Forty Characters at a Time

My daughter's very expensive machine that generates braille dots was lost.   Or perhaps misplaced is a better term.   It is about the size of a fat, wide tablet and its main job is to take words from a Bluetooth connection, website, file, computer, etc., and give the content to her in braille.   There are buttons and a switch, but the buttons are few and the screen is nonexistent.   The only output on the whole device is a row of forty braille cells. 

Think about that for a minute:  We have computer screens, televisions, tablets, phones, displays in our cars, signs at restaurants plus many, many more locations that give us digital information a large amount at a time.   Blind people see with their fingers.   Anything on any of those screens could in theory be shown on her refreshable braille display, but since her input devices are her two index fingers, she can only take in the information as fast as her fingers can parse it.

So her Mantis was lost.   She hadn't been using it and it sat around at our house because her main teacher left on short notice last year.  Then there was the whole distanced learning situation.   At the end of last year, my daughter had a one-month break for summer, which was barely more than her quarterly break.  So when she was back and her new VI teacher asked where the Mantis was, well, confusion ensued. 

Long story short with a sudden move of the very full VI room, us not sure if we turned it in at the last year with her braillist going out for hip replacement surgery and my daughter adamant she had turned the Mantis in, we didn't have it.   We hoped they had it.   They said they didn't have it.   But they found it, which is the only thing that matters and we all collectively took a sigh of relief.  

So now my daughter is reading a 254-page book, forty characters on one line at a time.   Her fingers are getting tired, but she is building stamina with her fingers.   She doesn't want to develop pads, because she needs the sensitivity, but she needs to have enough tactile tolerance to be able to read more than a half-hour at a time. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son slapped his sister.  He didn't like a situation that didn't involve him but he got in the middle and hit her.   He knows it's wrong and when we were discussing it with him he slapped himself several times saying he hated that he did that but he didn't know how to control it (his anger.).  He is working on it but it's very hard for him. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter had an unexpected play date today with Ashley, her friend from around the corner.   Her mother had had a procedure and needed her out of the house for a while so she could rest.  Next weekend we hope to have her back for more outdoor play.   She and my daughter get along so very well.