My husband and I went to dinner tonight with one of my daughter’s visual impairment teachers. We miss her, as she is no longer working with my daughter since kindergarten started. Raffaella asked to have a lunch with my daughter over the summer and at that time we also met Raffaella’s daughter, Lauren, who is also visually impaired.
Lauren is a sophomore at one of the local universities. She uses a cane and while she can read braille, she mostly uses technology to increase the size of the print and/or has things read to her with some VI software. Lauren is a computer science major and she and I have a lot of things in common we’ve found out. Tonight she sat for the children while her parents went out to dinner with us.
We had a lovely dinner getting to know Raffaella’s husband and catching up with her. We ended up talking a lot about Lauren’s experiences as a child growing up blind and what we might have to expect in the years to come. I don’t think it was any of our intentions to talk so much about blindness and the ramifications it has as a sensory impairment on a human being, but it was the thing we most had in common. And as parents, we can’t help but talk about our children.
My husband and I learned a lot. While there will be challenges, there is also comfort in knowing the hurdles are surmountable. It’s a comfort hearing about their daughter and the struggles she’s met and excelled beyond. She’s a perfectionist and is unsatisfied with anything but an A grade in anything. She’s in school but is also employed and does significant volunteer work on the side. She also has a boyfriend now (something her mother is still getting used to while being happy for her daughter at the same time).
When we returned home we heard laughter from upstairs. Lauren had fed them and cleaned up the dishes. She’d shown my daughter her speed reader program and talked to her about how she could possibly do things more easily on her iPad with some additional tools. My daughter didn’t want Lauren to leave, asking her if she could come back tomorrow. Lauren said she’d get me her schedule for November and we’re definitely looking forward to having her back.
The Big Boy Update: My son was drawing tonight and informed me, “I always put dynamite in my pictures.” It’s true, he likes to put a small diagram of at least one bundle of dynamite in pretty much anything he draws.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: We got a light pad for my daughter to draw on. It’s flat like an iPad but a bit bigger. You take a piece of paper and place it on top and you can either trace things or draw on it. Tonight my daughter said she wanted to do some drawing. I got out the pencils but she said she wanted a black sharpie—because she couldn’t see the pencil marks. She drew better than she normally does this way, probably because she can see what she’s drawn and can draw other things without drawing back on top of her existing work.
Not As Far As Planned: We ran 11.5 miles today. We were hoping for longer but time ran short on us. We’ll have to get in a 22 or 24 mile run soon because our marathon is less than a month away.
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