Skipper Zip’s Chops & Chips

I mentioned a while back I think that my daughter's VI teacher sent home a Green Eggs & Ham cookbook that features recipes children can make that loosely tie to one of the Dr. Seuss stories.  My daughter isn't into reading braille as much as she should be, which I think will change when she can read fully contracted braille.   

Speaking of, and as an aside, I'm only four lessons away from completing my contracted braille class.   I could have finished it long ago, but without using the braille it's hard to remember it and so I've held off on completing lessons until my daughter was at or near the same level.   She and I are both about to complete now and I'm sure my teacher would like what is probably her longest-standing student to complete the course and move on.  

This is particularly true since Hadley moved to an online self-paced version of the class after I started.  It didn't make sense for me to start from the beginning of that course so my instructor and I decided I should continue with the version I'd initially enrolled in. 

Back to dinner with Dr. Seuss.   My daughter and husband picked out a recipe titled Skipper Zip's Chops and Chips.   It's from, or rather related to the book, "Oh Say Can You Say" and involves pork chops and chips, which in our case were thin potato wedges.  

We had green beans, squash, and zucchini to round out the vegetable side of the meal.   My daughter helped her father cook it all, reading him the instructions and ingredients as they went along.   This kind of help is important to my daughter.  She has a purpose.  She is helping.  She is doing something that's all her own.   It really makes her day. 

Dinner was delicious.   She had a sense of pride in her voice when I told her thank you for dinner when she replied, "you're welcome."

The Big Boy Update:  My son is required to wear headphones when we're around and he's listening to videos.  Only sometimes we need to hear what he's listening to make sure it's appropriate.   Fortunately, he doesn't like wearing his headphones all that much so we've been able to let him know what's not okay to watch.   Mostly it's bad language, which I use, so he's heard it, but it's how the words are being said and other phrases that might sound cool to him but are absolutely not okay for him to repeat to a friend or anyone else.  He's fairly understanding about it and changes the channel.   He's not sneakily looking for content, he just wants to listen to someone talking about Minecraft.   Sometimes though, those people are more appropriate for an older audience.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter had her old friends from down the street come to the door today and ask if they could play together outside.  She asked if it would be okay to do so wearing a mask, and we said okay.   I saw them standing around and I asked later if everything was okay.   She said they were practicing the bullying game.  Children these days are taught how to handle bullying, not that it always is successful on either the being bullied or being the bully side, but it's definitely more than I got when I was in school.   She wasn't bothered, alarmed, or even concerned about the game.  It was something they were just doing.   She told me, "Claire asked me to bully her," when I asked what they'd been doing.   That sounded odd, but when she explained it it made sense.