A Faint Z

My daughter and I had lunch with her braillest from last year today.   We spent a lot of time talking about braille.   Mrs. Aagaard had brought a special lesson in binary numbers (because that’s how computers talk to each other, she said).   We learned how to represent any number from zero to two-hundred-fifty-five using only zeroes and ones.   There were flaps with braille on them we flipped up for zero and down for one.  My daughter liked quizzing us on numbers.

I also got a lesson from Mrs. Aagaard.   She had written up a long sentence which was, she said, rather nonsensical, but she wanted to use as many contracted single-character words as possible.  My daughter wanted to feel the braille because she wanted to help me read it.   Unfortunately, we told her, my lesson was printed and she couldn’t feel it.

I told my daughter when we got home from lunch I’d type it up for her.   We got home and later, after dinner, I did write it up for her but what happened earlier made me laugh.   I was in the kitchen cleaning up from dinner when I heard my daughter call out from her desk area, “Who wrote on my braille writer this morning?”   She sounded a little upset that someone had put a piece of paper in and had then typed something and left the sheet in the brailler.

She must have been reading what was there because she said next,  “there was the ABC’s and then a faint ‘z’”.  I could only think of one person who was learning the ABC’s and might have used her brailler while she and I were at lunch—her father.   So we asked him and he confessed.   Next time, he’ll work on making his z’s less faint.

The Big Boy Update:  My son went to a birthday party at a trampoline park today.   The last time he was at one (two weeks ago?) he figured out how to do a roundoff back flip.    Today he learned how to do a backflip without the need for a roundoff.   He goes to tumbling tomorrow, I wonder what else he’s going to learn>

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and I had a very nice lunch with her now retired braillest from last school year.   Mrs. Aagaard and I also had a lot to talk about with braille and school and. you name it, but mostly braille things.   At the end my daughter said in exasperation, “can we end the talking?  Because I’m tired of all that.”