The Program Assignment

I’m very excited about this weekend because Uncle Bob and Uncle Brian are getting married.  They’ve been planning the weekend for some time and it’s all coming together.   They’re getting married in town here, which has put us at the hub of everything.   And if you know me, I like to be right in the thick of things, so that suits me just fine.

My children are really looking forward to the wedding.   They have their special attire for the day and know there will be a party at our house for wedding guests on Friday night.  My daughter and son are telling me how many days there are until the wedding and they’re looking forward to having their aunts and uncles in town for the weekend.

Tonight I had a special assignment.   The wedding programs came in the mail today.   I opened the package and pulled out one of the programs.   Both Bob and Brian have been very thoughtful about how my daughter would be able to experience their wedding with her lack of vision.   One of the ideas they had was for her to have her own program printed in braille.

I don’t think it would have even occurred to me to have a program for her to read.   Maybe in part I still think of my children as small little humans who can’t read or who wouldn’t be interested in reading a wedding program.   Only I know my son is going to read through the whole thing and ask questions about it before the wedding begins.   So why wouldn’t my daughter too?

So tonight I went through the program and identified the whole-word or letter group contractions she’s learned so that I could type up her special program using her braille writer.   But I didn’t type it yet.   Because I make a lot of mistakes.   Because the backspace is my best friend on a keyboard.   And when it comes to braille, I’m in dire need of a backspace button.

I’m not bad at typing braille, but I’m trying to convert a letter into a group of one to six dots, rotated ninety degrees from the angle of the keyboard.   And some of the letters I’m converting are letter groups or words and have their own dot pattern.   Hence the mistakes.  Thankfully you can easily erase mistakes in braille using a high-tech erasing tool called your fingernail.   You just push the dots back into the paper and type the correct character.

My daughter is going to be very excited to have very own program in Braille at the wedding on Saturday.

The Big Boy Chronicles:  I came into the bedroom the other day to take a phone call.   I had been on the phone about five minutes when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye.   Movement where there shouldn’t have been any at a couch chair in the corner of our bedroom.   I got up and looked down behind the chair in the tiny, corner crevice where my children used to play to find my son with his iPad, without permission.  I didn’t know they still fit back there.

The Tiny Girl Update:  My daughter wanted to tell me the colors of the cars that were passing us when we were in the car the other day.   Her vision is so poor that we’re lucky if she can tell when a car passes, let alone the color.   But she can tell some things and there are a few colors she can discern over others.    As she stared intently out the window she muttered to herself, “don’t blow this for me…"