A Bigger Desk

We have this small, child’s table in our breakfast room.   It houses my daughter’s braille writer, which is heavy and large like a typewriter.   The brailler needed paper to go with it, so paper was added to the table, and then sharpies for drawing and then other types of paper, scissors, glue stick, note pads and all of this was fully covering the table, not leaving any room to get anything done other than type braille.

So I added a second child’s table.   That table was meant to be used to get things like drawing, cutting and gluing done.   But that table got crowded too with materials and supplies.   Fortunately, there was the breakfast table, on which most of the work was being done anyway, especially when other children were over and they were all working together.

And then my daughter’s Tactile Graphics Kit came in the mail two days ago.  It’s tools that emboss shapes, lines and patterns onto paper.   Braille is good for writing, this is good for drawing things so they’re tactile.   My daughter saved up her stamps and wanted this kit, which is typically for teachers or older children.   She was firm though, that’s the thing she wanted to spend it on though.

That tactile kit was sort of the last straw though.   There was just no more space left to shove things on the two small children’s desks.   So my daughter and I moved her today.   She said her brother had his own desk in the side storage room of their bedroom.   It’s his father’s desk from when he was young.   It’s infrequently used by my son, but it is “his desk” so we decided to give my daughter a full-sized desk in the bonus room.

She had ideas about what to do with the desk, which mostly involved rearranging a lot of the furniture in the bonus room.   The rearrangement put things back the way they had been in the past and did make sense with our plans for one of the small, children’s tables from the breakfast room to be brought upstairs for only brailling (no other crammed stuff).   That left the adult-sized desk free for all the supplies needed to do everything else.

I filled drawers and a storage tower full of supplies, added a lamp and then showed my daughter around the new space so she knew where everything was (braille paper in the top bin, scissors in the first section in the top drawer, etc.).  Then, with it all set up, she and I worked on our homework together.

The Big Boy Update:  My son had two friends over yesterday.  They came over and went up to the bonus room to play video games at the same time as my son was working on his homework.   I told my son I didn’t think it was a good idea, since he had a hard time concentrating.   But no, he said he could do it.   He took his homework upstairs into the room with them and then, in a short while, he came down to have me check his homework—and he had done quite a good job.   I asked him how he did it, thinking the “stonework” wall would have had no chance in staying up with the commotion and distraction of his friends.   He was fairly pleased about it he sounded though as he told me, “I actually installed a roof.”   I told him I didn’t know how he did it, but it really worked well, good thinking.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter went to school on Monday with a skort she had clearly outgrown.   When I saw her tugging at the crotch more than once before school I tried to get her to change, but she wasn’t interested at all.   After school she was doing the same thing, pulling down the shorts part under the skirt.   I told her I was going to retire it after tonight.   She was not at all happy about this (she never wants to let go of anything) so I told her we would have a place we could store it to remember it by.   She seemed fine with that.  I think after thinking about it she decided it would be okay, saying, “my vagina’s all worn out today.”