Sleepover With Aditi

My daughter and her best friend from school, Aditi, who is also the other VI student in her class, are having a sleepover today at Aditi’s house.   I took my daughter over at one o’clock and stayed until two, talking with her parents, getting a tour of their new house and meeting her brother, who has a bluetooth-enabled Star Wars bed.

The girls were very excited about the day, having planned lots of things together since we had the date picked out several weeks ago.   So far they’ve played VI games, been to the pool, had pizza, done crafts and I believe have henna on their hands.  I’m very glad they were able to go to the pool because on Monday, my daughter is having a vitrectomy with Dr. Trese in Detroit.

This means he’s going to remove the vitreous from her eye.  The vitreous is the clear “jelly” in the center of the eye.   They need to do this as the first step in addressing the high pressure in her eye.   This would be the left, only functioning eye she has.

This may disrupt the minimal vision she has remaining, but we’re not sure until we find out from her after the surgery.   Not doing this, and then a follow-on surgery to add a pressure reducing valve in her eye will result in the slow death of the retina and leave her completely blind.   And while she doesn’t have much vision at all, some vision is better than no vision.

I was glad they had a chance to go to the pool today at Aditi’s house because my daughter won’t be able to swim for two weeks after the surgery.   If we have a second surgery two weeks later, she will have a further two weeks without swimming—and that puts us mighty tight with our sailing trip at the start of July.

The Big Boy Update:  My son has been adjusting well to the new screen time schedule.  On the whole, it looks like he’s going to get a lot more screen time than before.   But the catch is he has to earn it.   We set it up so he could easily earn a good bit of it, while marking some things as, “bonus” so he wouldn’t be upset if he didn’t get those blocks of time but instead happy for earning extra.   As predicted (by my husband and me) he’s electing not to do a good bit of the bonus items which means he’s earning a lot less screen time per day.   He’s not counting though so he’s been happy with things. He also is restricted to redeeming earned screen time to certain hours of each day.   This has also worked out better than expected.   He looks forward to the upcoming time and when it’s up, there is no arguing about how much time he’s used.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was in the dog pen with the dog last night, which looked like this:



She suddenly went into a full conversation about being grateful.   Fortunately I was at the computer at the time and got most of it written down. She was quite passionate about it. Here’s what she said: "I’m grateful for air, water, food and clothes and shelter.  Matisse already has her clothes on...every day.   And I’m also grateful because we have not only needs, we have wants.  We have lots of things. Still, it seems sad, I really wanted to give a poor man money but then the light turned green and we had to go.   Let’s say we had fifteen marshmallows and I got three of them. Do you know what I’d say? At least I got three of them, because some people don’t get any marshmallows."