The Truth Comes Out

My husband was packing to leave for a week skiing this morning when I headed off with the children to Aditi's birthday party.  Aditi is my daughter's close friend and the other VI student in her class.  They've known each other for three years now and have become quite close.   So I was surprised when my daughter started saying how she didn't want to go to the party on the ride.

She had multiple reasons, but the main one was that she didn't like bowling.   She's bowled before with her father, brother, and me and had what I thought was an enjoyable time.   We had the bumpers pulled up, she got to pick her bowling ball from the collection on the rack, and we used that little ramp thing to let her roll her ball down the lane without having the need to swing and release the ball.  I reminded her of this, but it didn't make any difference, she didn't like bowling, and that was that.

We told her there was suppose to be an arcade at the location, but she didn't want to play games.   She was unhappy and became more so as I pressed her, saying when Aditi came to her party, she was polite and did all our activities without complaining.   My daughter said that it was because she liked what we did at her party.  It was getting fairly bad, with my daughter being negative about everything associated with the party.   She didn't want to see Aditi or eat food or do anything.

I became firm, telling her I was disappointed in her that this was a party to celebrate Aditi's birthday, not a time to be selfish and complain that it wasn't something you wanted to do.   After some more defiant and negative comments from her, I said with that attitude she could stay in the car, and her brother and I would go in, and I would explain to Aditi's mother that she wasn't going to be able to come in.  

I was hoping to turn her attitude around.  It wasn't working.   It upset her brother.   He said he was staying in the car too if she couldn't go in.   I told him he wasn't helping, that he was supporting her poor behavior in not wanting to go in.   He got pretty upset and screamed at me to stop being mean to his sister (which was super sweet to see him be so protective of her.)

He asked if she could please come inside to the party.  I told him she absolutely could, and I hoped she would, but she wasn't saying anything about changing her attitude.   That was all she needed to do—to tell me she would participate, without complaint, bowling, and anything else that happened at the party.   My son asked her to please come in to the party.   She remained silent.  My son said, "I think I know why you don't want to bowl.  It's because you're worried you won't be good at it and don't want to be embarrassed."

And that's when we got the real reason.   My daughter said, "no, it's not that."  He asked her what was it then?  she said, "The truth is, I'm afraid of bowling."  I was floored.   She put up a huge fight, got in trouble, and was willing to miss the party and sit in the car, all because she was scared to go bowling and didn't want to tell me.

Now that I knew, it all made sense.   We asked my daughter what she was scared of.   She didn't want to fall down.  I vaguely remember her walking on to the lane at one point the last time we went bowling and slipped, falling because the lane itself is very oily.  It's hard to see the oil if you don't know it's there, but right over the foul line, the wood is covered with oil, so the bowling balls slide and roll more easily.

I talked to her, saying I would be with her, and I would make sure she didn't get close to the edge of the lane and would help her bowl all her balls.   We told her no one needed to know she was scared, and we'd make sure together that she had a good time.   She agreed, and that was that with the bad attitude, it was gone as if it had never been there.  It was all fear.

My daughter did very well bowling, getting a spare on the first frame, closing the first frame of anyone at the party.  All the cheering for her did a lot for her self-confidence.   She was doing so well she was a contender for first place on her lane.  She ended up third out of seven with only a few pins from taking first place.

She had a good time the whole party after finding out her classmates and good friends were there.   She is well-liked at school and supported positively by the other students, not treated as though she has a disability.   It's nice to see the other students and parents treat her as though she's just another child in the group.

My son had a great time.   He can jump into a crowd of children he's never met before and make instant friends.   He's more easy going around newly met friends.   All three of us enjoyed the party and the friends we celebrated with.

The Big Boy Update: After bowling today, we all went to the arcade where we had game cards that were open play for an hour.   My son and I started playing a zombie killing game with machine guns. He and I were doing well as a team, beating back hoards of zombie alien monsters.  During downtimes and cut scenes, I would swipe the card again, building up credits for our regular demise and the large "Continue?" message that would pop up on the screen when we'd run out of health.   My son's arms must have gotten tired holding the large gun because he wanted to quit after playing through four chapters.   We left the game with ten credits on it, handing the weapons over to two boys who'd been watching us and waiting for a turn.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We got home today and as is typical, were greeted by the dog.   When our dog greets us, she goes into a near frenzy of joyous energy.   My daughter, upon grabbing the dog said, "can you handle all this happiness?"

Turns and Jurisdictions

I have a truly remarkable man as a husband.   I have joked many a time saying I don't know why he puts up with me.  He is of the most even temperament, managing the children with a calm demeanor while I'm losing my temper and using a colorful array of four-letter words.  He is of the, "never mind" mentality, meaning he never minds doing something and never complains.

I am forever worrying that I'm not pulling my weight, doing my share, making even all the things that are required in managing the household, our children and our lives.   Sometimes I reflect on the things we each contribute and when I think of all he does, I question if my contributions are equivalent in weight.

In a marriage, things tend to divide out into jurisdictions or alternately in turns.  For example, taking out the trash is my husband's jurisdiction.   He's good at it and I'm glad he likes the job of wedging all the recycling into the bin for recycling day.   I'm responsible for coordinating sitters.   He does the taxes and I tally and document all medical expenses for him to add into the taxes.   I manage the children's clothing, changing with the seasons, retiring worn out or too small items and getting new clothes when needed.   He cooks meals.  

These things we've gravitated into because we prefer to do them over other things.   I would rather do my jobs than his and he feels the same about my jobs.   Some things we take it in turn to do.   We both grocery shop.   It doesn't matter who goes, we both can get the job done as well as the other person.  We can both ger the children wrangled into bed ("wrangled" being the word to best describe the forceful encouragement needed to get to reticent children to go to sleep each night.). The dishes get put into the dishwasher and put away clean by whoever gets there first (or possibly last).

We get it all done.  Sometimes though, I don't feel like I'm doing as much as I should.   And since my husband never, ever complains, how am I to know?  We each take time to do our own things, to get away from family life and have some fun without having to be the parent constantly on the job.

Tomorrow, my husband leaves for a week of skiing with my best friend's family and some of their friends.   A few years ago we all went as a family.   It was fun but wasn't something we wanted to do every year.  My husband, on the other hand, could go skiing multiple times each year.  He told me tonight he felt guilty leaving tomorrow.   Hs came after a bout of whining on my part about being tired and wanting to go to sleep and he was downstairs, watching a second movie without movie night friends while I was upstairs, still managing things—something I'd been doing for several hours.

He shouldn't feel guilty for leaving; this was a good thing.  He was going to have fun.  We would be fine here and we were all glad he was going on the trip.   I suppose I'm not alone in worrying I don't do enough all the time.  I still think he does more than I do.   I'm glad he's getting away for the week.

The Big Boy Update:  My som has continued to change the color of his lightsaber multiple times per hour.   He did so during breakfast when he got home and just before singing the happy birthday song for our friend tonight.   The cake was lit only with candles and his purple lightsaber.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is fine after the car accident yesterday in her cab (minivan).   Her driver is eight months pregnant and is fine as well.  This morning I asked her if she wanted to go to the chiropractor again, that if she was in pain in her neck or back, we could go.   Typically she would say no, but this morning, she said yes.   She was doing well, the chiropractor said.   I think, after asking her some questions, that she said yes because she wanted to have me drive her to school instead of going in the cab.  She had a new driver this afternoon.  She liked this driver a lot.  Perhaps she'll have her next week until her regular driver's school transportation vehicle is repaired or a replacement is found.

A Shelf Below

I have a saying: "if a thing is worth organizing, it's worth organizing again, and everything is worth organizing."  Things that were organized once tend to become unorganized over time.  Everything tends to gravitate towards chaos—or at least in my house it does.

Our pantry is fairly organized and I have "rules" I suppose on what we buy so that we don't run into overflow issues.  Over time we get things and wedge them into this corner or behind that box or in a stack on the floor.   I had gotten to my tipping point.  It was time to pull everything out and do things better.

Aside from taking time, this is a fun thing to do.   You get to get rid of things—things you didn't even remember you had.  I love getting rid of things.  There is a lot of consolidation, this time with spices. We had gotten a lot of new spices and they were all over the place.

The main reason I had decided to reorganize the pantry was due to an idea I had that would add a lot more space in the pantry.   We had a shelf at the bottom with all the containers necessary to pack a lunch box or store a snack in.   There were various sizes of containers and reusable pouches.   I had a new location on the island that I'd cleared for the pantry lunch box items.

I spent several hours getting everything redone in the pantry.  That shelf below the other shelves, which had always been used for non-food items, was suddenly free.   It could hold so much stuff.   It was like getting a bigger pantry overnight.

I try to make this blog more about words than pictures, but sometimes a picture explains it all.  Here's the finished project:



The Big Boy Update: My son built a lightsaber when he was at Disney.  At the time he had to select what alignment and color crystal he wanted, which determined the color of the light shaft and the sounds it made (different character's lightsabers make different sounds).  My husband found out it was an RF chip in the device and if you had an RF writer you could change the chip in my son's lightsaber.   We now have an RF reader/writer and my son has spent the afternoon changing the color of his sword, pretending to be the associated character and running around the house.  His friends were over and they turned it into a game.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was in an accident today.  It was a minor one and we've her checked out to make sure she was okay.  She was fine both physically and mentally and was more hungry than anything when she got home late.

The Puppuccino Mess

Our dog loves to ride in the car.  If you're going somewhere, she wants to be with you.   She's always watching for when I get my purse on account of that typically means I'm leaving.   When she sees my purse in hand, she starts following me around, hoping it's one of those trips where she can tag along.   I talk to her, telling her where I'm going and if she can come.   She doesn't understand me, but she does get the message if I tell her I'm sorry in a sad voice, figuring out from past experiences that that voice says she's not invited this trip.

She goes with me in the mornings to take my son to school.   She's well known by the staff at this point.   Usually, someone comes up to her and pets her through the passenger window which I've rolled down for the purpose.

After dropping my son off at school I go to Starbucks.   I get my coffee and a puppuccino for the dog.   This is one of the items on Starbuck's secret menu and is a small cup with whipped cream.   The dog loves it, lapping it up while I hold the cup as I head home or to my next errand.

When she gets home, sometimes I've noticed she rubs her face in the grass or on the carpet to get off what I'm assuming is residue from the whipped cream.   It's quick and over within a few seconds and I've not thought much of it until today.

Usually, the cups are tiny and the amount of whipped cream is small but today someone enthusiastically gave my dog a coffee-sized cup overflowing with whipped cream.   It was so much I ate a good bit off the top before giving it to the dog.

When we got home I let the dog out of the car in the driveway and was checking the mailbox when I looked over to see her in the mulch grinding her face into the fine particles of mulch mixed with dirt. I yelled for her to stop and saw her look up, with confusion and innocence on her completely mulch-covered face.

It eas everywhere.   Fine needles of mulch that had broken off the larger pieces were all up in her fur. It was on her snout, her front paws, her ears.   Debris had adhered to the fur under her belly as well as parts of her back legs.   I parked the car while she held still, not sure what she'd done because she'd been doing such a fine job of getting the whipped cream remnants off her face, what could possibly be so upsetting to me?  Had I known she had a need to wipe jer face =d

I walked her into the bathroom and stuck her in the tub.   I found a comb and er brush and then spent the next twenty minutes making my bathtub a complete mess but getting her back to Matisse-colored.

The Big Boy Update:  My son did not like the my husband or me the other night as we told him he had to stop what he was doing and get ready for bed.  We had told him multiple times already and he was now facing a consequence for intentionally not listening and doing what we had said.   As my son huffed up to his bedroom he said in a loud tone from across the house, "mom, is there parenting school?  Because I think you need to go."  I told him yea and that both his father and I had gone and we had both gotten got A's.   He didn't have a response to tah

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was outside the other day when our next-door-neighbor, Bryna came out.   She said, "when did you get so big?" My daughter responded, "like three years ago."

New Friends

Remember Theo, the student at my son's school who approached my daughter and asked her, "do you have a Perkins Brailler?"   This is a story about his father and how he introduced me to some new friends.

Drew, Theo's father, and I like to talk at school events.   We mill about at these events, and over the years, I've gotten to know quite a lot of them, Drew included.  I always enjoy talking to Drew, and at one of the events, I discovered he was working on writing a children's book.  For many years I've been thinking about writing a book myself and was excited to hear about Drew's writing.  It turned out both Drew and I preferred to write with a target audience of children in the 8-10 age range.   He and I also liked to write science fiction.   I asked Drew lots of questions: What was his writing process?  What was the book about?  When and how did he write?  How far along was he with his book?

Drew told me his sister-in-law was also a writer as well as several other friends of his, and would I be interested in a writers group where we got together and supported each other in whatever ways we needed.   Truthfully, I've never considered myself an actual writer.  True, I spend a portion of each day writing, but that's just here within this blog that I do anything writer-ish.  That being said, I'd definitely be interested in talking to others.  I would enjoy supporting others in their writing.  I wasn't sure what this entailed, but it sounded intriguing, and by nature, I like to help people.

Drew created a group online, and we scheduled a meeting, which happened last night.   Five of us met at coffee, beer, and wine bar and spent the next few hours talking about what and how we each wrote.   Three of the members were working on books, one of whom was working on the second and third books in a series with plans for additional books in a different series.   Another member, who turned out to be a friend I hadn't seen in several years as her children had moved on to another school, liked to write small things, enjoying something called, "prompt writing" that I'd never hear of but sounded intriguing.

I spoke about my blog writing here, and to my surprise, they said that qualified me as a "writer."   I've never felt particularly prolific before, but when we talked about it, and I explained I spent thirty minutes to an hour each day writing.  Last month Grammarly told me I'd written over thirteen thousand words (that being the number of words reviewed for me.   My new writer friends said it sounded like I could consider myself a writer.

A writer!  Me, the person who abhorred writing all through school, now a writer?  I sat in the chair with the others around me and thought about the implications.   Did I consider myself a writer? Admittedly, I wrote things, but I had never thought of myself as a writer.   Perhaps I was, or maybe I would begin to be one now with the support of my new friends.

We had gotten together to be supportive of each other.  We each talked about what we needed from the others in the group.   One of the members needed editing help.  Not spelling or grammar checking but reviewing of content and comments and suggestions on what we had read.  Not, "critiquing" so much as we all thought there was a negative connotation with that word.  Help, advice, suggestions.  I would very much like to help in that way.   What did I need, they asked?   And this is where I faltered.

I hadn't thought about that at all.   I write and press the post button.  I publish posts and then I'm done until the next day.   I try very much not to edit these posts because I've found once I start editing, I can spend as much if not more time than it did to write the content in the first place.   It's why you might notice misspellings, typos, and sentences with poor structure.   On occasion, I'll put the title of a post up first and once I start writing find I go in an entirely different direction and never get to the reason behind the title.   My writing goes like that sometimes.  My hope has been that over time, with experience and with more writing behind me my writing would improve.

I'm rather shy about this blog in general.  From the start, this was more my diary or personal journal of my life and a place to write down events as they happen in my children's lives.  Sharing the blog with others has always been a bit uncomfortable.  But share it I have, and over the years family and friends have followed me.  It continues to amaze me that someone would want to spend five minutes of their day reading about mine.   It has always been the highest compliment when I hear someone reads this blog.

What did I need help with, my new writing friends asked?  Would I like them to read some of the posts here and give me advice?  Suddenly, I was afraid.  Did I?  There comes a time when you have to be unafraid to take constructive criticism.  That time, I think has come.   Before our next meeting, I'm to pick out two posts for their review.  I'm anxiously looking forward to hearing their advice.  I want to be a better writer.

One of the other members of the group said she enjoyed the process of writing in and of itself.  It was a joy for her to spend time writing.  She liked prompt writing in which a prompt, or topic, is given with a short time limit such as five to fifteen minutes.  The topic could be on anything, fiction, or non-fiction.   For our next meeting, we'll each bring a topic, and we'll pick one to write about at the meeting.  Then we'll take turns reading aloud our work to the group and then afterward we'll discuss together.

I'm looking forward to this very much.   Almost everything I do here is non-fiction writing.   I'd love to write some small fiction works.   Whatever we write there, I'll likely publish here along with a summary of the advice I got from the group.

New friends.  New adventures in writing.

The Big Boy Update:  My som hasn't ever been much into puzzles.  I did one of those sneaky things parents do and set out on the table a simple puzzle he got as a present recently.  I started putting it together and then walked away.   A while later, I came back to find the puzzle complete.   I next put out a floor puzzle of the solar system with 48 pieces on that same table.   My son put that together in no time.   Then I put out another floor puzzle, again of the solar system, this time with 128 pieces.   It took two days, and I jumped in to work on it when he was around.  He came over and was pleased when we finished that puzzle tonight.  As he got in bed tonight, I pulled out a third puzzle, yet again of the solar system, this time with 500 pieces.  My son now has both confidence and interest in putting puzzles together.  He's looking forward to starting the new puzzle tomorrow.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  I found a Valentine's card in my daughter's backpack today all the way in the bottom.   I was translating the braille but was having a hard time as some of her impressions were light, and I couldn't see the dots well.   When I asked her what it was, she said, "oh, this is a Valentine's Day card for you and dad."  She read,  "Happy Valentines Day X and O love blue grayed eyed Reese.  Mom and Dad,"  What's interesting about this is she mentions the color of her eyes.   She was born with light blue eyes.  When the infection injured her eyes, it affected her pupils, causing the delicate layers of the irises to fold over, forever hiding the grey under layer back and scaring it into place.  Today, the irises she has remaining are grey.

The Age of Homework

Do you remember when you first had homework?  I have almost no recollection of homework from my primary school years.   For instance, I don't remember as a second grader having to write fifteen sentences using each of the week's spelling words in context.  And then, when I was done with that, I definitely don't remember having to read to myself or a parent for fifteen minutes every day.

From prior posts, you'll likely know that's the kind of thing my daughter has to do for homework each week.  When I was in elementary school, I don't remember doing homework at all.   If my father were reading this (and I know he will), he would remind me of how I lied to him and my mother about doing my homework for onwards of half a year when I was in fifth grade.  

Sometimes I think my children must be very dense indeed to believe we won't catch them in a lie or see through their rather flimsy ruse, but I have only to compare to my younger self, and I think perhaps my children aren't doing half bad in comparison.   Because what was I thinking?  How could I have possibly believed my parents wouldn't find out I was pretending to have no homework for months on end?

I have many memories of my fifth-grade year.  We had Clariet the guinea pig, from whom I learned how to make that terrible screeching noise they emit when they want something.   There were the baby gerbils I got to take care of over P.E. one day and accidentally dropped one that then died in my hands from its injuries—a trauma of guilt I carried with me throughout the remainder of my childhood.  And then there was the coveted position of A.V. Assistant who got to load the film reels on the projector—a position I wanted but never had.   And finally, getting caught for lying to my parents for half the school year about having no homework.

I don't remember there being parent-teacher conferences, but I'm guessing there were because at some point my parents knew.   I don't remember the conversation they had with me when they found out, but I'm certain there were tears.   What I do remember are the countless conversations my father would have with me over the remainder of my pre-college years about how "I had lied to them about doing my homework."  Graduating from high school in the Honor Society, I think was finally enough evidence I'd decided to do my homework without any needed follow-up.

Because of that incident, I know I had homework by at least fifth grade.  But was there homework in the years before?  I don't remember any at all.   Perhaps there was homework, but it may have been minimal and not daily.   I remember my days after school being carefree.   I'd come home and watch some cartoons while I had a snack, and then would run outside to play with my friends.

Which brings me back to my daughter and the amount of homework my daughter has.  I've talked about this before here.   I think it's a lot.   She's in the cab for a long time every day, getting home after five o'clock some days.   A half-hour of homework, after being at school all day, isn't how I'd like her to spend her afternoons.   I would much prefer she does something social and active with her friends.

My daughter is in a bit of a different situation possibly than many children her age:  she is academically doing quite well, meeting expectations in all curricular areas.   Socially and emotionally, she is behind though.   Any time we can have her interacting positively with her peers is a good thing.    We're trying to balance things and have her do it all, though.   For now, we're making it work.

I wonder if my children will lie to us and say they don't have homework when they're older?  My daughter is too conscientious a student so I doubt it.   My son might very well try it.   I'll report back here in a few years with an update.

The Big Boy Update:  I picked my son up today and he said, "I want to go home and play chess."  He wasn't a big fan of Chess Club at school and hasn't been too keen to play really ever.   When I came home from a meeting tonight I found him and his father playing in the dining room.   I don't know if it has anything to do with it, but his beloved Spanish teacher who also taught chess club was diagnosed with aggressive cancer.  All the students have taken it very hard.   They hope he'll be able to come back to school.   We all do.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter gets up early sometimes.  The other morning she went out on our porch and was singing to herself.   She went outside so she wouldn't wake any of us up with her voice.  Our neighbor came out with their two dogs and realized she didn't know he was there.   He listened to her for a while before announcing his presence on the street.   He said she was quite good.

Blackie Saves His Friend

This morning my daughter came to find me asking if I could come upstairs because she had something to show me.   I, in full-on mother mode, said I'd come right up and was the thing she had to show me that she'd cleaned up the bonus room?   It was, not unsurprisingly, the unveiling of a cleaned bonus room.   My daughter said she wasn't even aware if the bonus room was a mess and anyways didn't dad clean it up last night?

We have conversations like this frequently in our house.   I have a feeling our house is not atypical. Children have fun playing creating a byproduct of mess.  This is followed by parents saying the mess must be cleaned up.  This is further followed by a parent coming in after the children and finalizing the cleanup because children just don't get the job done completely.  

My daughter was right, her father had finished up last night and the bonus room wasn't all that bad, which was good because we had music therapy happening in there in a few hours.  With my daughter telling me she had something to show me and, "I've been working really hard on this" I wouldn't have been surprised to find a large fort with all the blankets and pillows in the house.  In this case though, what my daughter wanted me to see was in their bedroom.

I knew that's where the surprise was because my daughter had the bedroom door shut and was standing backed up against it, arms out to either side as if to block me from entering without permission.  

When I told my daughter I was ready for the surprise she slowly opened the door with a small smile on her face.   This is what I found:



She had gone through all the storage areas in the house and found chairs we'd put away because they were too small.   You can barely see it behind my daughter but she even pulled out Gramp's childhood rocker.   She'd set up seating for eight as a theater in their room.   She wanted to get a sheet hanging down from the ceiling in front of her brother's dresser for the show.  And what would she be showing?



This is Black Dog, a large plush dog with positionable legs, given to my daughter by Samantha, the daughter of our chiropractor.   Black Dog would be Blackie in the story and he was saving his friend the hedgehog, currently sitting on top of his head.

That was all I got as my daughter hadn't finished the story and would I come back later?  I said I had my camera on standby for filming whenever she's ready to start production.

The Big Boy Update:  My son and I were on our own for dinner tonight.   He did not want to go out.  Not no way, not no how.   Until he thought about Crazy Fire, a Mongolian restaurant he likes.   He and I went together and he ate so much he said he was stuffed was it possible to eat so much your stomach would explode?

The Tiny Girl Chonicles:  My daughter made a blind joke the other day.   This is really a good thing.   It means she's starting to accept her blindness.   She had gotten one of those DumDum lollipops and was opening it up as we started driving away.   She knows that most of those types of lollipops have flavors but that a few of them have a wrapper with question marks meaning it's a mystery flavor.  She said, "This one's a mystery flavor, do you know why?"  I asked why and she said, "'Cause I'm blind and I can't tell."  Then she tasted it and said, "oh, it's orange, one of my favorites."  

Navigating to Eleanor's

My best friend and I met when our neighborhood was in its infancy.   Very few houses had been built and so at the initial point of our meeting, we could say we were, "next-door neighbors" because there were no other houses between theirs and ours.  The neighborhood is finished now and a good number of houses lie between hers and mine now.

We've been to Eleanor's house many times.   We've driven over, walked over, scootered over and trudged over through the snow.  It's a short walk of only two blocks between our houses, but my daughter said today she wanted to learn how to get there own her own.

She knows how to use her cane to walk on the sidewalks and can cross streets with caution and care, but none of the helps if you don't know which house you're aiming for.  When she mentioned this today my husband said he'd help her get there and know how to do so bt herself after their pathfinding trip.

My husband brought out the draftsman and drew the following picture for my daughter using the tactile paper and laid out the key things she'd need to navigate her way there.   Here's what he drew:

I marked out the path they followed in black sharpie.

The starting point is in the middle top, leaving our house and heading towards the intersection.

Next, she'd cross the street to the sidewalks on the opposite side which are indicated with a zigzag pattern.

When she got to the next intersection she crossed back to the other side of the street.

Then she counted driveways—Eleanor's driveway was the second one

For navigating home, she would do most of this in reverse with some minor variations.

On the way back they discovered there was an electrical box that was making a buzzing sound right about the point she should cross back to our street.

Eleanor and her family were out of town today so they did a scouting mission for my daughter.   They're back in town tomorrow and might get an unexpected visit from my daughter tomorrow.

The Big Boy Update:  My son brought home something he made at school in music class.   The front was a nice scale.   The back has three melodies, my son told me.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We played cards as a family tonight.   We have braille Uno and Old Maid, My daughter plays cards very well.   We can glance at our hand and see, or refresh our memory, on n what cards we have.   My daughter has to read the card names in braille and then commit a lot of it to memory or else she has to go through the cards constantly.   She's getting quicker all the time at this.   We had a good time, all four us and wasn't a bad sport when she didn't win.

Early Humans

My son had terrible penmanship.   That is if you could get him to get anything written down.   With the inattentiveness and hyperactivity components of ADHD he had happening in his brain, it was challenging for him to get his thoughts moving at the same speed as his hand.   That was last year.

After deciding to put him on a short-acting medication for the hours he was in school, things changed dramatically.   He brought home yesterday a long, rolled work he completed on "Early Humans."   Each sheet from left to right was one evolutionary step towards homo sapiens that he wrote about on the rightmost panel.  There is a sheet for each letter in EARLY HUMANS depicting a stage in the development up to now.

Here are the first two panels showing the beautiful cursive writing he was doing last year.   His writing is even more precise and by his preference, is smaller than what is pictured below from June of last year.  We went from him not being able to get any work done to completing lots of work with the concentration necessary to do so.  He is thriving at school now.





The Big Boy Update:  The shaft portion of the lightsaber he built while at Disney World arrived in the mail from Nana and Papa.   He and everyone else who's come over has looked at this very heavy and detailed sword.  He demonstrates how it comes completely apart and how he selected the red crystal (which makes the lightsaber glow red.).  It makes great noises when you swish it around.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has been keeping the dog with her wherever she goes.   She shuts the dog in the room with her while she does things or listens to an audiobook.   Matisse is happy to be with her all the time.   She has no desire to leave.   When she's with me, if my daughter comes home she sits at the door and wants to be let out to go find her.   Getting Matisse was a very good decision for my daughter.   She is such a powerful friend and calming influence on her.

I Have My Friend

My daughter is still having sleeping problems.  Well, sleeping isn't a problem, she's excellent at sleeping.  It's the waking up that's the issue.  She wants to go to bed early, will get her pajamas on (or not, she's happy going to bed in anything if she's tired enough).  We're doing a good bit of management trying to keep her awake if we realize she's getting to the point of being tired well before a reasonable bedtime.

Where this isn't ideal is the mornings, when she's waking up very early.  It's been as early as four in the morning.  She was waking us up and, after realizing we were sleepy and didn't plan on getting up to entertain her, she would complain.   This didn't work well for her or us.

My daughter has been coming up with different things to do when she wakes up early—listening to audiobooks or playing games on Alexa being two of the most popular choices.   This morning she scared me when I heard the house door chime sound, indicating a door had been opened.  I found her outside, looking to see if the snow had come in yet (it didn't arrive until this evening).

With snow on the ground and school canceled for tomorrow, I asked my daughter if she had something she could do to entertain herself in the morning.   She said, "I have my friend...Harry Potter."   She and her brother have been listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks a lot lately.   They're in the middle of The Chamber of Secrets currently and have it playing on and off at different times during the day.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was worried about me when I told him I didn't sleep much last night.   He gave me some time to get a nap in this afternoon.  I woke up to the children outside in the gently coming down snow with one very happy dog running around in the snow.   My son came in later this evening and asked me if I was going to stay up late again tonight?  I told him definitely not; one night without sleep was enough for me.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  I put my daughter's winter clothes out by the fireplace, where she left them to dry in front of the fire earlier.   They were drenched and were more easily dried in the drier and I wanted to turn off the fireplace for a while.   Her dried things are now out and waiting for her in the morning in case she wakes up early and wants to go out in the snow.

Challenge Met

My daughter attended the  The Braille Challenge, a national competition of blind and visually impaired students.   The competition she attended included students from first grade through high school, competing on braille reading, writing, spelling, comprehension, math, and other items, all surrounding braille.

Braille involves more than just letters and words.  My daughter does math both at home and in school using her braille writer.   Just as you might draw a graph paper to plot out information about a particular problem, you would then write the answer to the problem using numbers on a sheet of paper you'd turn in to the teacher.   Blind students use other tools to help with things like graphs and other mathematical concepts, but the associated formulas and mathematical notation can all be expressed in braille.  

My daughter and her classmate and good friend, Aditi, were tested on reading comprehension, proofreading, and spelling today.   This year she was entered as a non-competitive participant.   Next year she'll be ready to compete as she will have a good grasp on all she needs to read and write fully contracted braille.

We had a nice surprise when the morning started as they listed my in-laws among the sponsors for the day's events.   This is about a very special Christmas present my in-laws gave my husband and me.   They asked us to let them know what charity or non-profit organization we'd like to support and they would give a donation in our name.  

My husband and I selected the Eye Shine Foundation because they do so much for the VI community in our area.   They have hosted and run the Braille Challenge local event for multiple years among many, many other things.   They keep the community connected and do so much of it for free.

While my daughter was in the testing part of the day, my husband and I heard speakers and participated in discussions and both learned a lot.

My daughter apparently did very well with the test.  It will be graded and results will be out in a week.  In future years, if my daughter places the highest in her level, she'll be invited to compete at the national level.   She has the aptitude for it I believe.  

The Big Boy Update:  I got new pajamas for my son.   Because his existing ones were way too small and tight or looking ratty or thread bear.   This was a mistake, he told me.   He never wanted new pajamas.   Ever.   I solved the problem, removing everything from the drawer except one pair of new pajamas.   He is wearing them now, but he's not going to decide he's okay about it until tomorrow when he will have forgotten all about it.

The TIny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was anxious about today's Braille Challenge and it manifested itself in a stomach ache and headache at school yesterday.   After just a short time this morning, you would have never known she had ever been nervous.

Penmanship Old and New

My mother found something when she was going through things recently.   It was a letter written to me by my father's mother.  We're not sure when she wrote it but we can make a reasonable guess from some clues included.

My grandmother grew up in the great depression and the need to save, reuse and repurpose never left her.   Anything she ever wrote was on the back of paper used for another thing.   In this case, the backside of the hand-written letter to me was a typed mailing to my grandmother's sister, dating back to 1979.   The letter was requesting support for what appears to be the predecessor to or something similar to the Girls and Boys clubs of today.

My grandmother speaks of something in the note that sounds to me like a pipe cleaner figure she made and collapsed to fit into an envelope that I was to open out and place on the piano to listen to me as I practiced (I took piano lessons for many years).   Based on the tone of the letter, I would guess she wrote it not too long after 1979.

I recognize the handwriting as my grandmother's and could have told you it was her from a distance.  She died some years ago, but she was an important part of my young life just as my parents and in-laws are an important part of my children's lives.   I wonder if they will recognize Mimi and Nana's handwriting years from now when they're adults?



The second part of this penmanship post is about my daughter's writing.   He vision is as minimal as it's ever been and yet her writing has actually improved over the past year.   She's never stopped wanting to write, but for a long time her letters and lines would overlap badly and her characters were mostly unrecognizable.

She's blind, but she wants to be part of a sighted world.  She made this valentine's card for her brother.   Saying on the first side this about his trip, "hope you had a great time!"  She taped two quarters for eyes and some Hershey's kisses for the mouth (which my son has eaten.). On the back she wrote, "Happy Valentine's Day Love Reese XOXO Gray Gray"

 



The Big Boy Update:  My son learned a new word recently.   And you know how it is when children learn a new word and discover the word has a meaning not accepted in general conversation, right?  Yes, that means they use it whenever they can.   We were at dinner on my birthday, sitting around the table talking with my parents.   My mother said, "Do you know what happened fifty years ago today?"  My son said, "Today is the day fifty years ago that you pumped this girl out of your anus.  No?"

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  I mentioned I was going to try and get a picture of my daughter's right eye.   She says she can see some light now, which is changed from before (she thinks) but even if she has light perception, there is massive scar tissue covering the internals of her eye and she can't see out.   This is the best I could get picture-wise.   She was trying, but she doesn't use the eye much and bringing it to face forward is something she doesn't do easily.

Half Year, Half Million

I decided to get Grammarly a while back to see if it would help with my writing.   I'd seen advertisements for it for a while.  The things Grammarly could do was well beyond the red squiggly underlining of misspelled words and/or the autocorrection into something entirely other than what you intended on writing.   So I signed up.

I didn't mention it to anyone for a while because I wanted to find out what sorts of transformative writing suggestions I was going to receive.   I wondered if it would turn my writing into Shakespearesque prose.  Or, if not that, would I finally get a definitive answer on if punctuation went inside our outside the quotation marks?

I know a lot more now about punctuation within sentences containing quotes.   And I've learned I wasn't using commas in all the places they'ree meant to be used.  There have been many other suggestions and corrections, and over time I'm getting a lot less feedback from Grammarly because I'm getting more things correct from a punctuation and grammar perspective.   Spelling, on the other hand, I still struggle with.

I get regular updates from Grammarly.   Sort of Rah Rah kind of emails of encouragement.  The emails contained statistics on what I'd done for the week.   This past week, for example, I was more productive than 95% of Grammarly users and wrote over seventeen thousand words.   The first few weeks of emails I got surprised me.   I had no idea I was writing that much.   It's not just here on the blog but emails and other places I write on the computer.  My most significant error area is commas.   In this post alone, I will likely have five commas corrected.

This week marks a half-year I've been using Grammarly.   In twenty-six weeks, I've written over a half-million words.  The emails said 513,810 words checked with Grammarly in six months.   That's a staggeringly large amount of words.   I feel like my fingers should be falling off from the wear on them.   I hated writing when I was in high school.   I didn't like writing in college any better.   I would have never suspected later in life I would grow to love it.

The Big Boy Update:  My son and husband are home from Disney.  This story is from when he was eating ice cream beside some other people while they were at a meal one day.   He explained to the stranger, "The whole point of ice cream is to make a mess. You make a mess so your parents get all mad about it."

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  How is it I didn't notice we had an ideal climbing tree in my parent's front yard?  Of course, my daughter didn't know it was there because she's blind.   So I showed it to her.   This morning when I was coming to pick her up she was high up one of the four trunks of the large Japanese Maple, singing, "Let It Go" at the top of her lungs.   She told my mother she thought that's what the tree was named.  

This Old Bush

I was over at my parent's house this evening for dinner with my daughter.  After dinner, I went out in the front yard with the dog who, upon sensing a rabbit, went flying off in the bushes.

My daughter had come out too and was climbing in a tree we hadn't thought to tell her about before that is perfect for climbing.   She's going to be all over it tomorrow, finding all the sitting places and swinging spots.

While I watched my daughter I was trying to see if I needed to call the dog back.  Up the hill past the grass is a natural area that has azalea plants.  My father likes azaleas and they've been there since I was a child.

And this got me thinking.   We consider trees old because they get taller, bigger and have growth rings.   And yet the same plants have been growing since before I was born in some cases.  I don't know how age is determined for plants.

I looked at one bush in particular that we used to play in/around/under as a child.   The bush is still there in the same place at about the same size.  It's hard to believe those and some of the other plants in the yard have all been around for a half-century.

The Big Boy Update:  My husband sent this list of rides they rode today: The Simpson’s Ride, Men in Black: Alien Attack, Harry Potter and the Escape from Gringotts, Transformers, Hollywood Rip Ride Rocket, Hogwarts Express, Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, Flight of the Hippogriff, Jurassic Park River Adventure, Skull Island: Reign of Kong, Dudley Do-Right’s Ripsaw Falls, and The Amazing Adventures of Spider-man

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and I packed for her to have a sleepover with Mimi tonight.  I dropped her off and wanted to make sure my mother knew everything we'd bought and that she didn't have any questions.  My daughter told me she and Mimi needed to have their time and could I please leave now?

Lightsaber

The Big Boy Update:  Today, my son build his own lightsaber at Disney.   There were options for all the segments with choices based on what characteristics you want to be imbued in your lightsaber.   Here is my son studying the options prior to going in at his appointed time:



The options he was reviewing were:





He decided to go with Peace and Justice but then added a red crystal at the end, which was for the dark side.   I'm not sure what that means overall, but it's too late now, we have a Jedi in the family now.   We can hope he will fight for peace and justice for the rebels and not the Empire.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter told me this morning, "I'm sad because I don't have a long enough name."  She told me and then repeated her request this evening at dinner with Mimi, including specific spelling, that she wanted to be now called, 'Reesey Bom Bom'

In The Dark

Blind people don't need to have the lights on to do things.  The past few days it's been just my daughter and me at the house as my husband and son are away.   We've gone out to dinner the last two nights in a row, leaving when it was light out and returning after dark.   Both nights when we came in the house, now in the dark, I watched my daughter unerringly weave her way through doorways and around furniture in the dim light of emanating from things like the thermostat, refrigerator ice maker lights, clock on the microwave, nightlight in the living room, etc.

She does run into things and I believe she also uses the light for object detection and avoidance, but she doesn't really need it that much.  I wonder if she'll live in a house in the dark when she's grown?  Maybe not if she has a roommate or is married with children at home, but I don't see her needing lots of light for herself.

It's uncertain, but I believe less light is better for her.  Too much light overwhelms her eyes.  She has glasses that concentrate the light with the high prescription and irises that don't function.   She doesn't complain about bright light, but she has mentioned recently that lower light is better.

Tonight I was going up to read to her before bed.   She headed up first and when I arrived, the lights were on in the room.   I wonder if she turned them on for me or for her?

The Big Boy Update:  When my son arrived in Florida, my in-laws picked him up.   He greeted my father-in-law with the following, friendly words: "Papa, you look ugly in that shirt.  Too much yellow."

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and I went to dinner with Aunt Margaret and Uncle Jonathan at a sushi and Thai restaurant that we coincidentally went to last night as well.   We had a nice meal with the two of them on Valentine's Day.  My daughter bought her bag of valentines from school and showed them what she'd gotten from friends and shared some of the candy with each of them.

Of Necessity

Our dog doesn't get a bath because it's been long enough since her last bath and it's that time again.   I  don't think that ever happens.   She gets a bath out of necessity, on short notice, when it's unexpected and commonly when there isn't adequate time for it.

Tonight was one of those nights.  My daughter and I had gotten from dinner with my parents.  I had finished going through things in my daughter's backpack and mail and my daughter had come downstairs with her completed homework in hand.

It was officially bath time.   My daughter didn't really want a bath but I told her one bath a week as she might prefer, wasn't going to work so get cracking and start running the tub while I brought the dog in from outside.  I left the bathroom with water running and my daughter putting her clothes in the hamper.   Things were under control.  The night was going to go to plan and everything all would end well.

Then I went outside.  There were two shadowy figures in the dark in the front yard and the dog was going crazy.   The shadowy figures were my best friend's husband and one of their daughters.  The dog was going crazy because Remy, their dog, was in the yard with her.

I've been through this before.   I know what to do at this point—just relax and let it happen.   The dog was already likely a mess.   It had been raining all day and the ground was soggy.   As the dogs ran around and flipped over each other they were collecting things that were going to stay there until washed out.   Their dog is brown and doesn't look that dirty even if he is.   Our dog is light blonde and everything shows and sticks.

I didn't take her off her runner because I didn't want to add leaves to the mess, dirt and grass would be quite enough to clean up from, thank you very much.   Matt and Ellie left with Remy and I walked Matisse inside and told her to go to the bathroom.   I opened the shower door and she walked in—which was an unexpected bonus, it was like she was ready to have a shower.   Only my daughter wanted her in the tub with her.

So we washed her together and then my daughter drained the tub and ran more water to get the mud off of her.  The dog shook herself again and again and I had to dry the entire bathroom floor as it was a hazard for slipping.   My daughter wanted the dog to sleep with her and it was bedtime so we dried the dog together with a brush and hairdryer to get some of the knots out of her hair.

The dog and my daughter went upstairs while I cleaned up the messy bathroom.   The dog got a bath out of necessity tonight, and it was untimely and a bit unexpected.   But she's clean now and smells good and I don't have to send her to the groomers for a while longer.

The Big Boy Update:  My son has just finished his meal at Be Our Guest at Disney.   He tried everything they served, which included, Bread, cheese, grapes, strawberries, pan-seared chicken, scallops, lamb chop, filet mignon, wild rice, cauliflower fried rice, chocolate truffle, white chocolate “chip” cup, & a macaroon".  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is trying to coordinate not one, but two sleepovers this weekend.   When Mimi told her she could do Friday night, my daughter said to her, "I need to talk to Madison."   She didn't want to let my mother wonder what would happen next so she finished up with, "We'll notify you."

The Red, The Pink, The Yellow and Blue

You might think after all we've been through with my daughter's eyes via surgery, implants, and injections that we would be free of a daily regime of drops at this point.   You might have taken into consideration the fact that no vision at all, including light perception, is happening in her right eye and precious little remains in her left eye and why would we bother with drops if we've lost pretty much it all?

Further, you might remember we went through the battle with glaucoma, or high ocular pressure for some time and ultimately had an implant placed in her left eye to manage the pressure we couldn't control with drops and oral medication.   If you've been here for long enough counting you as one of my most steadfast and dedicated readers, you know that prior to the high-pressure battle, there was a low-pressure fight that went on for several years.   The high pressure was such an unexpected change in symptoms I did a literal double-take when her surgeon told us.

All of that is in the past now.  One eye gone, the other eye being pressure managed by an implant.  Drops done, right?   That would be a no.   We have four drops we use either daily or on an as-needed basis.

"Right red night" is my daughter's and husband's way of reminding us to do one red drop in her right eye every night.   I need to get a picture of her right eye and post it here.   Be forewarned though, it's not comfortable to look at as what was a once beautiful iris and pupil has now shrunk down into a small fraction of what it once was.   I need to follow up on the atropine drop for her right eye again.   The last time I asked we were told to keep doing the drops once per day, although I think it's rather pointless now.

We have steroid drops (pink) twice per day in the left eye and since that eye gives her some tiny bit of visual information, I'm all about keeping those going if they could help or prevent more loss of sight.

Then we have the yellow or blue drops.   We would ideally do neither, but we're monitoring her pressure and it's not able to remain in the ideal pressure range without some assistance.   One drop per day isn't a bad thing but we're going to see her glaucoma surgeon again soon and see if she has any guidance.   We've had to slowly increase those drops from one every few days to one per day and now we're having to use the more powerful drop some days and the milder one on other days.

On balance though we're only doing drops twice per day which is a much, much better situation than six times or even twelve times.   I wouldn't want to do drops six times per day on myself.   Imagine trying to interrupt your child to do drops she doesn't want to do and doesn't want other people to see her doing them.    So things are good.   In comparison to when they were really bad.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is off to Disney.   They left early for the airport heading directly from school.   My husband wanted to make sure they didn't run into long bag check lines at the airport.   It turned out there was only one person in line when they got there.   They're still in the air now.

Tiny Girl Drops Comment:  I asked her if she wanted to say anything about her drop.  She said, "I have a stinging yellow drop and a pink drop that doesn't sting.  I also do a red drop and a blue drop.  I do yellow and pink in the morning and blue and red at night."

The Pillowcase Linens

My parents spent the night with us recently and my mother wanted to take their linens down to the laundry room in order to help out.   I told her thank you and that I'd take it from there.  I didn't get around to doing laundry for another day and when I did, I wondered where the linens had good?

Perhaps my husband had done them, but I knew the bed hadn't been remade so that wasn't likely.  When I had walked into the laundry room I had expected to see the sheets piled in the corner.   What hadn't caught my eye at first was a stuffed pillowcase.

My mother had taken the linens and put them in the pillowcase, making a nice bundle for carrying downstairs.   How is it in my fifty years (wow, that's the first time I've said that phrase before) I have never seen this done?  Maybe it's been done all around me but I wasn't paying attention?  We use pillowcases to send my son's sleeping bag and other things with him for camp, but never for the transportation of bed linens from bedroom to laundry room.

Now that I write this, I don't remember how laundry was done at all in my house growing up.   It is a huge black hole.   I know where the washer and dryer were and I remember hearing them running, but I don't remember how laundry was done and what responsibilities I had in the process.   Did I have to fold and hang my own clothes?  At what age did I become involved with laundry as a child?

I know my boyfriend from my freshman year in college was aghast when he heard I didn't do a thorough separation of colors and whites, running upwards of three loads if a mid-shade load was necessary.   Even today, I'm pretty lazy about that aspect of laundry.  At least for my children's clothing—they grow out of clothes before they have time to be affected too much by mixed colors.   Or they wear them out.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is making it through the final Harry Potter movie tonight in preparation for going to Disney tomorrow.   He is very happy about the trip.   I wonder if he'll get anything done at school tomorrow or if he'll be too mentally distracted to do much.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We almost lost the front of my daughter's hair today.   She came home and had been bored and twirling her hair.   She came up with a way to twist, tie, twist some more and did this again and again until there was a massive knot of entanglement of the hair directly above her eyes.   She had compounded the problem by trying to brush it out.   I made her sit on a stool and worked with conditioner and a spray bottle for twenty-five minutes until I got it out.   It took me five minutes to even find the ends of the hair it was so intertwined.   I really thought we were going to lose the hair when I first saw it.

Education For One

It takes time and resources to create educational materials.  As parents (who aren't homeschooling,) we get in education when we can with discussions and explanations.   We might draw a picture to show the different phases of the moon.  With the advent of the Internet and streaming media, we might show a video on say what it means for a snake to molt.  As parents, we wedge some education in that's usually triggered by a question our child has.

Creating an entire curriculum for a child to give them the full breadth of materials and concepts necessary to educate them is another thing entirely.   Students benefit from materials created for mass use.  There are a lot of good materials out there.   My daughter is following the standard curriculum her sighted classmates are being taught.   Only her version of the materials are created just for her.

I've gone on about this before, but it's because I believe it is such a remarkable thing that our teachers, school system and nation give children with disabilities the opportunity to have the same chance to learn, despite their individual challenges.   Today I opened my daughter's backpack to find another elegantly simple tactile version of a concept that could have been explained in words to my daughter.   Other students see pictures and get an understanding beyond the words.   Pictures are very helpful in understanding concepts.   Ms. B. gave my daughter the same information in tactile form.



The sand is sandpaper.  The water is horizontally corrugated paper and the fish is big and detailed in features.





The orange and green stickers have arrows pointing down, indicating pressure. The rust-colored later is a different grit of sandpaper.



And finally, you can feel the sun above the land where the fish fossil is now exposed,



My daughter's education is customized just for her.   She is doing quite well in school.   Intelligence isn't an area my daughter is challenged in.   She has a sensory impairment, not a mental one.   Thank you, again, and again, to our teachers for giving my daughter the opportunity to learn alongside her sighted peers.

The Big Boy Update:  My mother came over the other day to play with the children.  They created a stuffed animal zoo in my son's bed, adding just about every stuffed animal they could find.   The plan was to remove them so he could sleep, but he decided he wanted most of them to remain.  Interestingly enough, he was able to sleep the first night.  Last night I came upstairs to get the dog from their room.   When I came in my son bolted up in the bed and asked me to please take away all the stuffed animals.   Groggily, he came down and got some water at the sink while I threw stuffed animal after stuffed animal over the railing and down onto the floor.  I would bet there were fifty in his bed if not more.   He came back up and flounced on the mattress and was back asleep before I had him covered up with the comforter.  He's generally liked a piled full bed, but this was over even his limit.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and I have both been growing out our hair.   Both grow very slowly.   She gets her hair cut about twice a year.  I have to cut mine more frequently because I color and use heating tools on it.   I've been growing out my hair for five years now and while it's been slow going, I'm gradually making progress.  I told my daughter we should see who's hair is longer (relatively).   I told her I wanted mine Lady Godiva style long and showed her where that meant it would need to cover on me.   She said I was almost there.  Then we checked her hair and while it's shorter in total inches, it's more than long enough to have her ride side-saddle on a horse naked through the center of town with reasonable coverage.

The Mental Institution Run

Today was the second race of the year I ran with my cousin towards her twelve months of races goal.   This is her personal goal: to run a 5K or similar race once per month for the whole year, but she's invited me to join her in the last two and we've had fun running together.

We were joined today by another one of her friends, named Malise, which my daughter thinks is neat, because her name is similar to our dog's name, Matisse, only the dog as a 't' sound instead of an 'l' sound.  The three of us didn't break any land speed records running, but we enjoyed the meandering course through a park near the downtown area that today is known as an area of fields dotted with older buildings housing government offices, but in the days when my cousin and I were younger, was known because the campus housed a "mental institution."

There is a lot of land on the campus and I find it hard to believe it was all taken up with insane people needing round-the-clock care, but when I was young, that was the only thing the site was known for.  When I was older and working for IBM, I went to do some work for the division of motor vehicles city planning group in one of the buildings on site.  I remember them showing me future street maps and telling me how everything was measured out in the metric system—because we would be changing over to that system in the coming years.

That was my first experience on-site and I must admit, I was looking for signs of ancient gurneys in the hallways with restraints dangling down the sides.   I saw no signs of that and it turns out we're still using the imperial system.  I wonder if the department of road planning is still around in one of the buildings today.

I've run multiple races through the park with today's 5K being held exclusively within the bounds of the park/campus.  At the end of the race, they gave everyone a rose, what with this being the theme for the race.  Malise and I told my cousin she was up for picking next month's race and we'd drive to her this time since she'd come to town for us the past two months.   We declared her the event coordinator seeing as how she'd picked two clement days of weather for what could have been cold, dreary winter race days.

I haven't been exercising much, if at all, so having a race to run every month has been a good thing for me.   It is also nice to have a chance to catch up with my cousin, who has always been the closest thing to a sister I've ever had.   She gave me some good advice today, as she always does.   She's a decade further down the parenting path what with her daughter in college now and has, "been there, done that" and survived.   Her experience and wise advice is always a comfort to hear.

The Big Boy Update:  My son and husband made heart-shaped brownies today.  This is the kind of thing I would say, "forget that" after finding the grocery store didn't stock heart-shaped brownies pre-made but is just the kind of challenge my husband likes.   He and my daughter got a heart cookie cutter the other day and today he made with my son two large batches of brownies.   The remnants were about as much as the beautifully shaped heart brownies my son will be taking to school tomorrow for their early Valentine's Day celebration. My son also created a hand-written card with a stamped border background and added a fun food-shaped eraser into a bag for each of his classmates.   This is a Montessori school, there is no candy allowed.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My mother called the other day about getting their Internet connection restarted once the power was back on.   I talked to my mother for a few minutes and then told her I was going to put my husband on the phone as he was more familiar with the AT&T router they had.   My daughter said in the background, "yeah, men know more about electronics than women."  If she could see, she would have noticed me glaring at her, and then laughing.

Aftershock Chicken

Have I mentioned before what a wonderful thing grandparents are?  We are incredibly fortunate in that we have four grandparents to my children who live close to us and want to be part of both our and our children's lives.   There is no drama, and both my and my husband's parents enjoy each other's company.  I count us as very fortunate in many ways when it comes to my children's grandparents.

This afternoon my mother called and asked if we were doing anything tonight, and would we be up for her coming over to spend some time with the children.   She is upstairs in their bedroom right now, and there is joyful play happening.  My son is showing off, loud and boisterous while my daughter is jealously guarding Mimi's position near her, making sure she captures as much of my mother's attention as possible.

In the kitchen, you'll find my husband, who is channeling his mother as he prepares some bread she left for us before they went to Florida for the winter.   She brought a loaf of frozen bread over and a container of garlic butter she'd prepared that was to go on the loaf.   It feels as if she's right around the corner instead of states away.

I'm in the bedroom, sitting on the bed, typing away on my laptop while the rest of the family is occupied around me.   I was single for a long while.  Married life with children is a good thing (when the children aren't driving you up the wall, which you've heard about in other posts here.)

Dinner for this evening is a dish my husband made up a while ago, using some Penzy's seasoning given to him as a thank you present when our cousins came to visit.   My son, after trying the dish the last time his father made it said, "it's good, but it has an aftershock to it."  We agreed it had a delayed spicy bite to it, and then I told my son he'd just named the dish.

So tonight, when I asked my husband what was for dinner, he said, "I'm making Aftershock Chicken."  My mother is going to get to try it shortly.  I wonder if she'll agree with my son's description.

The Big Boy Update:  My son has watched through the sixth Harry Potter movie.   We went to dinner last night and said to him and the sitter that he could start on the seventh movie if he wanted to.   I told her he might get scared.  He was worried about several parts of the sixth movie and wanted to skip past them.   The movies are getting darker.   When we came home, Morgan told us he'd opted for watching The Sorcerer's Stone (the first movie) again in preparation for going to Harry Potter world this coming week at Disney.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has figured out how to get to the top shelf in the closets in our house.  We have higher ceilings a,nd when Wayne was building out the closets I asked him to put not one, but two shelves at the top.   My daughter told me this morning, "Do you know what I was doing from 5:30 to 5:45 this morning?"  I had been asleep and told her I had no idea.   She had, in that span of time (which apparently she was monitoring) climbed up onto every top shelf in every closet in the house.

I Can Understand Now

We had some heavy rains and high winds here over the last two days.  My daughter's school was let out two hours early on Thursday and school was canceled on Friday due to the number of homes without power and additional weather coming in.   It seemed unnecessary at first, but it turned out to be more intense weather than I thought it would be.

We had one neighbor post a picture of a trampoline that had appeared in their yard, looking like it had been there all along, somehow making it over their fence.   This was interesting because they already had a trampoline in their yard—theirs.  I'm not sure how many houses in distance it had traveled, but there were downed trees and branches in addition to other property damaged around our area.

The road our neighborhood was on was closed in one direction due to a large tree or possibly power lines down; I never found out but we turned around and went to Target via the long route to get valentines cards for my daughter and I called out the damage I saw around us along the way.

On Thursday night, my parent's power was out and wasn't expected to return until the following morning.   We offered and were glad they decided to come over to spend the night with us.  My children were happy to have Mimi and Gramps visiting for the night.

My parents had been at home, in the dark, for a few hours before deciding to come to stay with us.   As I was out in the front yard with a large umbrella, helping my mother in, she said, "I can understand why Reese is bored now."  In the dark, all the things she might normally have done (work on the computer, watch television, read a book, do things around the house, etc.) were all either not possible or much more difficult.

My daughter only really remembers being blind and is capable of entertaining herself—if she chooses.   She has lots of things to do.   She just prefers to have someone do things with her.   This doesn't mean she wants someone to do things for her because she's blind; she just prefers the company and collaborative play.  It still is a good reminder for us though, thinking about how her world is different because of her lack of sight.   We try to balance helping her versus hampering her by doing things for her.

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Good Morning Hello:  My children woke up this morning and went in to see Mimi and Gramps who were staying in the bedroom beside theirs.   I hear my daughter was jumping rope in her bedroom at six in the morning, preparing for the jump rope challenge fundraiser at school for the American Heart Association.   After a bit of rope jumping, she and then her brother went in to see Mimi and Gramps and get in the bed with them—at six AM.   Mimi and Gramps left by seven to get some breakfast at Whole Foods and check on the flooding in their basement.  Nothing like the children alarm clock to get you up early in the morning.

The Love Demons

My children are having Valentine's Day card swaps at school next week.   I'm trying to find out what is expected or not expected of them so I can help them prepare.  My daughter's classmates will likely be giving candy with maybe a nominal card or sticker.   Perhaps we'll be able to find out who the cards are from—this year they're better at writing than the prior two years.

My son's class will be anything but candy.   Maybe a pencil or something academic-related.   Ideally, he should be handwriting a card for every one of his classmates, but I doubt we'll be getting that much done either from a motivation perspective or one of focus.

My son has been doing a lot of artwork lately in school, earning extra time for free art because he's been very productive during work cycle.   He brought home this picture yesterday of the word 'Unity' that he was quite proud of.



Today I saw this picture lying on the counter in the kitchen.   I thought it was Valentine's day related due to the large heart.   I didn't see at first the words at the top and bottom; I tried to adjust the picture to make the pencil more visible.   Here's his poem:

Demons are Red

Angels are Blue

All of the Love Demons

are hunting YOU!

            From: Me?

The Big Boy Update:  Home on the Range is the song of the day here for my son.   When he gets a song stuck in his head he can play it over and over again.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  The front door shut this afternoon and less than thirty seconds later my daughter was crying besides me, telling me how bored she is.   She was scared (a bad lightning storm with the threat of tornados). Then she was hungry but wasn't allowed to eat.   She wasn't going to do her reading and didn't want to do her homework.   BORED, I say.   I told her she needed to figure out how to entertain herself.   She huffed off and has now found something to do.

The Birthday Book

My husband got me something for my fiftieth birthday today (has it been a half-century since I was born?!   My husband said the book was kind of corny, but I loved it.  He had made me a book online all about my birthday and us.   It was funny and touching and silly and such a special thing for him to have made for me.   The book was hardcover and about thirty pages.  Here are some highlights:

My children thought this one was particularly funny:

I had to explain this one to my son, explaining there was a television show for years called The X-Files in which Mulder and Scully were a team of FBI agents that were an unstoppable team.  I told my son I got the idea of his middle name, Fox, from Fox Mulder in this show.  

This one was great...

This scene has happened around our table too many times to count (minus the cow):

The Big Boy Update:  My son came home today and has been playing Home on the Range song on Alexa again and again and has been singing along as he works on the marble tracks he got for Christmas from multiple people.   We're having to eat birthday dinner at the big dining room table since the breakfast nook is covered with marble tracks.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is no longer unhappy about the long cab ride.   This is a current situation because we're letting her take her iPad safely zippered in her backpack with an audiobook playing.   Her braillest starts the book again with her sound-canceling headphones on and when she gets home she almost doesn't want to stop listening.   All in all, we'll take it for now because she's not liked the cab ride for a good while.