Oh, The Toe

This is a big, big disclaimer that there will be a picture lower in this blog post of my toe.   It is not a pretty picture.  If you like looking at daisies, pretty sunsets and fluffy puppies, this is not a picture for you.    Let this be your notice to delete this email, close the browser or put your device down because the picture is coming and it’s ugly.

Back in April (I think it was April) I ran the Rock and Roll marathon.   We didn’t complete that one because my friend was worried about her foot so we ran seventeen miles and ended when we could get back to the start line.    The weekend before we ran a marathon in a state park on single track trails and groomed bike and bridle trails.     At some point during one or both of those runs I injured my left big toe.

This happens when you run.   You get one toe hammering into the front of your shoe for several hours and it gets bruised.   It’s bruised enough that the nail doesn’t grow well for a period of time and when it grows out it gets disconnected from the nail bed and falls off.   Usually this has happened to me with my second or third toes.   It’s not common and I try to prevent it from happening by getting running shoes a full size larger than my foot size so there is plenty of room in the toe box for my feet to have ample room.

Feet swell when you run, so that added shoe size helps and is recommended.   Sometimes, for example if you get stuck in a downpour, your feet can slosh around in wet shoes and cause problems. In my case, I don’t know what happened, but the toe got injured.

Toenails grow slowly—very slowly it seems, and there is a reasonable portion of the toenail not visible that has to grow out before you even see there was damage sometimes.   In this case, a few months later I discovered there was going to be a problem.    The problem got worse as the toenail disconnected from the nail bed and then became concerning because I didn’t want to risk infection underneath the loose nail.

So I cut the nail off.    It was going to fall or tear off if I didn’t so I didn’t have too much choice in the matter.    Are you prepared for the picture?   Here it comes.  It’s not a happy toe, but it’s not as bad as it looks:

The nail bed is red and has done some bleeding, but it’s not infected.   So don’t worry, it’s all right—It’s just raw and freshly exposed.   I’ve been keeping it bandaged, but it needs to air out from time to time (usually overnight).   Does it hurt?  Well, yes, but not as much as you might think from looking at that raw, red picture.   I have several weeks before I need to be toe-ready to run two marathons.    Hopefully it will be happier looking by then.   

The Big Boy Update:  My son’s main teacher has changed and the new teacher is making a big difference for my son.   He has continued to become a kinder, gentler, more positive person since the change and we’ve been very pleased with his progress with the new teacher.   Even our music therapist today said he was a totally different child from what he’s been in past months. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has been “scared” recently during the night.   She will come down to our bedroom with an unspecific scared feeling happening.   We will let her get in bed with us and try to talk to her about what happened, but she isn’t able to verbalize it well.   What we’ve found that works is giving her a flashlight.   For some reason this is empowering and fun.   She will take the flashlight and walk herself back to bed, content and calm.

Up and Down

My children were settling down into their beds after reading an interactive braille version of Going on a Bear Hunt when my daughter said, “let’s do our favorite parts”.  I had to think for a minute to figure out what she was talking about before I realized she wanted to do the Up and Down parts of our day.

We don’t always do this—we should, but we’re forgetful.   It’s when we talk about the best and worst parts of our day, or “Up and Down”.    My daughter started and had gotten into her third “Up” part before I said I wanted to share my Up part of the day—and this is the point I want to interrupt the story and go back in time about an hour.

My children aren’t that difficult, but they’re not completely compliant either.   They can dither, delay and be the cause of much adult infuriation when it comes to listening and moving their little bodies to do the thing you just told them (three times) they had to do.    Tonight it was bath-related and I lost my temper with both of them, explaining when I said a thing, I meant a thing.  

Some of this is good because if children realize they can ignore you three times because you never mean what you say until the fourth time, then why bother hurrying up when there’s time before they get in trouble?

I’ll spare you the details, but I got short and straight with both of them more than once during the end of night routine.  My daughter was particularly upset because I wouldn’t play the, “where’s the egg” game with her under the towel as she had run off and not listened when she got out of the tub.    Crying notwithstanding, I wasn’t swayed.   Hair was dried, teeth were brushed and we all three made it upstairs within the story telling window before bed.  

That’s when the Bear Hunt story was read and we moved into the Up and Down discussion.   And here’s the interesting thing—neither of them thought the worst part of the day was me being upset at them.  It was when Madison hit my daughter by accident or when the friends had to go home.   It wasn’t, “when you were being mean to us, mom, and you’re a terrible mom”.   It wasn’t that, even though that was the most recent negative experience they’d had in their days.

I’m not saying I’m happy about getting mad at the children, because I never am.   But I am somewhat relieved it’s not the black mark on their whole day in their minds.

The Big Boy Update:  My son told his Up and Down parts and shortly after that I left to go work in the basement.   My daughter found me downstairs a few minutes later, saying she needed Dolly and could I help.   I told her she knew how to turn on the lights in the closet and she could find Dolly herself and if she needed help, she could ask her brother.   She cried but went back upstairs.  About ten minutes later I went to go check on her to see if she’d found Dolly.   She had, and had asked her brother.   I told him thank you for helping her and he said in a groggy voice, “I was asleep and she woke me up.   That was my second down part of the night…”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles: Just before I left my children’s bedroom tonight my daughter decided to tell me about her plans for becoming a mother.   She told me: “Mom do you know when I grow up I’m gonna be a mom?   I’m gonna name my little sweeties.  I'm going to have eight. One is going to be Alyssa and one is going to be Goldie. How many more until eight?”

Toenail Update:  I damaged my left big toenail in April during the Rock and Roll marathon.   It’s been slowly growing out ever since (emphasis on ’slowly’).   I’ve had to trim some of it off in the past week because it was starting to, well, dangle.   The part under the nail is not happy.   It has been demonstrating this by bleeding regularly.   I don’t normally have injuries like this and while it’s not particularly painful, I hope the skin toughens up before the two upcoming marathons.

Blue Sky Crying

Sometimes children are upset by things that make simply no rational sense to adults.   These unexpected responses are not understood, but but are almost universally accepted by those of us who have experienced any time around young children.   Let me give today’s example…

My mother sent our two children postcards in the mail.   The children are always excited to get mail and when we told them they had something from Mimi, they were both interested in what she’d sent—only they were busy at the time playing with friends.

Dinner came and went and the postcards sat on the counter but the time wasn’t right to share them so we waited until after the children were dressed for bed and in a more calm mood.    My husband read the card to my daughter, which read: “This is what the sky looks like from our deck.   We hope you can come see us soon.   We miss you, Mimi and Gramps”

My daughter burst into tears.   She was upset, but why?    She was unhappy because the picture of the sunset in the mountains was of a deep, dark red sky just before the sunlight faded.    She didn’t like it.   She complained loudly how the sky should be blue and not red.    She said she wanted to fix it and where was a blue marker—the kind we used on the calendar that didn’t come off (Sharpie).

I got her the marker and she went to work “fixing” the post card.   Here’s her corrected version:

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Career Aspirations Update:  My daughter asked me in the car this morning, “Mommy, what will you be when you grow up?”  I explained I was already grown up, and I was a teacher from time to time.   My son said, “I think she’s talking about when you’re going to be a grandpa.”   My daughter jumped in, saying, “no, she’s going to be a nana.”

Substitute Teacher Training

Tomorrow is the substitute teacher training class for potential substitutes at our school.   I have been looking forward to this class, talking about this class and mostly saying it isn’t coming fast enough.    From last year there weren’t many substitutes that were willing to remain on the sub list for the school and this has posed a problem up until now.

For the first four weeks of school there have been needs for teachers to take sick children to the doctor, go to an appointment themselves, be out for being ill or take planned vacations.   These teachers needed coverage for their classrooms and the available substitutes compromised a thin list.  

The number of substitute requests I’ve turned down so far this year has been far too many, and by that I mean we need more substitutes.   We had a fever going around—that both of my children caught—which put many of our teachers out at once.  I couldn’t help as I was home with two sick children myself.

So tomorrow we have nineteen people attending the substitute training class, myself included.   I’ve been talking up the role of substitute because I think it’s one of the best ways to understand what happens in the classroom, even if you’ll likely not be in your child’s class.  

Hopefully we’ll have a “deeper bench” of subs after tomorrow’s class.

The Big Boy Update:  My husband went to the Halloween store with my son today.  My son loves all the costumes but doesn’t like to be scared overly much.   When dad would put on a scary mask he would like it but then he would change his mind, saying, “take it off, dad.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has been coming downstairs at night recently.   She told me two days ago she didn’t think her bed was comfortable.   She has made several comments about not liking her bed lately.   She didn’t have a mattress pad and her mattress was rather uncomfortable feeling to me being a sheet over a plastic mattress protector.   Today we added a comfortable mattress pad.   Tomorrow she’s going to put on a new comforter and sheets she selected.   We’re hoping she’ll be happy to be in her bed after the changes.

Going Downhill

I think it’s been three days in a row now that this blog has been a bit of a downer.  I’m not depressed, but sometimes there just isn’t good news to report.   But before I go in that direction, let me tell you about the children yesterday…

It was dinner time but you wouldn’t have known it was because the children were out in the front yard and road with their friends.   My son was on the scooter going very, very fast with Whitaker, his neighbor.    They would go so fast the adults would cringe and then at the last minute they’d press the brake on the back wheel and stop smoothly and quickly.

My daughter was on—guess what—her tricycle.   She had to be talked into wearing shoes because she likes to stop abruptly, sometimes with her shoes.    We got them inside for dinner and bath eventually, but they do love playing outside on things that move fast.

Okay, so to the downer part.   My daughter has been having more difficulty seeing colors lately.   I’m not jumping to conclusions on this mostly because I’m a skeptic.   I’ve been wanting her vision to be better, okay, not that bad, improving, etc.  Basically anything other than getting worse, but in this case, I’m noticing her having difficulty discerning colors she didn’t have some months ago.

I saw her vision impairment teacher today and we both happened to mention it.   She said she’s noticed a change in her vision since June at the end of last school year.    The change is most likely due to the cataract in her left eye.    It unfortunately means things are going to get worse until it’s removed, which will then cause the color clarity to be fixed, but we’ll have to get her corrective lenses for her eye so she can see somewhat like she did with her natural lens.

So for now, until November when her next EUA is, we hold on and hope things don’t get too much worse in the meantime.

The Big Boy Update:  My son brought home more drawing work today.   He’s had a change of teachers in his classroom and has been responding very well to the new teacher.   He came home with drawings of Oklahoma, Michigan and Virginia yesterday and he had some Metal Inset work today he was fairly proud of.   We very much like his new teacher.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter brought some pin punching work today.   She told me all about the “poinking” she did through the paper with the poinker (sharp point on a wood stick).  I asked her what she put the paper on when she did the punching work and she kept saying she punched the paper.   But what was under the paper? Ohhhh…she said after a few more times of me asking.   There is a felt pad we punch through the paper into.

I’m Not That Sore Update:  Twenty-seven miles and I expected to be pretty sore and tired today.   I’m pretty much okay though.  A bit sore, but not bad.   Hopefully that means I’ll make it through the upcoming marathons.

So Many Eyes

I think I whined last night about not having a blog post topic I wanted to write about.   Some days that’s true.  I have a list of topics on my mind, but some are more “heavy” than others and I have to be in the right frame of mind to write about them.  I’ve had this particular post topic on my list for a long time but haven’t been able to write about it yet.

Eyes.   They’re everywhere.   They are all over television all the time.   They’re in advertisements.   If there’s not a close up picture of an eye, there will be talk about “seeing <something> clearly”.   Vision, in all its important forms, is everywhere.   It is just that important.   And I hate it.

I look at those eyes in the television ads.  I look at the cover of the National Geographic magazine that came last month and I see a beautiful iris and a functioning eye.    My daughter’s eyes used to be beautiful.   They used to be blue and she used to be able to look around and see things.  

Now her eyes are grey from the underlay of the iris folding over during the original injury period.   Her irises don’t function normally and they don’t look round.    Her right eye has almost no iris visible and her left eye looks more like a blob than an iris.    If they looked bad but could see, I think I wouldn’t care about all the actors on television.    Even older people have eyes that might not look so attractive, might not be piercing in color, but they work.  

Eyes are everywhere.   I never paid attention to all the eyes.   I don’t care about any of those eyes, I wish we could get a little improvement with the two eyes I do care about.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is feeling more confident lately (I think).   He has been doing kind things and nice gestures on his own.   On the way home from a birthday party yesterday he said from the back seat, “mom, I’ll share this piece of candy with you.”  I told him thank you but I was driving and couldn’t get a piece right then.   He wasn’t deterred, saying, “I’ll save it for you until we get home and you can have it then.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   My daughter loves “Special Time”.   She asked the other day if she and I could have special time at the end of the night in the bed.   She wanted me to spend the fifteen minutes in her bed after the lights were turned out and the story was over.   She and I whispered and had a good time talking in the dark.    I gave her a big hug at the end and told her thank you for the special time together.

Marathon Run:  We ran twenty-seven miles today in preparation for the New York and Las Vegas marathons.   We were shooting for 26.2 but there was some overage distance before we got home.   It wasn’t a hard run, but it was a long one.   We really need to work on our pacing to drop some time off.

It’s Not Budging

I thought I had something to write about tonight but on review of my blog post topics list I find nothing new or even interesting.   For some reason I thought I had one of those, “that would make a good blog post, I’d better write it down” moments earlier today but apparently not.   When this happens I usually sit here for a few minutes, reviewing the blog post topics I have on my list that I’ve been avoiding writing about because they’ll be long posts, their time may not yet be right or I’m just not in the mood.   That’s tonight—I’m sitting here, looking at the topics list not really knowing what to write about.  

I have another option though.   I can look at the list of topics for my children’s blog sections and make it into the main blog post.    That’s what I’m doing tonight.  

My daughter had one of those days where she said far too many cute, funny or memorable things.   There was fifteen minute period I had with her outside, her in a frilly dress trying to drive the tricycle on the grass.    She is much too big for this tricycle, given to us by our friends John and Joan, but she persists in riding it around the house.

I hid it in the attic one time but she found it and managed to carry it down two flights of stairs to the main floor.    So today when she said she wanted to take it outside and could I hold the front door open for her so she could carry it out, I wasn’t surprised when she said, “mom, I can carry it down the steps myself.”   I told her I knew she could carry it all over the place.  

She went out on the road but when she realized I was next door looking at some tie dying laying out to dry.   She pedaled up their sloped driveway and when she couldn’t pedal any more, she got off and picked up the tricycle, carrying it up the remainder of the way.

She looked at the drying, colorful shirts with me.  I told her I was going back home.   She decided instead of going on the paved surfaces she wanted to go with me, through the tall grass, pedaling the tricycle.  

It was tough going.   She asked for a push.   She pedaled so hard the front wheel spun.   She didn’t get angry at all, but after the third time getting stuck she sighed and said, “it’s not budging.”   Then, she got off, picked up the tricycle and carried it the rest of the way to the sidewalk.    She got back on and happily pedaled off, knees almost hitting the handlebars.

The Big Boy Update:  My son wanted spaghetti with the sauce only in the middle of his bowl tonight at the restaurant.   I think he wanted to see some untouched noodles on the side.   He was disappointed to see sauce over all the noodles when his meal arrived, but he managed without getting upset.   Then he proceeded to put more spaghetti in his mouth than I’ve seen him eat in a long time.   He managed himself very well at dinner, wiping his mouth and hands on his napkin and being polite. I was quite proud of him.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has been known to like salad.   At dinner tonight Nana shared her salad with my daughter and Papa.   There was some silent eating for some time, punctuated with crunching of croutons from my daughter’s direction.   As everyone was finishing their salads my daughter looked up and said, “could I have some more lettuce?”  Fortunately there was enough for her to eat until her meal arrived a few minutes later.