SERVER ROOM

Braille isn’t everywhere, but it’s in enough places that my daughter is already looking for it.   She has an idea where it might be found and is on the lookout when we’re in public places.   From talking to some of the VI people we interact with through the school, there are locations braille should be expected—only we don’t know where those places are yet as sighted people.   Our daughter is sure to let us know though.

She’s already outpacing us with reading braille.   Initially all we needed to do was learn the alphabet and a few additional characters such as punctuation, letter and capital indicators.   But there is more to braille than that.  

Today we were at my daughter’s Thanksgiving celebration and as the children were talking amongst themselves, my husband and I were talking to Ms. Aagard, our daughter’s braillest.   It was singular then that my husband got a text message from a friend, with a picture attached:

  

Our friend said this sign had just gone up and he was confused because while he could suss out the second word of ‘ROOM’ from a braille perspective, there just weren’t enough letters in the first word to make up ‘SERVER’.

So my husband showed the picture to Ms. Aagard and she said, “ah, that’s because there is a shortened character for ‘er’ that’s used.   In this case, the word ‘SERVER’ is being spelled, ’S-ER-V-ER’.   So, mystery solved.

She said my daughter was only working on words that had a single letter “secret code” such as the letter ‘L’ representing the word “like”.   Next year she’ll get into the letter combinations for partial words.

And while my daughter’s braille reading is still slow, she’s progressing quickly.   She’s even found some mistakes in Ms. Aagard’s typing.

The Big Boy Update:  My son has been having behavioral issues.   We’re trying to get to the bottom of what’s bothering him that’s causing them and we’re working with his teachers and his play therapist.   When I know more from Dhruti I’ll give an update here, but today unfortunately my son found out (in a very carefully worded and kindly conference with his teachers) that he won’t be invited to go on the field trip to the aquarium on Friday.   It was an all day trip and he was looking forward to it.   His peers won’t be told why and he’ll have work to do at home while they’re on the trip.    He was good about it, but I do think he understands this was a significant consequence for him.   As a side note here, it wasn’t that the teachers are punishing him, he isn’t listening and isn’t willing to stay with the group (among other things).  So there were safety concerns the teachers had with having to focus on my son in large aquarium when they had an entire class to manage.   The teachers really wanted him to go on the field trip and gave him multiple opportunities to show them he was ready to go, which we appreciate.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter introduced her to her friends at school today at the Thanksgiving celebration.   She was very happy about us meeting her classmates.   There were a few times she thought it was one student when it was another, but the child just told her who they were, without any animosity, and she said, “oh, it’s Ruben”.