L-MAIL

I got a text from Aunt A about a week ago saying something was coming in the mail for my daughter and to keep an eye out for it.  She didn’t say what it was, but I was on the lookout for anything addressed to my daughter.    Things come for her from time to time, mostly they’re from one of the organizations for the blind or something I’ve ordered for her from one of the companies that provide products and materials for visually impaired people.

Sometimes we get letters, sometimes in braille.   I remember having my daughter’s braillest translate one of the things that came in the mail three years ago because I had no idea if it was important or not.   She returned it about a week later and I found out it wasn’t anything important.   I felt badly at the time because I had envisioned her taking an hour to translate the single sheet and I’d wasted her time.

Now, after learning braille to the extent I have, I realize it wouldn’t have taken her that long to interline the sheet with printed words, but at the time it was a mass of run together dots to me.

Something did come in the mail to my daughter from something called L-MAIL.   It was blank on the front page aside from some little text at the top and bottom with an address, reference number and a statement that the letter was brought to us by L-MAIL.   But overlaying that, the entire front of the page was filled with braille.   What in the world did it say?

You see where I’m going with this, right?  It was the thing Aunt A had sent to my daughter, only I didn’t know it yet because there was nothing in print of the letter content itself.   But not to worry, I can read braille and I’d just transcribe it.  

There are challenges though that I hadn’t encountered before.  First off, the braille was single spaced. Remember in school when we wrote our papers for the longest time as double spaced documents?   My daughter’s at that level and will likely be for a while.   As someone transcribing the braille into test, that extra space above the lines is helpful because that’s where I write in the print version.

There was another challenge though—there was braille on the front and the back of the page.   It’s fairly easy to see the raised dots in any reasonable light as they cast a shadow, even as small as they are.   But when you have both raised and lowered dots on the page you need bright light at a nice angle.

I spent awhile on the front of the first page, only to find all that braille was just the text that was tiny and took up about ten percent of the page when printed.   There were some contractions I didn’t know, but I have some excellent reference sheets and I was able to find them quickly (and getting practice at the same time).

I turned the page over and the first line was Aunt A’s name, and then her address, followed by my daughter’s name and address.   It was laid out in braille just like we would write a letter in print.   Following the addresses was the date and then the first line of the letter proper, “Hi Reese,”.

I wasn’t sure what my daughter’s attention span would be when I gave her the letter, so I started her at the top of the page so she’d know who had sent her a letter and then jumped her down to the salutation and letter body.

She flew through the words she knew, but got stuck when it was contractions in words she didn’t know.   I pretended like I had “found out” what the letter said because as you may well remember, she doesn’t like it when I know more braille than she does.  

Aunt A used words my daughter could both read and pronounce in the letter.   Many of those words, such as ‘good’, ‘your' and ‘letter’ have braille contractions my daughter already knows.  She pronounced out words like, ‘halloween’ and got some help from her father and me.

My daughter hasn’t had an opportunity to read double-sided braille pages before.   She was confused by the inset dots and before we explained said, “they did a lot of erasing!”   My daughter does a lot of erasing.   You erase by pressing the incorrect dots back into the page.   Done carefully, it’s hard to tell the dots were ever there.  My daughter isn’t the most careful because she’s typically in a hurry.   Which is probably why the inset dots from the other side seemed like erasures to her.

I had transcribed the letter in advance and had gotten stuck a few times, but the one that tricked me the most was right at the end.   It was an all caps word that involved the letter ‘X’ more than once.   X is a contraction for ‘it’.   There were also letter ‘O’s.   What in the world?   Then it hit me, it was a line of XOXOXO.   My daughter figured it out much easier than I did.

Thanks for the fun surprise in the mail, Aunt A.

The Big Boy Update:  My son had a challenging day at school again today.   We don’t understand it.   He’s either able to work or he can’t get much done at all.   We’re going to have a conference with the teacher to discuss what she’s seeing.   We’ll discuss with Liz, his integrative therapist tomorrow too.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and I made bath bombs today.   I didn’t realize they were so easy to make.   Baking soda, citric acid, witch hazel, a bit of color and some essential oils.   Press them into a mould and three minutes later they come out as a bath bomb just like you find at the store.   As I write this my daughter is in the bath with one of the bombs.   Tonight she selected a lemon one.   Tomorrow she wants to do the wild orange one.