Thanksgiving dinner is over, all our family has left and I've been trying to get to this post for an hour, but I've been stuck. I thought I could escape but the draw was too strong. My husband put Frozen on the television in the living room for my children to see. This rarely happens in our house because of my daughter. That may sound strange, but it's a concatenation of things based on my daughter's lack of vision.
We used to watch television shows together, put on Disney or other children's shows for the children when they both were sighted. Once my daughter lost a lot of her vision we would still put things on and she'd stand on a bar chair, holding on to the mantle, looking as closely as she could at the television, seeing only parts of the screen, in order to watch something. Then, when her vision declined more, she could only watch things two inches away on her iPad. And ultimately, she gave up on vision because it was so minimal, and started listening to things.
The decline in her vision caused the general decline in our family having family movie night. There is a way we can watch movies that my daughter will be able to understand what's going on using "assistive audio", but she doesn't prefer it usually. Assistive audio is available in movie theaters and is on many movies on Netflix and other streaming providers. It's an audio track like you would have a separate language track for movies at home. During any time in which there is no dialog, a narrator describes what's happening. It's always impressive to me what they can describe in just a few seconds.
But my daughter usually isn't interested and at this point, my son would rather do his own thing. So movies as a family rarely happen. Only tonight, after Thanksgiving dinner, my husband put on Frozen, one of the last movies my daughter ever saw before she lost her sight. He put on assistive audio and my daughter got her blankets and pillows and was actually interested.
I walked through the room and got stuck. I stood there for a while watching the movie. Then I sat down. Then I planned on getting up but didn't make it. Finally, during the dark part of the movie I made it into the bedroom to write this post. It's a good movie. We all know the songs and it was charming, hearing my daughter's little tinkling voice singing out from under her fluffy blanket as she lay on the sofa across the room.
But I'm here while the movie winds down, writing up our turkey experience today. In order to get my son more involved in thanksgiving dinner, my husband had him help with making some of the food, something my son rarely does that we're going to try and nurture more. I suggested my son make a graph of the turkey temperature, seeing if we could predict when the turkey would be ready.
He'd never made a graph before. I got some graph paper, writing "Temperature" on the Y-axis and "Time" on the X-axis. Every half hour Alexa would remind them to check the temperature. My son waited for an hour for the thermometer in the turkey to register more than 105 degrees and then, with excitement, each half-hour he checked the status and noted the increasing temperature on the graph until the turkey reached 165 degrees and was ready to come out of the oven.
It was a good day with our family. Hopefully, everyone had a happy Thanksgiving with whomever they choose to spend it with.
The Big Boy Update: My son was banned from YouTube today. He played with friends and helped his father with the Thanksgiving meal. He was positively manic at dinner, almost painfully so. I'm not sure what the cause is. Some of it is a desperate need for attention and acceptance, although the way he goes about it gets him negative attention because he's too intense. I'm not sure what to do about that. He had a happy day though I think. He had a great time with his cousin, Olivia.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter is awake still. She's watching, well listening to, a movie which is almost unheard of for her. I'd love for her to be interested in watching more movies with the family. It's something many families do together. We have very few things we can do as a family together because most things are challenging, like playing board games. Although we're learning ways over time to accomplish things with her lack of sight. There isn't anything that's quite the same as sitting together to watch a movie though.
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