into Creative Mode was cheating.   My son didn’t quite grasp why that mattered.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  This was from a while ago and rather out of the blue as we hadn’t gone bowling in a long, long time.   My daughter announced, “I don’t want to go bowling ever again because the lanes are slippery and I don’t want to be sent back by the lever” (the lever meaning the ball return)


Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Resurfacing

It seems like my house has been in disarray for weeks now.   We’re redoing the mechanical room which necessitates everything to be elsewhere.   That means I’m walking around piles of things to get to my computer to write this and do other work.   There is a big dumping ground in the garage and I shudder to think of the state of the attic.  

But progress is being made.  Coats of cement paint are on the walls and two coats of cement paint are on the floor.   The floor is what’s causing all the “stuff dispersal” because we can’t shove things left and right and have the whole floor painted and left to dry for days.

The dehumidifier has been running a lot in the room to remove moisture and we’re waiting for the second coat of paint to be completely dry before adding a top hard coat of epoxy that will make dropping hammers and other things on the floor nothing to worry about.   Since the back half of the room will be a workshop for my husband, a resilient floor is what we need—which means I have to manage with this mess for at least another week.

Sometimes progress is messy.  

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Treasure Burying Adventure:  Shortly before dinner my children ran in to find me and asked if they could have shovels.   Why, I asked?  They said they were going to bury a treasure.   Their friend said she had shovels at her house and before I could say another word they ran off.    They weren’t back until well after dinner.   They said I couldn’t tell anyone about the treasure, well, except dad.    What was in it?  That was a secret (I had seen the box and knew the types of things in the little box Mimi and Gramps had given them at Christmas though and wasn’t worried.)  Then while dinner was being eaten they told me they could show me where the treasure was, and seemed quite excited to share in the secret location.    Their plan is to dig it up soon, although I’m not sure how soon soon will be.    When we looked out the window into the bushes my son pointed to he explained, “it’s under the mulch.   You can see where it is because there’s a big pile of mulch.”

Monday, September 4, 2017

Brailler

My daughter is getting proficient using her braille machine at a remarkable speed.   To type a braille “cell” you need to remember the configuration of six dots corresponding to the letter in the alphabet, punctuation or letter.  Some things, like letters, take two braille cells to indicate.   As a sighted person we remember the shape of a letter, as a blind person, you remember the dots and their positions that represent the letter.

My daughter has almost the entire alphabet memorized with a few uncommonly used letters she needs reminders on.   She has a good memory, which helps her a lot.   Today my best friend and I went running and afterwards I asked my daughter if she wanted to show her how she could type on the brailler, asking her if she wanted to spell Eleanor’s name.

I gave her the letter combination only twice and then she was busy typing not on Eleanor’s name, but sentences including it such as, “mom and Eleanor ran”.   Then she wanted to type Eleanor’s children’s names.  I wasn’t paying attention until she called me over, asking if she’d spelled Ellie’s name correctly.   She phonetically written ‘Elie’, including the capital indicator for the first letter.   She’s just recently started phonetically spelling things and typing them on the brailler—all after three weeks of kindergarten.

We’re still working on her tactile recognition of braille letters, something that seems a lot harder to me as well, but I have a feeling once she gets a little more skill she’s going to be a quick reader.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was getting tired of being on the boat yesterday and wanted to come back to the house.   The weather was calm and the boat wasn’t rocking but he was just done, cold and wanted to get into the house and back to regular clothes.   He started off with, “I’m getting lake sick” and when that didn’t work he decided he was, “getting boat sick”.   Fortunately for him we were heading in just about then.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter’s class is learning the alphabet through a method called Letterland.   There is a character and song for each letter.   She likes the songs so much she wanted to spend her pom pom money to get a collection of apps all about the Letterland characters.   She’ll have her headphones on and you can hear her singing away to each letter in the alphabet.   She likes to show us the pictures and tell us about each of the letters when she knows one of us is near.

Running:  I ran ten miles today.   I’m not trained up for the marathon we’ve signed up for in early November, but the ten miles wasn’t overly difficult today, even though we ran it fairly slowly.

Sunday, September 3, 2017

Day Trip

Uncle Bob and Uncle Brian are visiting this weekend.   Today we took a day trip to visit my in-laws who live about an hour and fifteen minutes away.   I slept late, not realizing we had an eight o’clock departure until my husband woke me, saying he wanted to let me sleep if I could.   (How sweet.)

We arrived around ten o’clock and went for a boat ride through lunch time.   Swimming happened off the side of the boat with diving from the stern and swimming directly under and through the boat, something that’s interesting and eerie if you’ve never swam between the pontoons on a pontoon boat. 

After the boat ride I fell asleep.  I guess I was tired.  My children had fun all day playing with Nana, Papa, Uncle Bob and Uncle Brian.   When we got home tonight around bedtime they still weren’t tired and tried to wedge in as much time as they could with their uncles before they depart in the early morning tomorrow. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son lay down across me on the couch this afternoon.   He was very still for a minute and then said, “I don’t hear you digesting enough.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter loves to play the card game War.   She can deal out the cards and play the game, knowing which cards win in any given hand.   She even came up with her own version of War with all the cards for each player face up.   In this version, strategy and planning is important.   She can see enough to count the shapes on each card and can tell what some cards are.   But when she has seventeen cards face up she’s mostly relying on memory and us telling her what cards we have.   Her memory is very good and she understands the strategy of holding back on an ace or taking a five with her six instead of her queen. 

Saturday, September 2, 2017

Paint and Piano

The basement is a mess.  And I don’t like a mess.   But sometimes a mess has to happen in order for order to follow.   We’ve been revamping our mechanical room.   I’m going to use the word, “revamping” because it’s a mechanical room with a concrete floor, exposed studs on two sides and poured concrete on the other two others walls.  There is an HVAC system, lots of wires and a ceiling covered in the innards of a house normally hidden behind sheetrock, but we came up with plans for the room and now we’re executing them.

The floor is now a nice dark blue.   One concrete wall is an adobe red and with the other being a moss green.   We have a rug coming that will add even more color and warmth to the area.   One half of the room will house two pinball machines and an arcade machine with possibly a dart board at some point in the future.   The other half of the room—the uncarpeted half in the back—will be a workshop for my husband and his power tool toys.

The room is looking up, but the remainder of the basement is piled with stuff while the painting and drying of multiple coats happens.   In a week or so it’s going to look nice and I’ll be happy because everything will be back in place.   Then I’ll move on to the basement and attic which has grown in piles and boxes to make room for the other things we wanted to put in the mechanical room.

We got an addition to the basement tonight, the piano that had been sitting in our garage for several days that couldn’t fit up our stairs.   I wasn’t keen on it going down here but it looks nice on the back wall and was played about three minutes after it was rolled against the wall by one of the children who bounded down the stairs to see its arrival from outside.

I like things up and away.  In their place.   I’m going to finish this blog post for tonight and walk around all the things currently out of place surrounding my desk and look forward to next week having a tidier, more colorful, restocked mechanical room.

The Big Boy Update:  My son has had two bad tantrums in the past two days.   Since he started school in a new class this week it is likely adjustment to new schedules and changes in his life.    But tantrums, especially ones where you throw things and hit people aren’t tolerated, so he lost some privileges.   He was so mad today he went out on the front porch and was planning to leave, saying he didn’t want to be a member of this family any more.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Uncle Brian watched my daughter climbing the door frames today and told her she was very athletic.   She asked him what athletic meant.   He explained.   Once she understood she told him, “I’m a very fun person.”

Friday, September 1, 2017

The Unbroken Phone

This story isn’t about me but when I heard it I told my father I was going to have to write about it.   My father is excellent at evaluating a problem and figuring out a solution.   He is particularly good if the problem involves some complex piece of machinery.  However some things can’t be fixed, they’re just broken.

Technology is one of those things that’s hard to fix because you can’t operate on the level of micro miniaturization that comes along with computers and their associated peripherals making up our technological world these days.   What that means is that sometimes when something isn’t working, my father can’t fix it.    Take the phone in his workroom in the basement.   For almost two years now he’s had an issue with him being able to hear callers, but they can’t hear him talking back.

Since the phone was one of four handsets they had around the house, getting the one replaced would likely mean getting a whole new system with multiple handsets.    So he muddled through, going upstairs when needed to talk on a handset that worked.

This week he’d just about had it and was ready to chuck the phone when he decided to assess the situation and see if he there was anything he could do.   The phone looked fine.   It didn’t have any visible damage.   There was even a label my mother had conveniently put on the phone that said, “workshop” so it could always find its way home to be charged.

Only…wait a minute, my father thought—and then he laughed.   My very organized mother had placed a label on the phone and had accidentally covered the microphone hole.   Two years, stymied by a little sticky piece of paper placed there to help.    His phone is now happily unbroken and he can keep tinkering while talking on the phone, possibly calling to tell me other funny stories like this one.

The Big Boy Update:  Uncle Brian was watching my son playing Minecraft today.  Uncle Brian remarked that it looked like it was raining in the game.   No, my son told him, “the Earth has to pee.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter wanted to sit in, let us call it, “Car Seat A” on the ride home from dinner.   I told her to come back and sit in, “Car Seat B” beside me.   No, no no, she only had eyes for Car Seat A she said.   Then my son said that sure, she could have that seat.  He’d gladly take the seat beside me he said as he hopped in it.  Which means my daughter changed her mind in a split second and the only seat she wanted in the world was the one beside me, now occupied by her brother.   She wouldn’t budge.   She tried to sit on him.   We started the car moving out of the parking space and yet she stood (literally) firm.  So after three warnings about getting into the seat she’d initially asked for and being told she’d lose dessert if she didn’t, she lost dessert privileges.  You should have seen the wailing and crying that went on (no, on second thought, you really didn’t want to see it).   My daughter was sent to her room crying about being hungry.   She could come out, but not if she was crying and wailing.   She had eaten a huge dinner so her little, “I’m hungry” ploy wasn’t very clever and fooled zero adults.   It was one of those great lesson learning crying tantrums.   And I smiled to myself, knowing next time there wouldn’t be so much resistance.    She calmed down eventually and then typed on her brailler, showing Uncle Bob and Uncle Brian how she could type.    Aside from not being able to spell things, she can pretty much type anything she wants—and she can do it fast too.