He Cries Differently

My daughter was upset about something or other this morning.   When she’s upset she’s loud.   If the phrase, “drama queen” gives you a mental image, go with that.   She’s not always like that but she is more often than not louder and more emphatic the more upset she is or the more attention she wants.

My son hates to be in trouble.   He gets mad, he gets rigid and he pushes and pushes to get his way—to have control of any facet within a situation.   But when we get more and more angry or insistent with him he gets upset.   He still pushes back, but he hates to be in trouble.   He’s afraid of being rejected or not loved.   Helping him understand that we’re not going to love him any less is something we need to work on.

Today we were at an Easter egg hunt at my in-laws club.   My son was being all kinds of disagreeable.  We were waiting for the “go” to run off in the field to collect the eggs and the guys had an idea to all line up against the backdrop of colorful eggs on the green grass for a photo.  Everyone lined up but my son.   Or rather he lined up but wouldn’t face forward.   Or look up.  Or smile.  

They gave up on the photo and then the hunt started.   I had been tough on my son as had multiple other people because we wanted only a moment of his time—to be remembered for years to come.    But he wouldn’t cooperate.    As the group of men broke up I saw my son look away and then wipe tears away from his eyes.   I didn’t even know he was crying.  

My son cries differently than my daughter.   I went over to him and picked my seven-year-old child and he put his head on my shoulder.   I rubbed his back and we talked about how hungry he was.   He felt better once he’d eaten.   I think he was glad he did the Easter egg hunt.   For a while before he was insisting he hated egg hunts.

The Big Boy Update:  My son has had some dry skin over the past several days.  We put on medicine and lotion but it wasn’t helping last night because his penis was now both itchy and stingy.   He complained to his father, “I have the worst penis ever.   Cut it off!”   This morning I asked him if he was glad to still have his penis now that hit felt better.   He said he was.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Yesterday as we were walking through the terminal on our way to our connecting gate a man told me, “she’s beautiful.   I have two at home but I’m off on a multi-month work commitment in the middle east and won’t get to see them for a while.   She reminds me of my children.”  My daughter was disheveled with hair everywhere but she was moving along with her cane at a nice pace, following the sound of my voice through the airport.   I told him thank you for the very nice compliment.    After he left I told my daughter he had said she was beautiful and wasn’t that nice.    She said, “I’d rather be different than beautiful.”  

Did You Run From Boston to Here?

Today we travelled to be with my in-laws in Florida or our children’s spring break.   My husband’s two brothers and their families were also converting on my in-laws for the Easter weekend and holiday.   We didn’t start traveling until the afternoon though.   This morning my son’s school had the second Grandparent’s Day.   My parents went today and saw my son both in the classroom as well as sing and preform with his classmates.  

The flights were fairly without incident.   We arrived, got out bags, Nana picked us up.   Our other family had arrived on earlier flights and were at Nana and Papa’s house already.   As we were pulling into the driveway we saw Uncle Bob coming in from doing a run around the neighborhood.   My son knows Uncle Bob is good at running.   He got out of the car and said, “Did you run from Boston to here?”  

The Big Boy Update:  My son has learned how to “floss” or do “flossing” as a dance move.  Another class had the move in their routine for Grandparents day.   He’s pretty good at it.   My son tried to teach both me and his sister.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   We had just arrived at the airport.   Our parking space wasn’t a long walk from the terminal.    Everything was going smoothly with no one complaining, dawdling or losing their temper.  Then, my daughter slowed down and said, ‘ow, my bunions hurt”.    I laughed.   I couldn’t help it.   But in the rush of the pedestrian traffic I don’t think she realized I was laughing.    Next she said, “what are bunions?”

Grandparents and Special Friends Day

Every year at my son’s school there are two days where grandparents or other “special friends” come to visit the students.   It’s a special time where the children get to show off what they’ve been doing during the year.   My parents are usually in town this time of year and would come one of the days.   My daughter attended the Montessori school until this year so my parents would spend half of the time with her and half of the time with my son.

This is exciting to the children.   Children love their grandparents and being able to have them in their classroom is a special thing.   For the second of the two days we’ve invited “special friends” of our honorary Uncle Jonathan and Margaret.   My son was ready for them this morning, looking forward to the day.

I volunteer in the mornings, giving a presentation to the guests on what a day in the life at Montessori school is like for the children.   Montessori school is a little different than traditional schools but we think it’s the best choice for our children (or child now as my daughter is at a school that has trained vision impairment teachers helping her).  

I like talking about what the children do.   I have posters with lots of classroom pictures on them with the children working.   The grandparents love to look for their grandchild in the photos while I talk about what “work cycle” is and what it means to be in Children’s House Extended Day and how the toddlers participate in making bread every day.  Oh, and flower arranging and leaf washing and other things that sound silly for a child to do but make perfect educational sense when you understand they why behind it.

Tomorrow my parents will come to see my son at school and watch him preform some songs with his classmates (which he was pretty excited about).  

Then, it’s spring break.   Both children are off next week and everyone is looking forward to that.

The Big Boy Update:  My daughter was doing a game where she’d say, “say your name if you like bananas” or other item.   We’d say or not say our name.   My son responded to one of her questions with the answer, “Grey”.   He told her, “I only like it a little bit, so I only said half of my name”.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  This is a bit graphic, so come back tomorrow if you don’t think you can handle it.   My daughter has had a rash and we’ve been putting some cream on her bottom and around her vagina for the past several days.   Today I came into the bedroom to find her with her pants off, trying to tell if the rash was still there.   I could tell one spot was bothering her so I asked if she wanted me to put on the medicine.   She did and when I came over she was craning forward to see.    She said, “it looks like the state fair.”   I tried not to laugh in surprise and asked her, “your vagina looks like the state fair?”  She said, “yes, it has red and white stripes.”   There were no stripes, but we don’t know what she can see or how things look.   She loves the state fair.   It would seem there were similarities.  

I Never Really Knew What a Number Sign Looked Like in Print

My daughter got a new braille machine today as a present from Mimi and Gramps.   They wanted to get her something she would enjoy and be able to use for school.   This new brailler is high technology in comparison to the other braille machines on the market.   Even though the process is simple, just imprinting up to six dots at a time, the machines themselves need to be rugged while at the same time accurate.   That, and they’re not inexpensive.

When the brailler arrived today we opened it up and plugged it in.   Other braille machines are like old-style manual typewriters with keys you have to bang.    You still do that with this machine, but that’s because you have to hit hard enough to imprint the dots on a page of card stock braille paper.   But there’s a digital display, it speaks to you and it has a memory.

My daughter started typing on it right away and it called back to her every character she typed.    If she was spelling out a word it said the letters and then pronounced the word when the space key was pressed.   It also knew about contracted braille.

Contracted braille is like our contractions.   We can write “can not” as “can’t” and braille has similar shortcuts, but it’s a little more like shorthand.   For instance the letter ‘y’ all alone means ‘you’ and the letter ‘l’ represents the word ‘like’.   When my daughter typed a contracted word it pronounced the word and not just the shorthand letter(s).

As my daughter typed she made some mistakes.  She discovered some new contractions she hadn’t learned yet from making mistakes—and that was exciting to her.   What was exciting to me was the screen that showed each letter at about an inch in size.   She could look at the screen and see the uppercase or lowercase letter.   She could also see symbols.

She was typing a number and did the indicator symbol, “indicating” the next letters were actually numbers instead.   What appeared on the screen was the pound sign, or hashtag as it’s more commonly called today.   She looked at the symbol and said, “I never really knew what a number sign looked like in print.”  

The new brailler also has memory.   She can scroll backwards through what she’s typed and we can store a writing session on a USB drive and then bring it to the computer to save it or print it out so we non-braille readers can see what she wrote.

We’re all very excited to see what she does and learns with her new brailler.    Thanks, Mimi and Gramps.   Her brailler is something she’ll use for years to come.   It’s her main method of writing and is very important to her.  

The Big Boy Update:  My son knows I like things salty.   He told me after dinner the other night, “just so you know, there is such a thing as too salty”.   I told him I hadn’t met a dinner that met that criteria yet.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Our neighbor, Blake, came over to watch my daughter for an hour tonight while I ran an errand.   She had a great time with him and hugged him when he left.   As he was shutting the door she called out, “I can’t wait for next time, you’re my best friend forever, Blake.”

Acting Like Children

My mother took the children to dinner tonight while I went to a meeting with my husband.   She had to get them into the car and drive them to the restaurant, where my father was meeting them.    My children are great sometimes but they’re children and they were having a time getting ready to go.

My mother doesn’t lose her temper often but they weren’t listening and were being unkind to each other so she snapped at them.   She told them to stop, that they were acting like children.   My son said, “but we are children!”

The Big Boy Update:  My son and daughter were in the back of the car, bickering about getting the seat belts strapped in.   They were in my mother’s car so my daughter wasn’t as aware of where things were.  My son was trying to help her and she didn’t want any help.   My son got frustrated at her and said very uncharacteristically, “I wish you could see better”.   It didn’t seem to upset my daughter any more than the rest of the argument.   Later I had a little conversation with my son about how we all wished she could see better.   I asked him if he thought saying that might have made her feel bad.   He hardly ever says anything about her vision to her and is helpful a lot of the time.    I didn’t want him to think I was upset at him, but I do want him to think about what he says in the future, just like any other hurtful comments he might have about someone.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter made a, “starship” with Mimi yesterday.   It was constructed of pieces from a set of Tubation tubes that she and her brother like making into various contraptions from time to time.   My son’s creations invariably are sword-related.  Her starship though was sort of here, there and everywhere with it’s most notable feature being a whistle on one side.   She wanted to bring it downstairs to show Gramps when he arrived.    Upon reaching the bottom of the stairs it had fallen into a few pieces.   As she felt around for the pieces she told us, “it’s a delicate thing”.

Prince Valiant

My parents clipped lots of things out of magazines and newspapers when I was younger.   There was no internet or even personal computers until I was older, so print media was the main way information was transmitted.   My parents were both educators so reading was important to them and was something they enjoyed.

Every Sunday my mother would give me the comics section of the newspaper (or the “funnies” as they were sometimes called) and I would read through the ones that were age-appropriate for me.   There were a lot I didn’t get as a child, but as I got older I understood more and more of them and their humor made sense.

One comic I never understood was Prince Valiant.   It was beautifully drawn but the content was above me.   I didn’t realize my father was cutting them out though until one day I was in the basement and saw a stack of them.   I asked him why and he said someday I might want to read them.

My father could be described as a pack rat.   But he’s really a collector.   He has collections beyond the limits of the space he has to store them, so collecting Prince Valiant comics seemed a reasonable thing to me for him to do.

Years later I asked him if he still had the collection and he said he didn’t.   I don’t remember if he had thrown them out of if they’d gotten water damaged at some point.   I don’t know that I would find the same enjoyment out of the comic strip today that he did back when I was a child.   I just looked online and apparently the story continues, with the latest installment being this past weekend.

My parents still do a lot of reading and still clip articles and comics.   They both bring me things from time to time that they think I’d enjoy.

The Big Boy Update:  We went out for Sushi last night with my parents.   My son decided he wanted to have sushi instead of the more tame chicken teriyaki.   I was skeptical he’d actually eat the sushi, especially when he wanted to order some of the more exotic items on the menu.   But he liked the food and ate a good bit.   He said at one point, “this shrimp is dead!” meaning he was making sure it was dead as he pulled the tail off.   He also wondered about the red things on top of one of his pieces. My husband said it was fish eggs called “roe” and that it was like the chicken eggs he ate for breakfast, only from fish.   The best part was watching my son eat the shrimp head, which he thought tasted pretty good, although he only ate one of the eyes.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter ran to find me on Friday night as she was having a snack.   She had a strawberry in her hands and asked me, “can you take a picture of this strawberry?  Because it’s the cutest one I’ve ever seen.”

Counting Cows

When I was young we’d go to visit my mother’s sister and her family sometimes.   Or we’d go to visit my father’s mother.   Both trips had us going through long, country roads on the way.   Today those roads are likely still there, but they’ve been outdated by faster highways with more direct routing.

What I remember for both trips was a game we would play to pass the time: Counting Cows.   You would pick a side of the car and when cows came up on your side you would count them.   The first one to ten cows would win the round.

On any given trip we could easily play the game multiple times.  There were farms that had only a few cows so you had to keep a lookout to see most of the time.   There were also an occasional pasture with many cows, effectively ending the game with a quick win, but mostly the rounds took a while.

There were other things that gave points too.   An abandoned building was something like five points (each cow was a single point).   I remember the number one thing for points was a burned down house with only the chimney remaining.   Surprisingly, there were a number of these around.

We had fun playing Counting Cows.   Sometimes we’d stop if the view was particularly nice.   I vaguely remember (or have a memory of a memory) of a huge field of yellow daisies.   It was on a slight incline from the road so you couldn’t see the end of the field of daisies and it looked like it went on forever.

We got out of the car to pick a few.   My mother put one in her hair and my father took a picture of us, with my mother in her 1970’s hair style and clothing from the time.   It’s a beautiful picture with the field of daisies in the background.

We don’t get to see farmland on our trips much anymore, or count cows.   We’ll have to come up with a more modern version of the game to play when we go on trips today.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was saying or doing something in the tub and talking to his sister tonight.   I overheard him say, “I’ve done that like a million times.   It’s easy to impress parents.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We had an event at my son’s school today.   My daughter didn’t want to go, complaining, “it’s not my school”.  I told her it had been her school for multiple years and that maybe we’d see her teachers, Anne and Susan at the event.   What she said next was interesting, giving me an insight into how she perceives her world.   She said, “what does Anne sound like?  I can’t remember.”

The Umbrella and the Half Circle

I’ve said this many times before: we don’t know what my daughter can and can’t see.  We have to infer from what she does and says.   She doesn’t like talking about it but she also can’t really describe it well either.  

For example, today she asked me when we were going to Disney.  She’s been but she wasn’t really walking at the time.   I told her about it and said we’d have to go sometime because there would be a lot I’m sure she could enjoy.   I also told her the last time we went I wasn’t able to see well because I’d just had my lens replacement surgeries but she could see fine because it was before she lost her vision.    She said, “you mean I could see out of my right eye?”   It’s been two-and-a-half years and she doesn’t remember the first four years of her life being able to see out of the right eye, which I didn’t know until today.

But she’s seeing some things and it might be that she’s seeing more than she was or at least she’s putting together what she can see better.   I’d move the car seats to the third row this week because my in-laws were visiting so today when my daughter and I got into the car to go to a birthday party she was two rows back.

She said to me, “mom, I see a rainbow umbrella.”   I didn’t know what she was talking about until I figured out it was my colorful water bottle sticking up out of the cup holder between the two front seats.   It did have the shape of an umbrella.   I pulled it in and out of the cup holder and she could follow it as I moved it.  

Then she said, “I see a half black circle too.”  I pointed to the steering wheel and said, “do you mean this?”   She did.   She only knows what’s in her world if she touches it or gets up very close and she doesn’t get in the driver’s seat of the car so I don’t know that she knows what the steering wheel looks like.   But she saw it from all the way in the back of the car.    That’s a level of detail I didn’t think she could see.

She’s also been very light focused lately.   She wants the blinds closed because I think the light from outside makes it harder to see.   In contrast, she’s wanted the lights on at full brightness (many of our lights have dimmers on the switches) so she can see more.  

Is she having some regeneration in her rods and cones and are they becoming more sensitive, seeing more with proper lighting?   Is my daughter learning different lighting helps her see?   Or is this something like a drop in pressure in her eyes and she’s needing the light to see better?   I don’t think it’s the latter because we talked to her about it tonight, but it’s hard to tell because she can’t really tell us.   For now I’ll hope she’s seeing a little bit better.   That’s always my hope.

The Big Boy Update:   My son had terrible intestinal cramps today.   He wanted to be cut open (“because you were cut open when you had my sister”) to fix the pain.   He tried everything but nothing worked.   I called out to him at one point and found him on the bathroom floor.   He said, “I’m getting up to go to the toilet now to face my fears.”   He wasn’t able to go to the bathroom and instead fell asleep on our bed about six o’clock.   He didn’t want dinner and he’s currently asleep in his bed with his clothes still on.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was so excited to go to Layla’s birthday party today.   She sat at a table with friends from school eating ice cream together and comparing who has the oldest sibling/parent/grandparent.   After that the children at the party ran around inside and outside playing with toys and bubbles.   My daughter stayed by me the whole time.   I know she wants to play, but she can’t follow the other children at the speed they move in an unfamiliar environment.   The children aren’t excluding her, they just have no idea she can’t join in.    I don’t think my daughter was overly upset about it, but it does make me sad seeing all the other children running around in the yard and my daughter declining an invitation to be on one of the teams.   I know she wants to run, but she knows her limitations.    She and I had fun with the bubbles and had some very nice conversations with the other parents who gave her M&Ms and gummy bears from the toppings bar for the ice cream.

Sashay

I was cleaning up from dinner the other night to boisterous sounds from the living room.   I wasn’t sure what was going on but I kept hearing my son say, “sashay!” followed by laughing.   Apparently he’d come up with a game he titled, “The Tackle Game” with my husband.  

In the game you were ’safe’ unless your secret word was said.   The secret word wasn’t that secret because everyone knew it.   He picked the word, ’sashay’ for some reason.   My daughter had the phrase, ‘french fry’.   My husband would say all sorts of words and then yell out one of their words and tackle them.  

Laughter followed.   Lots of laughter.   My husband is great with games like this with the children.   I’m good at cleaning up.   I’ve leveled up that skill over the years.   He’s much more fun than I am.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is coming in from tumbling class.   He loves tumbling.   His occupational therapist said he needs endurance activities to help burn some energy.   After free running or tumbling he seems to be in a better state of mind for the rest of the day.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was talking to me about having a bath the other day.   She said, “but I need a bath”.   Then she thought about it after I told her she didn’t have to have a bath unless she didn’t want to.   She said, “wait, I had a bath last night!”  That ended that conversation.   I guess she didn’t need a bath that much in her mind.

It’s Like a Rock the Baby Thing

Last night I came upstairs after bedtime to find my mother-in-law reading a story to my children in the closet (where their bookshelf is).   I looked at the clock and it was past bedtime—past bedtime and homework wasn’t done.  

The children’s homework is reading.   My daughter and son sometimes take turns reading their things and one parent listens.   Other times we divide up and take a child each and they read to us and we help where needed.  

So last night we were behind schedule and no reading was being done, save my mother-in-law reading to them, and she doesn’t need help in learning how to read.    I was about to say something but I stopped myself and realized, it’s like a rock the baby thing.

When my children were babies we worried (okay, I worried) that they wouldn’t learn to soothe themselves to sleep if we set a precedent of rocking them to sleep every night.  Or singing to them.   Or rubbing their backs.   Or any number of things that required an adult to help the child get to sleep.

My mother-in-law said one time that it couldn’t hurt to rock them to sleep once in a while.   She was the one wanting to rock the baby to sleep.   And she was right, the children go to sleep just fine on their own.   No habits were made and no harm was done.   And it was enjoyable for my mother-in-law.

So I walked out of the room and let her read and didn’t say anything.   They can do their homework other nights when they’re not visiting.   They’ll be reading everything before we know it.

The Big Boy Update:  I told my son to hurry and brush his teeth as we were late to bed.  My son then said, “why is it you never hurry when I want you to?”

The Tiny Girl Update:  My daughter has been invited to have breakfast at school with the school mascot tomorrow.   She was selected by a teacher for her good manners.   She is very excited.  

The Irritating Husband

A little while ago I called downstairs to my husband, saying, “if you write my blog I’ll finish everything up here”.  I just got to my computer to find the following blog post, ready for the “publish” button.   You tell me, I think he should ghost write this blog as me more often…
—————

I don’t really enjoy complaining about my husband, but it does seem to be one of my best hobbies.  He has been keeping me awake with his incessant snoring as of late.  I know it’s not his fault, and part of me feels bad when he apologizes, but there is only so much freight train I can take at 3am.  He’s even offered to sleep in another room while his sinuses clear out.  So far I’ve replied no, but I have such a strong, secret desire for him to follow through.  Let’s see what happens tonight.

Another skill I have is to immediately point out all of his failings as soon as I walk in the door.  Such as, the kid’s are three minutes behind schedule with their bath, there are 12 papers on the counter when he knows his permissible limit is 10, and why is he arguing with me when he knows that I’m the one that is right?  See, I knew you were on my side—ridiculous isn’t he?

However, my best talent absolutely must be complimenting him while insulting him at the same time.  My ability to do this in the most subtle way is probably Guinness worthy.  Most of the time he doesn’t even know I’m doing it, but at the end of the night, I get such a great internal chuckle out of my triumphs of the day.  Sometimes I get caught laughing out loud while thinking about all the clever things I said during the day, and when he questions what was so funny I have to quickly invent some imaginary text, tweet, or lolcat that I found amusing.  He falls for it almost every time.

Enough about him though—it’s my brain that’s truly extraordinary.  I know my husband gets confused sometimes, but really, how many people can be talking about topic A, throw in a mention of topic C while in the middle of a mid-anecdote topic B—all in one sentence without breathing?  I believe my brain compartmentalizes each thought into its own little bubble you know the kind of bubbles that I like that are store bought not homemade because the homemade ones are tricky to get just right like this one time I made some and I spilled it and it took so long to clean up but the store bought ones evaporate great especially the dollar store brands and then my brain can jump back and forth between the two or three or four of the cheap ones work great, you know? <big breath>

What do you mean you lost me??

Fortune Cookies

I like them—fortune cookies.   I like the flavor.   I like how they’re crunchy, but I don’t like how they crumble before you can get them out of the packaging sometimes.   But I’m not so into the fortunes.

For years I’ve eaten the cookie and not looked at the fortune until I’d finished eating the cookie.   Now, I don’t even look at the fortune anymore.   It’s sort of like horoscopes, good fun, always something nice to say or some gentle guidance, but it’s not going to change the course of my life or tell me what to think.  

I don’t expect it to cause me to prepare for a future predicted on a random slip of paper, printed repeatedly en-masse, as a matter of course.   Also, I’m a cynic.   So I just stopped reading them.  

But they are fun and in a group setting it’s fun to go around, reading off each other’s fortunes to see what’s been said.   My son is getting old enough to read them now.   We were at dinner tonight and he helped to read them to our family.    The fortunes were nice, as always, but the cookie was better.

The Big Boy Update:  In the car today my son told me he had had a dream.   He said it started out as a happy day, but then it turned into a walking dead zombie dream.   His sister was involved he said too.    He told me, “I couldn’t tell you before, but I can now.   Zombies aren’t scary to me anymore.”  I told him I thought this was great (he was afraid of the picture on the side of our The Walking Dead pinball machine in the basement at one point.   Then he asked, “so can I watch The Walking Dead now?”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter finished her “blanket” for Helen today.   It was a project she’d been working on with the little loom I got her as a project she could hopefully do independently.   She took Helen the bunny to dinner with her blanket and at bedtime ran downstairs saying she’d forgotten Helen and had to have her.

What Does ‘Overwhelmed’ Mean?

My in-laws came to town today.   We’re excited to have them in for a visit.   It’s also my father-in-law’s birthday.   My children are glad to see their grandparents for a few days.   We’re going to see them in two weeks for a spring break vacation in Florida at their home, but you can’t get enough of grandparents, right?

The Big Boy Update:  We had a meeting today with my son’s teachers, his Integrative Occupational Therapist and his Play therapist.   While we met over the teacher workday this morning, my mother spent some time on the playground at school with my son.   When it was time to bring him in she came with him.  

We did a lot of talking about how we can help him with his anxiety.   He had said recently that he was behind everyone in his class, notably he felt like he was the last one.   It turns out he’s not last in his class, his comment came after coming back from a week of vacation where he saw his peers ahead of him from lessons he missed while away.   He’s doing fine, but he is distracted very much from the anxiety of being overwhelmed with everything.    His teacher said it’s not intelligence—he’s very intelligent she said.   He just has a hard time settling down to do his work.

We discussed strategies for how we can best help him both in and out of the classroom.   When he came in to hear what we’d talked about we all made sure he knew we were there to help him.   He said, “I feel like I’m a good kid and a bad kid at the same time.”  His therapist said, “guess what?  We all feel like that, and that’s okay.”

He listened very carefully to what we had to say and then we asked if he had any questions with the ideas we had to help him.   He nodded and then asked, “what does ‘overwhelmed’ mean?  After explaining, he nodded again and said he thought the plan for dividing his work up into smaller lists (a day’s work plan instead of a whole week’s plan) would be a good idea.   We’re all hoping to help him.   We want him to be successful and feel comfortable in the classroom doing work.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has crazy hair.   We used to dry it after it was washed but gave up for a while.  Last night I dried it again and today it looks so nice and is much less fly-away.   She isn’t thrilled with the drying part, but I’m hopeful it will make brushing it easier for the next day until we wash it again.   We’ll see what she thinks about it when it gets brushed again tomorrow morning.

Dr. Fanta

My best friend had an idea that we could take the children to go to paint some pottery while we were in Park City, Utah on our ski vacation.   It seemed an indoorsy thing to do when we were getting over being outside for so many hours so we called and made arrangements.    We got there and had the entire store to ourselves until just before we left, which was nice.

It turned out we didn’t need much help because painting pottery was pretty simple—even if you couldn’t see what you had and hadn’t painted as in the case of my daughter.   My daughter selected an egg-shaped bowl and painted it in largely pastel colors.   She picked the colors based on my description coupled with the name of the color itself.   So for instance “red” wouldn’t have been as likely to get selected as, “Robin’s Red Splash” would be.

My son worked on his selection with virtually no help.   He picked a ceramic version of a soda can.   He picked colors in red and orange and for a while couldn’t decide if he was going to make a Dr. Pepper can or a Fanta orange can.  In the end he decided to compromise half and half and created what is likely the world’s first ceramic and backwards written, “Dr. Fant” can.  

The finished products were mailed and arrived today.   For dinner my daughter ate her lo mien in her egg bowl and my son drank his water out of his Dr. Fant can.

And yes, we are co-mingling the Amazon Alexa and Google Home Mini.   We’re making them sit beside each other in the hopes they’ll make friends.   They sound enough alike to be sisters separated at birth.

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Entrance and Skill Challenge:  My daughter beat my son four to one in endurance and skill challenges today at their private tumbling class.  She held a handstand for longer, climbed the wall edge back and forth more times and hung on to the rings for more iterations than my son.   My son was a good sport about the whole thing though, especially since he goes to two additional classes per week and this class is her private lesson he comes and joins in for fun.

The Flux Capacitor Doorbell

My husband has been working on our doorbell most of the day.   Or rather the part of the day after he slept late.   He’s had a cold and hasn’t been sleeping well lately.   But the Nest Camera Doorbell had arrived and he wanted to get it working.  

In my childhood we had a doorbell.   It was a button outside the house and then a ‘ding dong’ sound played inside from a little box in the hall near the bedrooms.   I didn’t think much about the wiring, the button or the sound, because for the entirety of my childhood it did exactly as it was meant to do—it alerted us when people were at the door.  

Our new house is more complicated.   It didn’t start out complicated, it only grew into complexity out of necessity and new technology.    The first thing we discovered is we couldn’t hear the doorbell.   The chime itself was on the second floor, but we weren’t up there much and our infants or toddlers that lived up there pretty much had no idea what to do about a ding dong sound.    So my husband took steps.

He wired the doorbell sound into the Niles system and accompanying speakers he’d had wired with the house.   That fixed things because two floors down in the basement when the doorbell rang we could hear it.    It turned out even our neighbor could tell when someone rang our doorbell because we initially forgot to turn off the outdoor speakers which were at high volume.  

The hitch with the speaker relay was the delay in the sound.   The circuit would open and my dog would run, barking straight up the stairs.   No one knew until a second or so later that there was some at the door.   In later years we’d just tell people the dog had ESP.

But now your doorbell isn’t complete it would seem unless it has a camera attached that will send a text message to you so you can get up to speed on who’s at your door from your phone or watch while you sit comfortably at your desk on another floor.   Or so the marketing materials would have you believe.

Once the product arrived all that needed to be done was to have my husband do the easy job of hooking it up.   If you’re guessing that we ran into troubles, you would be correct.   Or rather he ran into trouble.   I just gave him the, “I’m sure you can do it, you’re good at all this electrical stuff” from the sidelines.

The problem was the totality of circuitry in the mix.   The original door chime, the wire to the Niles system, the amount of watts going to the different parts of the system.   What was in loop, what wasn’t.  What could be excluded, what had to be involved.   How to get enough  power to get the camera working.   It was a total mess.   My husband at one point had this drawing going on the kitchen counter:

 
He had to do a Lowes run at that point followed by a period of time in the workshop downstairs.   He emerged looking rather victorious only to have to rethink his electrical schema once again with the new variables factored in:

I remarked that it looked much more flux capacitor-ish and a lot less complicated (less the gigawatts) and that surely he had it licked this time.   He wired it in under the cabinet with the Niles and then I heard him say, “colors?!  There are wire colors?!”

You would think that grey and white would not be the go to colors of Nest for their wires.   Apparently color scheme is all important, even if it’s at the price of clarity.   Fortunately one iPhone light and some wire checks later and he got lucky, getting it right on the first go round.

So now it all works.   Except the holes in the brick on the front porch are slightly off.   He was going to do that tomorrow I think, but there’s a chance I hear the hammer drill running now upstairs.

The Big Boy Update:  Last night my son wanted to put on one of my daughter’s footie pajamas.   They are too small for him but he really wanted to wear it.   He called it his, “Lah-Vay” pajamas.   I didn’t get what he meant until he unzipped the front, splitting the word LOVE on the front of the pajama right down the middle, dividing it into the two syllables he was saying individually.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter must have driven around in her Tesla Model Tiny S car (from Santa) for well over an hour today.   I kept hoping the battery would drain, but it’s got a lot of “range” apparently.    She had a very good time, only hitting one thing once, which thankfully wasn’t any of the cars over for a St. Patrick’s Day party next door.  

Sink Slime

My sink in the bathroom was starting to drain slowly.   It seemed like it went from draining fine to not draining well in a short period of time.   I’d tried to pull out the drain but it didn’t want to come out.   I’d done this before in the past because it looked like it needed cleaning.   It didn’t want to turn or unscrew or rotate in any way and I was usually in a hurry so I planned to come back later.

But I never put much effort into it until I was faced with a non-draining sink.   I tried again on pulling the plug and it wasn’t budging, so I consulted YouTube.   It is amazing how the right ten seconds of video can tell you exactly what you needed to know while showing you how very far off from getting the answer on your own.  

It turned out there was a bolt and then a pull I needed to loosen under the sink and then the drain plug would pull straight out.   My husband was helping while I was under the sink.   He said something along the lines of disgusting, gross, disbelief, nasty, in short, something unpleasant was waiting for me when I got up from the floor.

And it was indeed quite frightening.   I’m careful to keep my long hair out of the sink, but it’s the most heavily used bathroom sink in the house and things do get down there.   So there was hair and some sludge.    I had to go get a two-pronged fork and dig into the drain to pull out what was amassed in there.  

It went on and on and looked somewhat like the largest hairball I’ve ever seen.   But the strangest thing about it was the clear gelatinous ooze attached to the whole thing.   I was worried it was some terribly funky bacteria that had been growing, planning on taking over our house and family, but I think it was something more mundane.

The children’s toothpaste is a colored gel.   They frequently don’t get it evenly dispersed in their mouth so globs end up in the sink.   And those globs are sticky.   I have to wipe them off because they stick and won’t let go from the side of the sink.    I think the toothpaste was getting stuck to the hair and was being leeched of color over time, but didn’t dissolve.

Whatever it was, it’s gone and the sink drains back at it’s normal rate.

The Big Boy Update:   My son does not like it when you ask to talk to him when he’s using the iPad. We talked to him about ways we could communicate with him when he’s on it without him getting upset.   His suggestion was an interesting one, he said, “just push the app exit button”.   We’ll try tomorrow and see if it works.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter said she didn’t have a braille eraser about a week ago.   I ordered one online after having my daughter look very closely at the screen and telling me which one she liked at school.   It came in the mail today and she was very excited.   She gave us a demonstration by spelling her name wrong, erasing the letter and then retyping it.  Then she showed us where the braille eraser could be stored.   It’s quite small, about three inches and looks like this:

Seven Years Is Enough For A Kid

The Big Boy I Wanna Die Statements: My son is having anxiety about a lot of things, school in particular.   We’re meeting on Monday but today in the meantime I was trying to channel Liz in how she helps him feel comfortable enough to talk about his feelings.   I met with some success in so far as he told my husband and me how he was feeling, but I think I got the more negative end of the spectrum.

While asking about school it appears that a lot of anxiety revolves around school, which my son doesn’t want to go to anymore.   He doesn’t want to go to his school specifically, I don’t think he’s opposed to school in general.   When he gets upset he says things like, “I just wanna die.”  Sometimes he elaborates more because we haven’t gotten too terribly upset at this statement which in words is a lot, but for his age means he’s dealign with a lot of stress.

So today he told me, “can my life just stop now?  Seven years is enough for a kid.”   I felt so badly for him.   He told me right after that, “I just don’t like myself.”  

I’ve been trying to do some comparison stories because Liz says he thinks he’s a bad person and no one is going to love him or we’ll withhold affection or love from him if he’s bad.    This morning he got in trouble for dawdling.   I wasn’t nice about it because he had been pushing it.   He complained about being a bad kid.  

So on the car ride home I asked him if I was a bad person if I burned his english muffin?   He said no and I did some equating with needing to work on things or forgetting to do something like take the toast out wasn’t reason to be a bad person.     We extended the example into asking if he’d love me any less if I burnt his toast?   He got the comparison and I think understood.    But in the end he still said, “I just don’t like myself.”

So we have work to do to put his self image back together again and get him going with confidence to focus on his school work.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter asked me what day it was yesterday.   After I told her it was Wednesday she said, “I can’t wait until it’s Sunday.”   What’s so special about Sunday, I asked her?  “Tumbling,” she said quietly.    We’ve not been completely sure how much she likes her private tumbling class.   She would be all over the place if she could just see what the instructor, Zak, is trying to teach her, but she’s doing her best and is learning some and now I know looks forward to class.

Helen and the Bunny

Everyone is affected differently when they hear about my daughter’s vision loss.   Tonight my parents took my daughter and me out to dinner while my husband and son were at Free Running class.  We went to our favorite Sushi and Thai restaurant and had a waitress that’s been serving us since my children were babies.   At one point she offered my daughter a spoon to help her eat her rice and my daughter couldn’t see where the spoon was.   So I decided to say something.

I took the waitress over to the side and did my one minute rundown of what happened two-and-a-half years ago (has it really been that long?)  She was very saddened to hear what had happened.   I did what I always do and put a positive spin on the story, saying my daughter was happy and the vision loss happened at the best time because she was old enough when it happened to have started her life knowing a sighted world but young enough to not know what she’d really lost.

It must have upset our waitress because the next thing I know she had her purse and was down on her knees beside my daughter.   She unclipped a fuzzy plush animal and gave it to my daughter.   She said she’d just come back from a five week stay in Beijing where she visited her mother who had suddenly become ill.   She brought back this bunny and she wanted my daughter to have it.

My daughter hugged it and felt it all over.   We showed her where the ears were and the nose (hidden in the fur) and the four little white paws.   My daughter started playing with it, having it dance.   She asked our waitress what her name was.   How we’ve gone this long without knowing her name, is perhaps a question, but maybe more of a shame since we’ve seen her frequently over many years.

She said her name was Helen and my daughter immediately named the bunny the same, asking Helen if she would be the mommy of the bunny with her.   My daughter hugged Helen, she told Helen she loved her and had the bunny give her kisses.   Helen was smiling a very happy smile along with my daughter’s. 

We got the bill and Helen insisted we not give her any tip for the meal.  Insisted.   Said it was on her this evening.   My daughter is going to sleep with Helen tonight and is planning on taking her on her next trip to Detroit.    We were very touched by Helen’s kindness this evening.   My daughter is sitting on the chair in the living room as I write this with Helen by her side. 

The Big Boy Update:  We have a conference scheduled on Monday with my son’s two teachers, his occupational therapist and play therapist.   Hopefully we can come up with some strategies to help him have less anxiety in the classroom so he can get his work done with more success. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was telling me about the clay fish she was making in art class this week and how they would bring it home after it was fired and they painted it.   She had an interesting insight about humans and animals.   She said, “humans are better than other animals.”  I asked her why and she elaborated, saying, “they can take care of pets.   And then one day the could cook them in a fire and roast them and then eat them.”      

I’m Behind In Almost Everything

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Thank Goodness We Have Professional Help Update:
My husband and I had a meeting with our play therapist for the children today.   I also had some interesting exchanges with my son and as a result his occupational therapist today as well.   It’s all interesting, and it’s all fixable, but it’s clear and present in the lives of my children right now.  

First, Dhruti, our play therapist said my daughter’s play has dramatically changed.   She was able to visually see some more things, but she couldn’t invest her attention into anything during their session.   She didn’t have an evolving story.   She wasn’t anxious, it was more like, “what’s the point?”  

She thinks my daughter is looking for control but it’s more that she’s bored.   She’s doing a finger drumming thing she describes as caterpillars on her fingers that means she’s restless, she’s bored, she wants something to do but doesn’t know what to do.    So we got homework from Dhruti to help her.

We have some activities we can send my daughter on that we can assign to her that she can do by herself.  Create a list of how many socks you have.   Weighing things to see which potato for dad’s dinner weighs more, making a paper chain for the upcoming birthday at the house, etc.   Things with no consequence—things she can be successful at that will keep her mentally occupied.  

My son is also having his challenges.   I picked him up today to go to his occupational therapist.   On the way to see Liz I had a rare conversation with him in which he gave me insight into his mind.   I asked him if he had had a good day today.   He said yes, only he would have not gotten good marks on, “focus on work during work cycle”.

He told me, “I’m behind in almost everything” which he elaborated to mean where his first year peers were at this point.   He said, “everyone works faster than I do” and then, “they think I get distracted but it’s not that.”   He told me that school was boring—“aside from the Mesozoic era and the one after that”.

And then he said, “I think it would help to see Liz more than once a week.”   Did I just hear a child as to have more occupational therapy?   Sometimes it’s fun, but it’s not always, and he has to think hard and talk about how he feels and what he can do to be successful in the classroom and with his peers when he’s with Liz.  

So I walked into the session and he and I together told Liz all of the above.   And she was proud of him.   She and he had good hour together and at the end we talked about having a parent teacher conference with both Liz and my son there (at the end).   He didn’t want to be in the conference because I think the only other conference he’s been in was one he was told he couldn’t go to a field trip due to behavior.   But he was interested in going to this one, because he’s starting to understand what’s happening in his brain.

He and Liz talked about his amygdala and how it was hijacking his thoughts.    She asked him how he felt at the beginning of work cycle when he had to start work.   He put his hands on his head and spun around quickly twice.   She asked him if that meant he was feeling anxious or unsure.   He nodded.    It’s not intelligence.   It’s not lack of ability to focus.   It’s anxiety that’s causing my son to be, “behind in almost everything”.  

We just got his progress report for the first semester and he’s not behind in almost everything, he’s doing fine.   But he’s judging himself against his peers, which can be a tough thing.   We’ve asked for a conference.  Hopefully with Liz we can help him with his anxiety and he can focus more easily on his work.  

Some Stage of Grieving

I was talking to my friend, Margaret the other day.   She and I talk about all sorts of things, with my daughter being a frequent, recurring topic.   My daughter absolutely loves Margaret.   Margaret has a calm, reassuring manner and my daughter just feels comfortable and happy being with her.

One of the things Margaret and I talk about is scheduling our “foot toilet” (pedicure) date with my daughter.  Schedules have worked against us, with the weekdays being taken up by school and the weekends filled with events for both of us.   But I can assure you, my daughter has most certainly not forgotten about that promise of a pedicure with Margaret.    We’ve told her we haven’t either and she understands being patient is something we all have to work on.

Margaret said something to me the other day when we were talking about my daughter’s vision loss.   I can’t remember if I was talking about discussing the latest with family or how we try to not bring it to the attention of strangers unless it was necessary—basically helping my daughter have the most normal life as possible.

It’s hard to tell the story of how she lost her sight to someone though.   I was on the phone with my insurance agent today, someone I’ve worked with for many years, and she didn’t know.   So I told the story again.   I’m good at the three minute rundown and I always put a positive spin on it because it is a sad thing to hear.   No one wants to hear about a four-year-old suddenly losing her vision and all the medical intervention she’s had to go through.   But I tell it a positive light about how my daughter is very happy (she is) and doesn’t seem bothered in the slightest that she can’t do something we all take for granted.

Margaret said something that struck me though.   She said all of our friends and family are in some stage of grieving over her loss.   I think that’s true, but I hadn’t thought of it in those words.  It’s sad.   It’s a shame.   Will she get any of her sight back?  Unfortunately, no, she hopefully won’t lose more.   It hurts.  And it hurts us all in a way that can only affect an adult who understands the true implications and the scope of the loss.

Am I grieving?  Possibly at times.   Sometimes it’s just a phrase from someone like, “how did I not see that, I must be blind.”  Or a television show that has a close up of an eye in their intro (you wouldn’t believe how many shows have eyes in their intros.)  Maybe it’s hearing about the great time friends had on a vacation that makes no sense for our family because my daughter can’t experience what they did well.  I think that affects all of us who are close to my daughter in our own ways sometimes.

I always remember that my daughter is happy.   She’s killer at braille, can navigate without a cane for the most part now and has friends.   She’ll grow up happy and have a good life, even if it’s a life we can’t imagine because we can see.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was on his iPad last week and I asked him what he was watching.  He said what I thought was, “YouToop”.   I asked him about it and he did in fact think it was YouToop.   I explained that it was YouTube and had to go into a complicated explanation about tube-based televisions because he’s never seen one.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter’s school released early today for inclement weather.   She got home, took her shoes off and put her socks in the laundry basket.   Then she lay on her back with her legs in the air and wiggled her toes around.   I asked her, “how are your toes?”   She informed me, “they’re ready for action”.

I Made a New Book. It’s Nonfiction

My daughter’s brailler broke a while back.   She said something but I didn’t think it was broken at the time.   It turns out she was right (I should have believed her), so we sent it in to school for a working one which arrived on Friday.

My daughter has been doing interesting drawing things for a while.   She’s writing in large print and making shapes that, once she tells you what they are, you can sort of see.   She’s coloring more in the lines than she used to as well.   She’s doing this all without any guidance on ideas too.   She has no coloring books or activity books that have mazes, connect the dots, things to color or search and find. She can’t see any of that—so she has to make up her fun.

She must have missed her braille machine though because on Friday I got home and my daughter had written a book.   It was six or seven pages with a few lines of braille at the top and then an illustration at the bottom.   And the only thing my husband did to help was staple it together when she was done.

She wrote the book in the same format as the books she’s reading that her braillest makes for her.   The first page has the page number at the top left, the title of the book on the next line, “By <author name>” on the third line and “Illustrated by <illustrator name>” on the fourth line.

My daughter does all of this, including the correct spellings with the exception of ‘illustrator’.   She says she prefers the word ‘illustrated’ instead and usually giggles when she tells you this.  She follows the same format for the remainder of the pages, putting the page number on each page and then writing a sentence or two with illustrations below.

Today she came to find me and said, “I made a new book.   It’s nonfiction.  Can you staple it for me?”   Aunt Rebecca and Olivia have been staying with us for a few days as Olivia is in a swim meet here.  The book was about Olivia swimming and winning the race.   And about how she won a medal.

She was indeed correct, it was a nonfiction story as Olivia did win a medal.   She even let my daughter wear it around her neck.

The Big Boy Update:  Speaking of reading and writing, my son has gone from struggling to read to being able to read entire books we wouldn’t expect him to have the skill to read yet.   Tonight while my daughter was helping me make his lunch for tomorrow he read, Action Movie Kid with help on only one word.   Last night he read, Dragons Love Tacos and impressed my mother and Aunt Martha who were watching them for the evening.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  The children were upstairs reading books with my husband tonight as I was downstairs making my son’s lunch for tomorrow.  My daughter appeared at the bottom of the steps and asked if she could help because she’d already finished reading her book.   She was very helpful and actually cut the time it would have taken me to make the lunch alone.  

School Auction

We had our school’s annual auction tonight.   It was the sixth auction my husband and I've attended for the school.   I remember the first year we went; we didn’t know the people or the school well as the auction was early in the school year.  One husband and wife and I remember the wife raising her husband’s arm that held their paddle again and again for auction item after auction item.    We didn’t bid on much that year.

This year I was the emcee for the event.   I’d tell you I was more than a little anxious about the job, but I really wasn’t.   Speaking in front of large groups of people has never bothered me.   That, and I knew the audience well.   I was fairly sure I could do a decent job, mostly because we had a professional auctioneer doing the auctioning part itself.

We had some phone calls with the auctioneer and as we discussed things, my job got smaller and smaller.   I was only going to speak at a few key points.    That changed somewhat when we got there tonight.

We met the auctioneer for the first time about an hour before the live auction started.   I was about as busy as a bride at her wedding with people asking me things on top of the responsibilities I was working on in preparation of the start of the auction proper.

The auctioneer did an outstanding job of raising money for the school.   Hopefully we can bring her back next year.   But she threw an unexpected thing at me just before we got started.   She told me to introduce the twenty-two items and she’d bid them up.    Okay, not a problem.   Only I hadn’t prepared to introduce them.

I tried to get some time alone to read over the descriptions so I could plan what to say (because reading off a sheet is a less than ideal energy building speaking strategy.    For the majority of the auction I was barely keeping one item ahead of her.   I had a fast learning curve to go through, figuring out how to work with the auctioneer to best help her while moving quickly enough to keep the audience engaged.

The thing I like most about the auctioneer was her friendly attitude and her willingness to work with whatever we had and basically roll with the situation, no matter what was happening.   Nothing flustered her.    I was on the verge of being unready when she handed the mic back to me for the majority of the night.

But I had five years of experience at our school’s auctions and a lot of personal experience with the auction items themselves as some were repeats or similar to prior year’s items.   The auction went well.   It raised significantly more money than we anticipated it would and we added an additional amount of money to the Capital Campaign final phase, which is closing out at the end of the school year.

Would I do it again?  Yes.   Especially now that I know how to best support the auctioneer.   All the members of the committee learned a lot from the experience (we do every year).   This year we may have raised more money than we ever have before—something we typically do every year.

The auction committee worked very hard to make tonight a success.   And a success it was.   I was on the outskirts of the committee, not being very involved personally, but glad to play a part in the success of the night.

The Big Boy Update:  My niece, Olivia, is staying with us this weekend as she has a swim meet in town.   Yesterday she was disqualified from an event for jumping the start before the horn.   She’s as close to a professional at swimming as you can rightly be at seventeen and this rarely happens, but sometimes it does.   My son, not knowing much about tact, asked Olivia when he saw her, “why’d you get disqualified?”   Fortunately, Olivia said she’d slept off the disqualification and kindly explained to my son what had happened and what it meant.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was unhappy with her headphones this morning.   She chucked them on the ground and they rolled under the bed.   She went off to the bathroom a minute or two later.   When she came out of the bathroom she wanted to know where her headphones were because she couldn’t find them.    These are large, over the head, covering the ears type of headphones and she would normally be able to see them had they not been out of sight under the bed.    She said, “did I drop them in the toilet?”   I told her I was certain she would have heard the large headphones splash in the toilet had she done that and that maybe a bit more searching would help her find them.

More Jobs for Alexa

Alexa is pretty cool.   If you have one (or more than one) then you might feel the same.   My children love Alexa and have her do more and more things it would seem every day.   They figure out things to ask her and she seems to like them a lot.    Alexa also does things for the adults too, thanks to some additions my husband.

Alexa manages our shopping list via ITTT (If This Then That).   That was the first thing my husband added beyond the general list of things Alexa can do on her own.   There is music and calling people and dropping in on the other areas of the house .  We now have five Amazon Echo products dispersed around the house in key places doing specific things.  Alexa is our alarm and sets a timer for the children to swish for a minute or for cooking or to let the children know they have ten minutes to finish getting ready for school.

Next my husband wanted to give Alexa control over some of the lights and the television in the basement.   Initially he did this for our Christmas tree and lights, but once the holidays were over he repurposed the smart plugs for all the lighting in the main area of the basement.   We can turn on specific lights or turn on the television and all of the lights with one command.

But the latest and possibly the feature that’s made my husband the most happy is Alexa now can play music on our in-house speakers.  When we built our house we selected areas we wanted to have speakers to play music both inside and outside the house.   My husband got good speakers and selected a product that would let us control multiple music sources from wall consoles.

But the speakers have fallen into disuse because it is so much easier to just ask Alexa to do something for you.   Recently he figured out he could integrate with the Niles system in our cabinet that was gathering electronic dust so that we could say, “Alexa, play Greyson’s playlist on the speakers”.    This starts my son’s playlist (that he’s built by telling Alexa what songs to add) from Amazon Prime Music.   And it plays the music all over the house.   And it sounds great.

My mother brought this cartoon to me the other week.   At the rate we’re going, adding functionality and appendages to Alexa, I think this could possibly us in the future:

The Big Boy Update:  I bribed my son today.   He came home from school and had to go to tumbling with his neighbor friends almost immediately.   He was resolutely not going.   He needed calories.   Nothing was working.   That is until I told him I’d make him some S’mores as a snack.   He got melted marshmallow all over his hands but he left for tumbling happy.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter hop jumps all the time now.   Remember the door frames she climbed seemingly all day long?   She’s move on.   Now she gets on something bouncy, like the bed or the ottoman, squats and then jumps up.   She claps her hands as fast as she can on every jump, seeing how much, “air time” she can get.   My father got the ottoman from an auction years ago and it’s likely from the 1990’s or earlier.   It’s a sturdy ottoman but it’s showing some wear and as such we’ve suspended all jumping, tumbling and parkour on it for now.   I went shopping this week and got a new ottoman that will be delivered next week.   When I informed my daughter I was getting, “a jumping ottoman” she cried out, “YAY!”

Bookshelves

My daughter’s braillest has been sending home “books” she’s been making for my daughter.   She wants there to be a library of books she can read at night.   My husband and I just ended the night with him working with my daughter and me working with my son to have them practice their reading.

I re-organized their books (and braille books) so that they each have a small “shelf” of books on one of their dressers of books that are appropriate to their reading level.   Only my son had added some additional books he liked, regardless of reading level.

My daughter’s skill in reading braille continues to increase and my son’s ability to read is going through leaps and bounds of late.   I was surprised when my son decided to read, “Dragon’s Love Tacos” tonight instead of the easier, Dogman, comic book he’s been working through.  

I was duly impressed as he read through long and difficult multi-syllablic words.   He read some of the sentences so quickly I would have suspected he had the book memorized only we hadn’t read the book in quite some time.    He’s got reading to the point he can teach himself now.

The Big Boy Update: At music therapy today my son had a good time with Chelsea.   She was teaching him how to play “Axel F” from Beverly Hills Cop.   But apparently she wasn’t all that because he told her, “I am not impressed with you.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicle:  My daughter has finally gotten over her cold.   For a good while she was blowing her nose so regularly it seemed as though it was constant.   She even slept with a box of tissues in her bed.   I asked her one day just before we went on vacation how long her one nostril had been stopped up.   She said, “it’s been like a year now.”

Zero to Braille

My daughter lost her sight shortly before turning four-years old.   She’s now almost six-and-a-half, meaning she’s been close to a third of her life with very little vision at all.   But she remembers vision and for those first four years she saw letters and words all around her.   She wasn’t reading yet, but she was practicing drawing cursive letters in her Montessori class and she was inundated with non-verbal communication that only the readers of the world could decipher, because we could both read and see.

And then she had a dramatic loss of vision.   She can’t see anything precise at distance other than moving around obstacles.   She also can’t see up close, but that doesn’t stop her from trying.   Instead of the beautiful, cursive version of her name she had learned before she lost her sight, she now does a fairly nice print version—on everything (she is fond of her name).   It wasn’t until two-thirds the way through her life that she was impacted visually and couldn’t learn how to read.   It wasn’t until later still when we got engaged with the public school system and they insisted she needed to do, “pre-braille work” (whatever that was, we thought at the time).   

But they were right.   She needed to learn to use her fingers.   She needed to be excited about reading and learning about things from a book and not from asking an adult to help you.   The good news is she’s getting it.   She’s getting it so fast we can’t keep up.    

At the beginning of the year she wasn’t that interested in reading braille.   She’s in kindergarten.   I don’t think I was reading in kindergarten, but now, a little over half-way through the school year, this is what she’s reading:  

She’s reading all the words and knows about all the punctuation.   She’s sounding out long words and knows about silent letters.   She knows the “contracted” braille versions of words (check out ‘like’ and the second ‘you’ in the second image.    And she’s flying through books.    She can sound out words I wouldn’t expect her to even get close to—but she’s getting them almost right.  

I am really impressed both with her as well as her teachers and the reading curriculum that’s been developed to help understand the mess we call the English Language.    

The Big Boy Update:   My son was getting clever with his name the other day, integrating it with a phrase they use in his school to describe part of the Montessori curriculum: ‘Grace and Courtesy”.    He told me, “you need some more Greyson and Courtesy.   Also, I want some more in the blog.   And ten exclamation points.”  I told him I’d write him up with his words the way he told me to say them.  So there you go. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  There is a game called BopIt.   It’s a little device that talks to you.   There are three things you do to this device:  pull it (pull a handle), twist it (twist a knob) and bop it (hit a button).   While we were on our ski vacation my daughter told us, “we should have brought BopIt…I’ll be BopIt.”   And she did just that.   She said one foot was the pull it part, one hand was the twist it spot and you could bop her head.   When it was time to start the game she would call out what to do next and tell you if you got one wrong.    Honestly, it was pretty fun to play with her being the ‘BopIt’ machine.

Lefties Of The World Unite

I think I had a notepad that said, “Lefties of the world Unite!” when I was a little girl.   Or maybe it was a t-shirt, I can’t remember.   My cousin and I turned out to be left-handed when none of our four parents were.    Seeing as we had educators and scientists raising us, they were understandably interested “why”, or if there actually was a why in the first place.   Maybe it was a “why not?”

The subject was deemed important.   Research was done, articles were published and notepads were printed up.    I remember the notepads my cousin and I got for Christmas one year.    Those notepads are long gone, but my parents did something interesting: they both were into clipping articles from the myriad periodicals they read.   They would take articles on all different subjects they were interested in and sort them them into manila folders so they could find them later.  They did this for years and years.   I remember folders all over the basement floor as my dad would go through months of periodicals, sorting and cataloging them.

Today my mother brought over a manila folders labeled, “Handedness” and gave it to me. It was all the articles she and my father had cut and saved over the years.   This was way before the internet.   This was even before personal computers.   This was old school scissors and the printed word.

The articles ranged from the late 1980’s all the way back to January 1976, just before I turned six-years-old.   I was already left-hand dominant by six which must have sparked the folder and article collection.

I haven’t had a chance to read any of the articles yet.  I wonder if they’re still relevant today or if they’ve been superseded with newer research on why it is we left-handed people get ink on our hands when we write?

The Big Boy Update:   My son had a hard time at OT today.   At the end when I came inside to pick him up we got into a conversation that his therapist ended up facilitating.   It carried over into the car ride home.   My son has a hard time with conflict and he’s been saying, “I hate my life.  I want to die” lately.    This isn’t depression or a want for suicide—he’s too young to really understand the depths of the concepts at seven.   But it does mean he’s upset or unhappy and he’s heard words to use that he thinks describe how he feels.    On the way home today he explained in more detail to me about how he feels.   He told me, “Reese is mainly the thing that makes my life horrible.   School, my sister…sometimes myself.   And Lilah at school.   She laughed at me.  Whitaker punches me.   I try not to cry and tell him to go home.   Whit is really nice, he’s the least of the things I don’t like.   Wait, there’s one more thing: my parents.  My parents are the second biggest thing.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter told my son the other day, “Greyson, I’m going to give you a lesson.   If someone doesn’t want to do something and you want them to do it, you cannot make them do it.”

I Failed

Parenting is a continually evolving job.   As soon as you get one thing under control your small offspring develop more talents, skills and challenges that have to be met by you, their parents.   Sometimes this can be frustrating, sometimes it can be rewarding and sometimes it can be challenging.   My husband and I try to walk a fine line between letting our children be children while expecting them to be independent and capable.  

Managing the independence, turning it into opportunities where the children can be capable can be tricky.   There’s a balance of work that needs to happen.   Sure, I can get the breakfasts and the flow of the morning routine quickly by doing it myself—because I’m faster by far than a six- and seven-year-old, but they need to learn how to do it themselves.   For example, if we hadn’t told them they had to get dressed or their breakfast wouldn’t be served to them, I would hazard a guess they’d still be waiting upstairs in their bedroom right now for us to dress them.  

So we push.   And we expect results.   Sometimes we do this by not extending privileges (such as eating breakfast) and other times we accomplish it through rewards.   Both work and both get results. Iteratively we expect them to do more and more to manage their lives.   Over the past week my husband and I have been talking about more ways we can get them to step up to things in their daily lives and how to best accomplish them.

We have a stamp system.   They were getting stamps for doing certain things and they could, “spend” them on things like screen time on the weekend, eating a piece of candy, picking the restaurant when we go out, etc.   But they had gotten less interested over time and we had gotten slack in tracking spent stamps.   So tonight we changed the game.

There were new guidelines on how we’d give out stamps.   Mostly those guidelines were to our advantage, picking things they didn’t want to do—like reading books or playing a game of chess for Chess Team practice.   There was also putting dishes in the dishwasher and cleaning up from doing craft work with paper, scissors and markers.   These were things they didn’t want to do.   But when they found out they could earn stamps for them suddenly there was a flurry of activity.

One of the things was nighttime routine.   We said we’d give them a ten minute timer to get dressed for bed, brush, floss and swish for their teeth and they could earn a stamp.    They do this now, but typically my husband and I get the toothbrushes ready with toothpaste on them and put out some pajamas for the children on the bed.

Tonight my son and husband were deep into a game of chess (that my son won fair and square I heard).   I was cleaning up from dinner and my daughter was happily getting ready for bed while I cleaned up from dinner.    Ten minutes later I came into the bathroom to find my daughter crying.

She had gotten her pajamas on (backward) and was at the sink to brush her teeth.   I came over to her and she said in a voice so sad it almost made me cry.   She said, “I failed”.   I looked at her and she had toothpaste all over her shirt.   She had gotten the stool out and put it at the sink.   She had the swish ready.   He flosser was on the counter and there was toothpaste everywhere.    She was crying in true sadness.   She had tried to get the toothpaste on the toothbrush but she couldn’t tell where to put it our how much had come out and it got everywhere.

I told her it was okay, that the most important thing was she tried.   I gave her an extra stamp for trying, I told her.   We got her a second pajama shirt and then I gave her a lesson on how to hold the toothbrush to put the toothpaste on with some control over where and how much came out.   When we got done she said, “but I already brushed my teeth.”   Then she said, “that’s okay, I’ll brush them again.”

Enabling children is important.   Enabling my blind child sometimes takes extra thought on how it can since she can’t see what she’s doing.

The Big Boy Update:  My son can see.  Sometimes because he can see, I think he can do things just because he’s normally sighted.   But he had trouble loading the toothpaste on the toothbrush too.   I gave him the same lesson as his sister.   Tomorrow we’ll see if he can get only a dab of toothpaste on his toothbrush or if he’ll go for a huge blob and get it everywhere.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  After “failing” tonight with the toothpaste I think the most poignant thing, that I didn’t want to tell my daughter, was that she had a perfect toilet paper “tail” coming out of her pajama pants all the way down to her feet from going to the bathroom.   I pulled it out and threw it away and didn’t tell her.   I was quite proud of her for getting ready for bed all by herself.

The Salt Nipple

We had dinner guests tonight: Uncle Jonathan and Margaret.   My husband made extra pasta because Uncle Jonathan had run sixteen miles and if there’s one thing we all know about Uncle Jonathan—he can eat.

As we sat down at the table my children had decided where each of us would sit relative to being “beside” them.   This can sometimes be an argument, but they seemed to agree tonight.   Once everyone was seated we asked them to tell our guests where we each were sitting.  

A while back we explained that there was a “head” of the table.   They took this concept and ran with it as children sometimes do.   At our six person table we have a “head”, two “arms” two “arm pits” and one “legs and foot” of the table.

I had gotten new salt and pepper shakers and brought them to the table earlier.   They are easily operated by children and my children were having fun putting salt and pepper on their salads.   My son got a look in his eye and then placed them very precisely between his sister and me.   She and I were in the “Arms” of the table position.   My son said, “those are the nipples of the table”.

The adults couldn’t help but chuckle.   A short while later after we’d gotten our next bowls of pasta, my son said, “could you hand the salt nipple over?”   I’m afraid these new shakers are going to be forever nicknamed the Salt and Pepper Nipples.  

The Big Boy Update:  I don’t know what my son had in plan, but I heard him come up to the chair my daughter was sitting in this morning saying in a loud voice, “test subject, Reese: ready”.   My daughter said back in an equally loud but indignant tone, “I’m not doing it!”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  I was in the bedroom last night waiting for my children to fall asleep.   My daughter said something that reminded me of my childhood, “mom, I can’t feel my heartbeat”.   I remember being afraid I didn’t have a heartbeat because I couldn’t find it and worrying.   I told her I was most certain her heart was beating.   We found her heart beat together and then she fell asleep.

Ollie Fest

Today we went to a fundraising event at my daughter’s school, “Ollie Fest”.   There were silent auctions and things you put a dollar ticket into to a shoe box to win some kind of prize like a collection of Target or Amazon cards or sports package or computer or something else the class room parents put together with donations from the parents.

There were bouncy houses, a rock climbing wall, food trucks and a fashion truck (that was a new on on me).   Face painting, bingo, go fishing wall and a collection of other little games for the children were positioned around the school, all in an effort to raise money.  

It’s convoluted and complicated and takes a lot of time as opposed to the, “will you write a large check to go towards our annual fund” spiel we get from my son’s private school, but it works.   The number of tickets in the Amazon gift card box was impressive.

My daughter was more excited about showing her brother the playground she plays on every day at school with her peers.   The two of them had a discussion, nay argument, over the meaning of the phrase “Monkey Bars” on the way to school.   One contended it was the entire play structure (my son) while my daughter insisted it was only the section of horizontal ladder that you swung back and forth on.  

It turned out they were both right in a sense, with my daughter being the most correct.   And speaking of the playground/monkey bars, we got to school and my son and daughter did indeed have a good time together there.   And as I was sitting on the perimeter of the play area, I noticed a clock under the central structure that said, “Learning Braille”.  

Sure enough, there was a braille-centric learning wall as part of the play structure.   This is for an elementary school that has only six visually impaired students from K-5th grade I believe.   I was impressed.   I was touched.   Here’s what it looked like from both sides:

   

The Big Boy Update:  My daughter had gone off today to spend some time with classmates she’d met up with at Ollie Fest.   My son was enjoying time on his sister’s playground.   There was a small child there and my son, in his typical fashion, was wanting to take care of the little guy.   I asked my son if he wanted to be a babysitter when he got older.   He flashed this huge smile and nodded.   Then he made sure he took care of the little boy until it was time for us to go, even telling me one time he was practicing his baby sitting skills.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My husband and I have a bit of a cold.  It’s not a bad cold, it’s just a niggling one.   My son had it three days ago but he felt fine the next day.   At this point though the only one who hasn’t gotten it is my daughter.   She very concisely explained to me yesterday, “I hope myself doesn’t get sick.”

I’m Not Excited For The Future

We left Park City, Utah early this morning in a whirlwind of morning calamity with three adults urging on six children to get themselves ready to get in the large passenger van to ride for a while to transfer to a shuttle bus to wait in line to check bags to wait in line at security to then get on a plane for almost four hours to get home.    Exciting stuff.   Riveting plans for the day.   But we made it.

We landed and I called my mother to tell her we’d be in before five o’clock and we were all excited to have her homemade soup for dinner.    She had not only made soup, she was bringing it over for us all to eat after getting home from a long day’s tiring travel of mostly sitting around.  

On the way from the airport to the house my children both got in trouble.   My son’s transgression was for blatant lying.   After much discussion he (hopefully) understood that owning up to something is a far less consequence than lying about it—especially when you’re not that good at coming up with lies.  (I didn’t tell him that last part).  

My son was very upset.   Quite distraught.   He exclaimed that he wanted to die.   (He’s done this before, although it’s relatively new).   We told him he’d miss out on all kinds of good things, like Mimi’s soup for dinner.    He had an answer for this though.   He told us. “I’m not excited for the future”.    That was hard to find a counterpoint to.  

But we did get home and they did enjoy the soup and I think my son is back into life now that the arduous day of travel is over.

The Big Boy Update:  My son told us at dinner, “chocolate is a tsunami of unhealthy stuff.”  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   We were very glad to have Alexa back in our lives when we got home.   At dinner we were asking her things and playing songs.   At one point things got quiet and my daughter said to me, “did you mean to say that?”   I realized I’d used the word ‘Alexa’ in a sentence without realizing it and Alexa had been patently waiting for me to ask for something.   My daughter informed me what I’d done wrong by saying in completely safe words, “you said the Echo Dot’s name”.