My daughter participated in something called Cane Quest this weekend. It was a competition for visually impaired students who use canes to compete in fourteen tasks. Each task had a score from zero to four. A perfect score indicated you used all the appropriate and necessary cane skills to complete the task.
My daughter was, I think, a little underaged for participating in the event, but her Orientation and Mobility instructor thought she had all the necessary skills to attend and recommended we sign her up.
My daughter asked me before we arrived if it was okay if she was shy. I said that was just fine. I know her, she opens up pretty quickly. She was paired off with a teacher who would take her to each of the tasks and help her through them if she needed help. There were scorers at each location to watch and grade on appropriate cane skill usage.
Here’s an example of a task. Put a blindfold on so that you’re completely blind and grab one of their canes. Walk into an auditorium. You’re told there are two aisles. You need to find the right aisle, walk all the way down to the front row, cross in front of the front row and then go back up the left aisle until you’re at the back of the auditorium. Find your way to the entrance you came in. Do this without interrupting others with your cane, walking down the wrong aisle or getting lost.
My seven-year-old did this one perfectly and got four points. She even knew she was back at the start and stood still, waiting for them to tell her she’d completed the task. When they didn’t say anything for a bit she said, “I’m back at the beginning.”
There were all sorts of tasks you would need to be proficient in as a blind individual using a cane to navigate your environment. My daughter is apparently quite good at this. We don’t see her in action very much because when she’s with us and we help her navigate through something called, “sighted guide.”
Sighted Guide is when a sighted person guides a blind person. There are ways this is done and not done. My daughter is pretty good at telling us when we’re not doing the right thing as her guide. We have no formal training, which we probably should get, but for now our daughter tells when we’re getting it wrong.
The title of this post has something to do with Honeycrisp apples. Just like the auditorium navigation example above, let’s do another thought experiment. You want to but some Honeycrisp apples. Someone takes you to the grocery store and drops you off with a blackout blindfold on and a blind cane. How to you find and buy Honeycrisp apples?
This wasn’t presented as a problem, but an opportunity to my daughter by her Orientation and Mobility (O&M) teacher. He takes her on field trips and more recently it’s been to buy things she wants. She likes Honeycrisp apples and wanted to buy some to bring home to her family.
Think about the grocery store and the hundreds of thousands of individual items therein. None of them are labeled in a way a blind person can read. Apples are in the produce section. You might remember where where the section is from prior experiences in the store. You might be able to find apples by feel. But which apples are the Honeycrisp out of all the varieties they carry? Even if you knew where they were last week, inventory seems to forever be changing around. What do you do?
Not only is my daughter’s O&M teacher teaching her learn how to navigate, he’s giving her guidance on how to self-advocate. In this case, and probably for many, many more times in my daughter’s life, she went to the front of the store where the office is. She told me, “the office is always in the front.” Then she asked for an associate to help her find her apples. She is cute and sweet and people like to help her. She was very happy when she came home with the apples. What it took for her to be able to get those apples by herself is a far more impressive story.
The Big Boy Update: My son said in the car this morning. “I want to go to Canada. Can we take our next vacation to Canada?” I’m not sure why other than he wants to go to some place that’s colder than it is here so he can wear his new sweatshirt.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: We have maybe made progress in getting my daughter in with another specialist doctor. Her pressure has been very high for over six months now. We’ve been monitoring her pressure at home and with lots of drops and medication we can’t get it to go down. We have a referral to see a pediatric glaucoma specialist. Tomorrow we’ll take her in and see if we have anything else to try and save the precious little vision my daughter has left in the one eye that isn’t totally black.
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