Who Does the Cooking?

It’s been a day.   One of those days that has come to an end and I’m just not sure I’ve got the energy to put forth the effort to write a blog post.   But I did hear a conversation that was funny while I was out of the room tonight.  

My husband and children had sat down to dinner and I was heading in.   My husband likes to cook and has for the time we’ve been married been almost exclusively the one who does the cooking.   He told me once, “thanks for letting me cook dinner tonight”.   My children know that their father does all the cooking but it wasn’t until tonight that I got their perspective on the matter:

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Does Mom Know How to Cook Conversation:    My daughter asked, “has mommy ever cooked dinner?   My son replied, “no”.   My husband, trying to be helpful said, “she has one dish” and then because I think he thought he’d better revise his statement he said, “she knows how to cook”.   My daughter helpfully cried out, “egg salad!”

The Oldest Scar

I was looking at my leg the other day and I saw a scar on the outside of my left knee.   It’s been there for a long time.  It’s possibly the oldest scar I have.   It’s about one inch long.   I have a lot of little scars and marks on my body at this age, indicating maybe a life of hazard or perhaps a life well lived, I don’t know.  

This particular scar I remember exactly how I got when I was young.   I don’t know how old I was but I was old enough to take out the trash.   Back then our trash can was a round, metal bin that sat in the far back of our yard.   On trash or was it garbage days, back then they were separate I think, we’d have a man step off the garbage truck and walk through our yard as well as the close neighbor’s yards and collect the trash.

He would walk past the hammock I spent untold hours swinging in in the years to come, open up our metal bin and take out any bags of garbage inside.  He would put them into the larger, plastic bin on he propped up on his back and then head to the next house.   The garbage truck would pick him up at the end of the street around the corner.

On this particular day my mother asked me if I would take out the full garbage bag and put it into the metal bin.   And also, could I make sure the lid was on tightly because there had been a raccoon problem and the lid tightly on would keep out any interlopers.

I wanted to be sure to do a good job.   My father had securely fixed the trash can by adding wooden stakes around its perimeter.   With this knowledge in hand I put the bag of garbage in, put the lid on, climbed on top and then jumped up and down on the lid to make sure there was no chance it would be pried off.   I wasn’t expecting the lid to slip.   And I wasn’t expecting to fall.

I fell off and on the way down got a deep scrape in my left leg on a the sharp corner of one of the stakes.   I remember looking at my leg and seeing no blood, only the white, fatty tissue underneath—initially.   And then it started to bleed.   A lot.

I ran in and at that point my memory has faded, but what remains today is the scar line from that day that I made sure no raccoon could possibly tear into our trash.  

The Big Boy Update:  I had a board meeting tonight.   When I returned home the children were in bed but my husband said my son had left me something on my nightstand.   My son hasn’t been that interested in writing, it being mostly a chore to him—unlike math, which he finds enjoyable.   He had written a full page about when he was born and who his family members were.   I’m looking forward to telling him how much I enjoyed reading it when I see him in the morning.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has been using my husband’s Virtual Reality Oculus Rift glasses a lot lately.   They turn things three dimensional, but they do so at a fixed focal length—possibly a focal length she can see well in.   She can spend hours working on Minecraft with the glasses on.  

Free Matter Shipping

I was ordering some braille paper online yesterday.   There aren’t too many options so my browsing didn’t last that long.   I found some label paper that we can use to put labels on things in the house or on belongings.   Or we can translate books to braille and stick them on the pages (one we learn to write contracted braille that is).

When I got to the check out page it asked what type of shipping I wanted and there were options.   One of the options was Free Matter Shipping For the Blind.  Well heck, I knew we’d gotten some things free, but it hadn’t occurred to me that we could get things ordered online mailed to my daughter for free.

It isn’t everything, it’s reading and print-based things, but it’s nice to have the papers sent without postage.   We might have to have my daughter registered with the USPS for official purposes.  Maybe my husband wants to look into that—it’s just his kind of thing,

The Big Boy Update:  No idea on the background for how this question came about.  My son asked today, “Dad, was Zeus the sixteenth president?”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We were at Panera the other day and had ordered food.   We got our drinks and sat down at the table.   After about a minute my daughter said, “do we have one of those sizzling things?”   My husband said, “you mean vibrating things?”   She wanted to hold the “sizzling” thing so that when it vibrated we’d know it was time to go up and get our food.

Blind Spot

This isn’t about my daughter’s vision, it’s about that place in the car where you as a driver can’t see another car.   I have a bit of an overactive worry about changing lanes into someone who’s in my blind spot.   I’m not sure if this is from excessive warnings from my driver’s education teacher when I was in high school or if it’s from near misses by me.  

It’s one of those things that gets negatively reinforced over time.   I’ve always become slightly anxious when I’m a passenger in a car and I notice our driver hanging out and not moving out of a car’s blind spot.   I’ve even said something on occasion when it looked like the other driver wasn’t the type who really paid attention (as if I could tell across two cars).

The blind spot can be defeated by using your mirrors well in conjunction with turning around.   And I always turn around, even though it’s hard for me to do because it’s more of a me turning around instead of my head turning around because with the fused vertebra in my neck I just can’t turn around that far.

But for some reason today I was lulled into complacency.   It was probably a combination of two things.   First, I was expecting there to be a fast beeping sound indicating I was close to another car.   I wasn’t in the car I typically drive so I wasn’t getting that feedback.   Secondly, I’d been in my lane for some time and peripherally we sort of keep mental track of what cars are where.   I didn’t think there were any cars behind me.

So with my ignorance in tact I turned on the signal and began to change lanes to the right.  And I heard a horn honk from that blind spot spot and so I moved back into my lane.    Shortly the other driver passed me by and this is what happened: he gave me the thumbs up sign and smiled at me.

No finger, no angry glare—he was friendly.   I smiled and did the silent “thanks” word back to him and our cars drifted apart.   And I thought about it.    I’d just made a mistake.   I was expecting to be chided for it by the random person it almost impacted.   But instead I got a different message.  It was almost like, “we communicated through the horn and just prevented an accident together.   Good teamwork”.

I don’t know who that guy is, but next he sort of made my day simply by not being angry at me for making a mistake.   I’m going to try and do the same in the future if someone almost lane changes into me.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was playing with the remnants of his chocolate pudding pie slice last night.   He was smearing it all over his plate, getting full coverage in a circular pattern.   Grandpa asked him to stop but he said, “I’m making a chocolate world!”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has been helping me take care of our friend’s cats.  One of their cats is very friendly and exceptionally tolerant.    She picks him up and carries him around.   She told me, “Mr. Cuddles is my best friend cat.  I love him.”

Reading The Cards

My daughter likes to play cards.   Nana taught her how to play War and since that time my daughter has modified and changed and invented new ways to play that game.   She wants you to play with yer, but if you’re busy, say making lunches for the next day, she’ll gladly say she’ll wait for you.   What this means is she’ll be busy cheating by stacking the deck before you get there.

Initially she was able to do this by discerning face cards as they had more color in the middle of the cards.   She could get aces as well because they had the least amount of information on the card face. Beyond that she wasn’t able to do a lot of fine-grained cheating but it was enough to win the game as a landslide.

As she played more she learned the card suits.   She can’t always tell what suit a card is, but she can get the number on the card.   And this part is what’s improved we think.   A while back she was having to count the pips on the card to determine the number.   Now she’s able to read the number in the top corner and check by counting pips if needed.  

She can’t see what my cards are as that’s way far out of focal range but that’s not a problem, she’ll just ask you to tell her what cards you have.   This part isn’t cheating, it’s skill, because we play a face-up version of War.   There is strategy involved in seeing what cards your player has left, knowing they know what cards you have and that the lead follows the trick winner.   As someone with sight, we can take in the opponents hand quickly.  My daughter has to ask and then remember all the cards I have as well as what she has.  

My mother-in-law is in for the Thanksgiving holiday and she played cards with my daughter on the first day and she came out of the room and whispered to me in an excited voice, “she can see the cards!”   I told her we were pretty excited about it.

So good news there.   But I always have to temper it with where we really are.   I do this probably more for myself than anyone.   I have to always keep in mind that she isn’t ever going to have anything remotely close to normal vision.   There isn’t much we can do to help her regain her vision but we’re doing what we can to help keep her from losing more vision.

Here are some things from today on how my daughter sees (or doesn’t see) the world.   She can see curbs fairly well and only misses one in ten.   Steps are hit and miss depending on the light angle.  Going down is hard, going up is almost always easy to see.  In a store she didn’t run into anything hard, although she found some of the clothes racks  quite comfortable when she walked into them.   At our friend’s house she found the six metal food bowls in different locations half from memory and half from sight.   She wanted to play with the cats but she couldn’t see them even when they were right in front of her unless the light was very bright like in the bathroom.   And at Five Below, she can pick out items on the shelves without knocking them down, which is a good improvement in vision.

So things have gotten better, but she’s still quite blind.   She can navigate more safely in the world but she’s accommodating more and learning more secondary skills as well.    But there is this one niche where she can see.   Maybe that will keep improving little by little.

The Big Boy Update:  My children were in bed the other night and I was finishing story time.   The lights were out and the children were quiet.   I said, “are you awake?”   My son replied, “we’re holograms, so we can’t talk”.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter’s wanting dessert but she wasn’t eating her meal.   She said, “Daddy, I’m more really eating because my heart hurts”.  Dad let her know that heartache or not, dessert wasn’t available unless dinner was finished.

Proprioceptive

It’s Thanksgiving day and there is a lot of flurry and activity upstairs while people get ready for our family dinner.   We have a small group this year in comparison to some years, but it’s family and I love having family in town and visiting so it’s all good to me.   My children are happy to have four grandparents and two uncles visiting them.   They’ve been doing all sorts of things with them.  Or rather my daughter has been monopolizing the time of any adult that she can find and corner.

My son is interested in screen time (which is something he’s always interested in).  The children have been put on a stamp-based system where they have to do things to earn stamps, which they can spend (or waste as they call it) on things like screen time.  This has limited the amount of time they can use screens.  

My daughter is collecting stamps like mad.   She enjoys collecting them but doesn’t have a lot she wants to spend them on, but that hasn’t been a deterrent for earning them for her.   My son is on the verge of being out of stamps almost all the time, but this has encouraged him to do things like make our bed and remember to wash his hands after going to the bathroom, so we’re getting good habits reinforced and seeing less screen time for him as a side effect.

My son has been having issues at school and on Tuesday I had a meeting with their play therapist to discuss what she’s seeing.   There was a lot she told me and, as always, it was insightful and not at all what I thought was going on.   My son has entered another developmental plane and his anxiety is spiking again.   His teachers are saying the work he’s doing isn’t more difficult, but Dhruti says that it’s not the difficulty, it’s his ability to process.  The work isn’t harder skill-wise, it’s harder cognitively for him.   And that means that while his brain is processing what’s going on within and around him he ends up getting out of whack, or disregulated.

He’s seeing what the students two years his senior are doing in his class and that’s adding to his anxiety because he sees them easily able to do what he’s struggling to do.   The anxiety is making him hyper sensitive sensorially.    And so he spins.  And does parkour moves and does other vestibular things to help him, only it’s not helping.   His anxiety is causing him to try and control things (negotiating, whining, resisting).   In school he’s also not sure where he fits in with the social dynamic which is different in his new class and he’s struggling too find out where he is, “within the pack” as Dhruti called it.

His anxiety is added to because he’s a huge empath and yet he sees things around him constantly that he can’t change.   One thing (not the largest though) is his sister’s blindness.   In therapy he’s playing out scenarios such as having a “blindness power”.   He played through one scenario where he had a weapon that he used to poke a stuffed bear’s eyes out, making it blind so that he could then help the bear.   He wants to use the weapons to gain power.   He’s been doing imagination games in the classroom because, Dhruti says, children play out things that resonate with them.   He’s doing this because he’s trying to protect himself.

He told Dhruti, “I get attacked all day long”.    He created one scenario in which he set up a lot of army men and one of them represented him.   He said, “nobody is noticing me.”  Dhruti asked if he wanted to be noticed, because he’d put himself in the middle of the characters.   He said, “that guy is protecting himself and I am this guy not being noticed.”   Dhruti asked him more about the character representing him and then she said he surprised her because he articulated how he felt so well.   He said, “this guy is going to do more and more until he gets noticed.”

So we have to change some things at home and at school to help him so he can move forward.   We have a chart up on the refrigerator now for when my son whines, negotiates or does Parkour/tumbling when he shouldn’t be.   This isn’t a punishment, it’s for awareness.   We made it very clear to him that it was to help him realize when he was doing these things (because Dhruti says he isn’t realizing how much it’s happening).   When he gets three marks on the chart we have a “Time In”.

The time in is three to five minutes only, with a parent, in which we focus on the proprioceptive instead of the vestibular.   We go somewhere quiet and do things like squeeze Therapy Putty really hard.   He might lie on the floor and be rolled up in a blanket tightly like a hot dog or lie on his stomach and have our hands firmly press on him, pretending to make him into a pizza.   He needs tactile, something like a strong, long hug, something to get him in tune with his body so that he can let go of some of the stress.

We’re also going to focus again on the pompoms, rewarding him randomly when we see he isn’t doing things like whining, parkour indoors or negotiating.   This will help build his self-esteem back up because he’s in dire need right now of a more positive self-image.

I’ve only done one time in so far but the result was dramatic and immediate.   I’ve also been working on coming up to him and giving him firm hugs (no kissing, he hates the kissing part) or putting my hands on his shoulders and squeezing him.  

We’ve only been at this two days now but with the few changes alone, I can already notice a difference.   I don’t know what we’d do without Dhruti to help guide us in this journey called Parenthood.

The Big Boy Update:  Papa walked by my son this afternoon and heard him talking, although no one was around.   Papa said to my son, “who were you talking to?”   My son said, “I’m talking to myself.”   Papa asked him if he was having a good conversation and my son replied, “I’m having a great conversation.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  While my son may have a low self-image, my daughter does not.   We were in the car today playing a copying game.   She was copying me and I was naming family members I loved.   She said after a bit, “you forgot me”.   I told her she was coming up and said, “and last but not least is Reese”.    She told me, “I don’t like that, say, ‘and last but best is Reese’”.   She said she liked her the best.   I explained what the phrase, “last but not least” meant but she wasn’t having any of it, saying she liked her way better.

Massage Tribe

The Big Boy Entrepreneurial Endeavor:
Over a year ago my daughter discovered she could ask Alexa (our Amazon Echo) to play songs.   She would say songs she knew or just random words and see what would come up.   One day she asked for ‘moon rise’ and got a song she liked.   It was peaceful and we all liked the song and asked for it frequently.

Recently we upgraded to Amazon Unlimited music, which increased the total number of songs Alexa would play.   This was good, because the children hated it when they were informed a song would be only, ‘a sample’.   But it also changed some of the songs they commonly asked for.   It changed because with the expanded available songs to play, Alexa was giving a different resulting song for things like, “play moon rise” than she did previously.    We had to figure out who the artist was to the original Moon Rise to make my daughter happy.   In the end it worked out because my son liked the new Moon Rise and she liked the old one.

Last Friday when my son was at home having to do work and not attend the class field trip, I came back from errands to the sounds of some very pleasant, almost southwestern instrumental music.   I wondered what my husband had put on because it was working—my son was focused on his school work.   Later I asked my husband and found out he didn’t put the music on, my son did.

It took me two more days to figure out that my son was asking for music by a group called, “Massage Tribe”.   If you’ve ever been to a spa or to get a massage, it’s the kind of music that’s played in the background to instill you with a sense of calm.

Where did he find out about the group Massage Tribe, I asked?   It turns out that’s the name of the artists for the new “Moon Rise” song which had started playing once we upgraded the music option.   My son figured out he could ask Alexa to play songs by Massage Tribe get a lot more songs like the new version of Moon Rise.

Tonight at our pre-Thanksgiving Dinner with our family who had come in for the holiday, my son asked Alexa to play music by Massage Tribe again and then asked the adults in his room to please talk more quietly so everyone could enjoy the music.   After a bit he came around to the two rooms with a very special offer:  Massages for one dollar.  Free for old people.

There was a lot of laughing about this offer, but he was serious and went around giving the grandparents massages for free.   My husband (deemed not free) checked and had a dollar and took my son up on the offer.  My son offered a massage to the non-grandparents for the price of one dollar.  Uncle Brian negotiated a partial massage with a Qdoba receipt from lunch and Uncle Bob and I missed out on account of we didn’t have any money on us.

After making sure everyone in the family had had a chance for a free or cost-based massage, my son looked at his dollar and receipt, and then over to me and said, “I think I’m going to set up a business.”

The Tiny Girl Very Helpful Thief:  While my son was offering free massages to the “old people” and while the “non-old people” were debating if they should give my son a dollar for his new business venture, my daughter decided to get involved.   In her most helpful tone she said, “I know where Mom’s purse is if you need to get a dollar.”