Work Sheet for Reese’s Mom

My daughter came down yesterday morning with a brailled page giving me instructions on what I’d be doing for my upcoming homework.   The homework wasn’t quite ready yet, she told me, but she’d let me know when it was.   My instructions page said:

Instructions
Color the part that it says and color on the right spot.  For egsample it says blue and it also says blue terdle than you find a terdle on your page and color it blue. 

This morning while I took her brother to school, she remembered and went upstairs to create this work for me, which time-wise is impressive because I’m gone for about a half-hour.  The content itself is the most amazing to me though.   She’s maintaining an entire two-dimensional picture in her head, one line at a time.   She has a flat representation of certain objects and can translate them to paper in braille symbols.   Here’s what she made for me:

The first page was the color coding sheet:

The second page was the work itself.   I was to do the work with crayon, because she can feel the crayon wax on the page, unlike marker or pencil, and was able to check my work when I was done.

She told me before I began, well, showed me by taking my fingers and putting them on the page with her, that the bottom two rows of full braille cells was dirt.   The two rows above that was the grass.   The flowers had legs so they could move around and talk.   I asked about the perimeter around the picture and if I should color it and she explained that that was a field all around the flowers and the bee.

The Big Boy Update:  My son and I went to get new shoes for him after his school today.   This was precipitated by a need for new shoes as his current ones were pretty beaten up.   But more to the point, they had gotten lost.   My son picked out shoes quickly and then danced around in them for the rest of the day.   He loves getting new shoes.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My sitter, Shane, came over to help out for a bit while I went to get my son and get him some new sneakers before our trip.   Are they called ‘sneakers’ anymore?  Am I the only one that likes to think of the movie bearing the same name every time I say the word?   Shane asked if she could take my daughter to Ben and Jerry’s for ice cream.   Before dinner?  Sure, why not.   I’m that great of a mom under pressure.   When I asked her later how much I owed for the cones she confirmed what my daughter had told us: it was free cone day.