My daughter is tracked out for three weeks from school. She’s and I have been doing various things together during the day. I’m in the middle of reorganizing/rearranging my craft room to make things the children can use more accessible to them. I have a load of stuff in my craft room and while it’s organized in a way, it doesn’t have an overarching plan. I have a collection of something like stickers, and those go together, but they’re not near the paper, scissors, markers and glue sticks that would be useful for my children (and the neighbor’s children) to use together.
I have a lot of things that I don’t want used without adult guidance. Overall, the craft room is exciting to the children because there are so many thing in there that look fun to them. But I don’t want them using acrylic paints or Swarovski crystals or many other things without adult supervision.
The good news is, they all know they’re not invited in without an adult, and everyone has been good to honor that rule. But I’d like to make an area of items like construction paper, foam stickers, stamps, paper punches, embellishments, etc., that the children can come in and use without having to ask and without one of us having to go and manage them.
The organization is going well and I’m getting a lot done while at the same time doing things with my daughter. I’ve been collecting tactile stickers and objects she can use. For example, my daughter will go and write a story on her braille writer and then come in and ask what have that she could use for a lake, a road, cars and dogs (because that’s what’s in her current story).
I find different things and she makes an illustration of the story on a separate sheet. She’s pretty prolific; she can write a story in less than five minutes. She’ll come in, read it to me and then we brainstorm on how to illustrate the story tactilely.
I think she’s on story nine or ten now in only two days. She wants to put them together into a book when she’s done. I told her she wrote very well for a first grader after she finished her last story. She said, “well, this one’s short. At school they usually say I write novels.” She’s right at that, she writes quite a lot for her age.
The Big Boy Update: My son has a hard time disengaging from screen time. It turns him into a big ball of angry sometimes, no matter how we try to prepare him for his screen time to be over. He’s storming about in his room now, not coming down for dinner with Mimi and Gramps.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter loves stickers. I’ve gotten all kinds of stickers that are puffy or dimensional so that she can feel what she’s putting on the paper. She can cover a page and know exactly what each piece of her illustration is.
Friday, April 5, 2019
Thursday, April 4, 2019
Cursive
I've always had terrible penmanship. I would look at other people’s handwriting, particularly in later years as an adult, and appreciate the consistency and smoothness. It didn’t matter if their handwriting was flowery and large, boxy and small, print or cursive, it all looked better than my scratchy notes. To me, other people's handwriting seemed to have a consistent style all their own.
My handwriting, on the other hand, was inconsistent, sprawling and ungainly. Maybe it was because I didn’t like writing. In part, this was because it hurt to write. For years it was painful to write for more than a few minutes because my shoulder and neck would go into spasms from the spinal cord injury I have. I think I tensed up when I would write because I was afraid it was going to hurt, which probably was half the problem and likely contributed to the problem.
My husband has been nice to write thank you notes for me. Typing on the computer isn’t a problem and I’m fairly fast at it. I would type up the words I’d want to put on the thank you notes and my husband would write them out for me. That’s one of those things you don’t appreciate you’re getting when you marry your spouse—how many husbands would write out thank you notes for their wives?
Then my children went to school and started to learn how to write. My daughter’s writing was arrested due to lack of sight and she took a detour into braille land. I joined her on the journey and have been learning how to both read and write braille.
At my son’s Montessori school, students are taught cursive. Cursive is faster to write and is a more fluid way to write as opposed to the stop and start strokes of print. I looked at my handwriting and discovered I was doing a combination of print and cursive. If my son was going to learn cursive, I’d see if I could pick it up as well and see if it made a difference in my handwriting.
My husband and I, over the next two years, had to look up how to write certain cursive letters, particularly capitals, and later on even asked my son how specific letters connected to other letters. I wasn’t doing a lot of cursive writing, mostly because I don’t write very much in this digital day. But I got practice over time. For instance, I write my son a little note to go in his lunch box every day.
And I started noticing something: as I practiced cursive writing more, it became easier to write. My arm didn’t get tired as much because I was more relaxed with my arm and hand. And I started thinking my handwriting wasn’t so awful anymore. Then, last week, something happened that I don’t think has ever happened in my life: someone said to me, “oh, you have such beautiful handwriting.”
The Big Boy Update: My son and I did some origami tonight. Math origami. I asked him if he could take a square of paper colored on one side and white on the other and figure out how to fold it so that both sides had half in color and half white. It’s called ISO Area Folding. He figured out two ways pretty quickly. Then he asked me how to fold a cootie catcher. He’d never folded one before and was pretty excited to find out how easy it was to do.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter wanted to play Hangman tonight. While I finished something downstairs she created a braille version on a piece of paper. The game of guessing the letters and figuring out the word was mostly done in our heads, but she tracked all the missed letters and filled in boxes she’d made on the page as I guessed correct letters. I had gotten the following five letters of a six letter word and couldn’t figure out what it was for a while. Can you guess the word she gave me: EA _TER
My handwriting, on the other hand, was inconsistent, sprawling and ungainly. Maybe it was because I didn’t like writing. In part, this was because it hurt to write. For years it was painful to write for more than a few minutes because my shoulder and neck would go into spasms from the spinal cord injury I have. I think I tensed up when I would write because I was afraid it was going to hurt, which probably was half the problem and likely contributed to the problem.
My husband has been nice to write thank you notes for me. Typing on the computer isn’t a problem and I’m fairly fast at it. I would type up the words I’d want to put on the thank you notes and my husband would write them out for me. That’s one of those things you don’t appreciate you’re getting when you marry your spouse—how many husbands would write out thank you notes for their wives?
Then my children went to school and started to learn how to write. My daughter’s writing was arrested due to lack of sight and she took a detour into braille land. I joined her on the journey and have been learning how to both read and write braille.
At my son’s Montessori school, students are taught cursive. Cursive is faster to write and is a more fluid way to write as opposed to the stop and start strokes of print. I looked at my handwriting and discovered I was doing a combination of print and cursive. If my son was going to learn cursive, I’d see if I could pick it up as well and see if it made a difference in my handwriting.
My husband and I, over the next two years, had to look up how to write certain cursive letters, particularly capitals, and later on even asked my son how specific letters connected to other letters. I wasn’t doing a lot of cursive writing, mostly because I don’t write very much in this digital day. But I got practice over time. For instance, I write my son a little note to go in his lunch box every day.
And I started noticing something: as I practiced cursive writing more, it became easier to write. My arm didn’t get tired as much because I was more relaxed with my arm and hand. And I started thinking my handwriting wasn’t so awful anymore. Then, last week, something happened that I don’t think has ever happened in my life: someone said to me, “oh, you have such beautiful handwriting.”
The Big Boy Update: My son and I did some origami tonight. Math origami. I asked him if he could take a square of paper colored on one side and white on the other and figure out how to fold it so that both sides had half in color and half white. It’s called ISO Area Folding. He figured out two ways pretty quickly. Then he asked me how to fold a cootie catcher. He’d never folded one before and was pretty excited to find out how easy it was to do.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter wanted to play Hangman tonight. While I finished something downstairs she created a braille version on a piece of paper. The game of guessing the letters and figuring out the word was mostly done in our heads, but she tracked all the missed letters and filled in boxes she’d made on the page as I guessed correct letters. I had gotten the following five letters of a six letter word and couldn’t figure out what it was for a while. Can you guess the word she gave me: EA _TER
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
First Email Address
I was driving home from dropping my son off at school this morning and somehow my mind wandered to the first email address I ever had. I don’t know what the address was, because at the time, in 1990, I didn’t really get the distinction. I was working for IBM and had an address on the mainframe that was called your “Inbox”. We could send mail back and forth to the people we worked with as well as anyone who worked for IBM that had their own Inbox.
It was a bit later, when I was coordinating the software beta program that I found out I had an Internet Email address equivalent for my Inbox. Not everyone had one of these, because back then the Internet and email presence worldwide was in its infancy. I needed one because I had to distribute the beta version of our product to the something like eighty customers world-wide every time we dropped a new beta test version.
There were about fifty people working on the product—it wasn’t a small endeavor from IBM, but at the time, the total size of the beta fit on seventeen 3.5” floppy disks. I packed up each floppy disk into something similar to a .zip file, build a distribution list of the beta customers and then sent an email to them with the files attached.
I did this on a green screen terminal interface on the mainframe, which was how we did all our mail and communication. Once I sent the email, there was no indication that things were happening or that the files were being transferred, so I went home and waited for customer responses in the following days, hoping fiercely that I hadn’t messed anything up on my end and all was sent out well.
The following morning our manager had been contacted though: who had sent the email to all the people with the “huge” attachments? It had taken up 90% of the communication bandwidth for the day. Did we plan on doing it again (yes) and if so, they needed to talk to us about how to do so in a way that wouldn’t repeatedly send the same thing eighty times, but instead use some optimization routine so that it would only leave the IBM system once and then branch out to each Internet email address.
We sent many more beta versions of the product before it was released, taking hours to get around the globe. Today the same amount of data could make it there in seconds. I wonder what that email address was though that I used to communicate on the Internet back in 1990.
The Big Boy Update: Uncle Bob came to visit last week and brought with him some new flannel sheets for my son. I’d been meaning to put them on for the past several days but kept forgetting until tonight just before bed. When my son climbed up into his top bunk tonight he said, “Yo! It looks awesome!” He and his father told my daughter about all the things on the sheets, including “trees and bears and porcupines and acorns and foxes and pine cones…and a bird” as my son described it.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter is on the bottom bunk of the bunk of the bunk beds she and her brother share. She recently has wanted to have blankets covering up the side so it feels like she’s in a tent or enclosed place. It’s nice and cozy in there; I think if I was a child I’d like it too.
It was a bit later, when I was coordinating the software beta program that I found out I had an Internet Email address equivalent for my Inbox. Not everyone had one of these, because back then the Internet and email presence worldwide was in its infancy. I needed one because I had to distribute the beta version of our product to the something like eighty customers world-wide every time we dropped a new beta test version.
There were about fifty people working on the product—it wasn’t a small endeavor from IBM, but at the time, the total size of the beta fit on seventeen 3.5” floppy disks. I packed up each floppy disk into something similar to a .zip file, build a distribution list of the beta customers and then sent an email to them with the files attached.
I did this on a green screen terminal interface on the mainframe, which was how we did all our mail and communication. Once I sent the email, there was no indication that things were happening or that the files were being transferred, so I went home and waited for customer responses in the following days, hoping fiercely that I hadn’t messed anything up on my end and all was sent out well.
The following morning our manager had been contacted though: who had sent the email to all the people with the “huge” attachments? It had taken up 90% of the communication bandwidth for the day. Did we plan on doing it again (yes) and if so, they needed to talk to us about how to do so in a way that wouldn’t repeatedly send the same thing eighty times, but instead use some optimization routine so that it would only leave the IBM system once and then branch out to each Internet email address.
We sent many more beta versions of the product before it was released, taking hours to get around the globe. Today the same amount of data could make it there in seconds. I wonder what that email address was though that I used to communicate on the Internet back in 1990.
The Big Boy Update: Uncle Bob came to visit last week and brought with him some new flannel sheets for my son. I’d been meaning to put them on for the past several days but kept forgetting until tonight just before bed. When my son climbed up into his top bunk tonight he said, “Yo! It looks awesome!” He and his father told my daughter about all the things on the sheets, including “trees and bears and porcupines and acorns and foxes and pine cones…and a bird” as my son described it.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter is on the bottom bunk of the bunk of the bunk beds she and her brother share. She recently has wanted to have blankets covering up the side so it feels like she’s in a tent or enclosed place. It’s nice and cozy in there; I think if I was a child I’d like it too.
Tuesday, April 2, 2019
Cleaning Out
I’ve been spending a lot of time at the rental property we recently acquired. I’m just flummoxed, bewildered, in awe or maybe in shock to see what the prior owners left when they departed. It wasn’t like they ran out of time to remove their belongings, they had vacated the home probably a year-and-a-half prior to selling the home. They had plenty of time to go back, at their leisure, and remove anything they wanted to keep, or throw away even.
The bedroom had shoes, undergarments, hose, makeup, notepads filled with notes, bedding and random items. The closet was partially full of clothing. The bathroom had makeup, toothbrushes, supplies and even a tray full of change.
There was furniture including a sofa, chairs, end tables, book shelves and filing cabinets. The linen closet was full of linens. There were more pillows abandoned than I would have expected a house that size to have in total. And paperwork.
The paperwork was surprising. One bedroom had it strewn all over the place. It was as if they went through it hurriedly, checking to see if there was anything they had to take, and then left the rest in disarray on the floor. Bills unopened, bank statements, collection letters, correspondence, legal documents, tax documents, pay stubs—all sorts of things I wouldn’t want unknown people to have access to personally.
The living room had a chair with a single knife and matches on the seat and an empty wine bottle on the floor beside it. I don’t know the situation surrounding it was, but it doesn’t look good. Medication for bi-polar disorder and anxiety that might be for one of the children that visited, but that’s just a guess.
And then there’s the kitchen. The power has been off for over a year. They left food in both the refrigerator upstairs and in the basement. Both are duct taped shut with “Do Not Open” signs on them now. Food was left in the cabinets in boxes and containers. Where mice could chew in, they did. The amount of mouse droppings indicates a large infestation. I don’t know if the cabinets can be salvaged with the amount of feces and urine accumulated on the surfaces.
There is a full basement, largely in the dark without power. We had previewed the property before the most recent owners, considering buying it. At the time the basement had a kitchen and tiled flooring. Very low ceilings but it was rentable and rented. When we went down there the other day we found the lower cabinets torn out, the tile floor removed and the bottom sections of dry wall cut out. Signs of a flood, my brother-in-law, Bob suggested. As I went through the paperwork I found a statement to have a company come to look at the septic system about a backup. Did the septic overflow into the basement or was there a plumbing leak? It’s hard to tell, although there is no septic smell.
Here’s what one of the rooms in the basement looks like that I haven’t gotten to yet:
So there’s a lot of work to still be done. I wonder what I’ll find when I go through this pile of stuff?
The Big Boy Update: My son got interested in my crystal sphere on the shelf tonight and decided to become a wizard. He and his father made a “spell book” with illegible writing of mystical spells. He set the “crystal ball”, spell book and a crooked walking stick I got from the flea market this weekend and made a wizard’s corner in the bedroom just before bed tonight.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: Today was my daughter’s second day of track out. She doesn’t like track out, she says, because it’s boring. I did some things with her, my mother came over and even Shane came to sit with her for a while, making jello. She’s staying up late now, listening to a show on her iPad in bed. Hopefully we can keep her entertained through the two weeks we have at home before we travel to meet my in-laws for a week. The third week, I know she won’t possibly be bored. Who can be bored on vacation?
The bedroom had shoes, undergarments, hose, makeup, notepads filled with notes, bedding and random items. The closet was partially full of clothing. The bathroom had makeup, toothbrushes, supplies and even a tray full of change.
There was furniture including a sofa, chairs, end tables, book shelves and filing cabinets. The linen closet was full of linens. There were more pillows abandoned than I would have expected a house that size to have in total. And paperwork.
The paperwork was surprising. One bedroom had it strewn all over the place. It was as if they went through it hurriedly, checking to see if there was anything they had to take, and then left the rest in disarray on the floor. Bills unopened, bank statements, collection letters, correspondence, legal documents, tax documents, pay stubs—all sorts of things I wouldn’t want unknown people to have access to personally.
The living room had a chair with a single knife and matches on the seat and an empty wine bottle on the floor beside it. I don’t know the situation surrounding it was, but it doesn’t look good. Medication for bi-polar disorder and anxiety that might be for one of the children that visited, but that’s just a guess.
And then there’s the kitchen. The power has been off for over a year. They left food in both the refrigerator upstairs and in the basement. Both are duct taped shut with “Do Not Open” signs on them now. Food was left in the cabinets in boxes and containers. Where mice could chew in, they did. The amount of mouse droppings indicates a large infestation. I don’t know if the cabinets can be salvaged with the amount of feces and urine accumulated on the surfaces.
There is a full basement, largely in the dark without power. We had previewed the property before the most recent owners, considering buying it. At the time the basement had a kitchen and tiled flooring. Very low ceilings but it was rentable and rented. When we went down there the other day we found the lower cabinets torn out, the tile floor removed and the bottom sections of dry wall cut out. Signs of a flood, my brother-in-law, Bob suggested. As I went through the paperwork I found a statement to have a company come to look at the septic system about a backup. Did the septic overflow into the basement or was there a plumbing leak? It’s hard to tell, although there is no septic smell.
Here’s what one of the rooms in the basement looks like that I haven’t gotten to yet:
So there’s a lot of work to still be done. I wonder what I’ll find when I go through this pile of stuff?
The Big Boy Update: My son got interested in my crystal sphere on the shelf tonight and decided to become a wizard. He and his father made a “spell book” with illegible writing of mystical spells. He set the “crystal ball”, spell book and a crooked walking stick I got from the flea market this weekend and made a wizard’s corner in the bedroom just before bed tonight.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: Today was my daughter’s second day of track out. She doesn’t like track out, she says, because it’s boring. I did some things with her, my mother came over and even Shane came to sit with her for a while, making jello. She’s staying up late now, listening to a show on her iPad in bed. Hopefully we can keep her entertained through the two weeks we have at home before we travel to meet my in-laws for a week. The third week, I know she won’t possibly be bored. Who can be bored on vacation?
Monday, April 1, 2019
How Blind Is Unfair
My son and daughter were playing on or around our bed tonight while they were getting ready to go upstairs for bed. I was just coming in from dog training class so I missed the actual event, but I heard my daughter screaming as my son ran out the front door. I came inside and heard something about an ice pack so I went to get one.
My son came back in a few minutes later, after the ice pack had been administered and my daughter had calmed down. My daughter wasn’t upset at this point, but my son was. He was upset because my husband had yelled at him or had gotten upset at him or that’s how it felt to him, because my daughter had gotten hit in the eye.
And this is the part that both my husband and I felt badly about: my son said we cared more about her because if he had gotten hit in the face or eye or whatever, we wouldn’t have yelled at her. My son was pretty upset. He said he wished he was blind and deaf, because then we’d care about him more.
So we had a conversation. I asked my daughter if she felt like we were unfair to her and that we cared about her brother more sometimes. I was rather hoping she would say yes to this and I’d be able to talk about perspectives, but she said no. My husband was talking to my daughter about eye drops while this was going on so I took a chance to ask my son if he liked video games, because if he was blind, he wouldn’t be able to see the screen and he would never be able to play a video game again. He doesn’t understand what it’s like to be blind, even though he lives with a blind sibling, he just sees the inequity.
We told them both, and I told my son more later, that we always tried to treat them equally, but that they were each different people and we tried to do the best we could for each of them. We all went upstairs and I read two more chapters in the book we were reading together. After the reading was done, my daughter called the dog up on the bed for a goodnight hug. While she was doing this I was giving my son a hug and said in a whisper, “I am so sorry it seems like dad and I get upset at you sometimes when your sister gets hurt. It’s not your fault, it’s because dad and I are scared. Your sister can only see a tiny bit out of one eye and her eye can be easily damaged and she could lose the only vision she has.”
My son was surprised by this, so I asked her for him: “let’s ask her. Reese, can you see anything out of your right eye?” She said no. I asked her what she saw out of it and she said, “only black”. My son knows a lot about his sister being blind, but in some ways he’s missing key parts of the picture even though he’s been with us through the whole vision journey.
I said to him more loudly this time, that I was sorry we got upset at him, that we just get scared when anything happens to his sister’s eyes, and that it absolutely didn’t mean we cared for her more. He seemed to understand it. Knowing him, he’ll be her biggest protector now.
The Big Boy Update: I walked into school today with my son, carrying a tree branch with a basketball-sized wasps nest on the end. It was an impressive specimen and frightening if you’re afraid of wasps. My father brought it over for the children. He’s had the nest in his shed for about ten years. It was beautiful. His classmates were all interested when we came into the classroom with it.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My mother took my daughter to the mall today. They were playing on the internal play ground when a mother and her daughter showed up. My daughter asked her her name and age. She answered “Amelia, and 5 years old.” They played for a minute or two and then my daughter said “I’m blind. Do you know what that means?” This is the first time I’ve heard my daughter talking about being blind to another child like this. She’s processing the vision loss and accepting it in a way she hasn’t done before. The vision loss is trauma, and one that’s repeated again and again as she’s lost more vision and had to endure more medical things surrounding it. That she can talk about it now and not avoid the subject, even when we try to talk to her about it, is a very good sign.
My son came back in a few minutes later, after the ice pack had been administered and my daughter had calmed down. My daughter wasn’t upset at this point, but my son was. He was upset because my husband had yelled at him or had gotten upset at him or that’s how it felt to him, because my daughter had gotten hit in the eye.
And this is the part that both my husband and I felt badly about: my son said we cared more about her because if he had gotten hit in the face or eye or whatever, we wouldn’t have yelled at her. My son was pretty upset. He said he wished he was blind and deaf, because then we’d care about him more.
So we had a conversation. I asked my daughter if she felt like we were unfair to her and that we cared about her brother more sometimes. I was rather hoping she would say yes to this and I’d be able to talk about perspectives, but she said no. My husband was talking to my daughter about eye drops while this was going on so I took a chance to ask my son if he liked video games, because if he was blind, he wouldn’t be able to see the screen and he would never be able to play a video game again. He doesn’t understand what it’s like to be blind, even though he lives with a blind sibling, he just sees the inequity.
We told them both, and I told my son more later, that we always tried to treat them equally, but that they were each different people and we tried to do the best we could for each of them. We all went upstairs and I read two more chapters in the book we were reading together. After the reading was done, my daughter called the dog up on the bed for a goodnight hug. While she was doing this I was giving my son a hug and said in a whisper, “I am so sorry it seems like dad and I get upset at you sometimes when your sister gets hurt. It’s not your fault, it’s because dad and I are scared. Your sister can only see a tiny bit out of one eye and her eye can be easily damaged and she could lose the only vision she has.”
My son was surprised by this, so I asked her for him: “let’s ask her. Reese, can you see anything out of your right eye?” She said no. I asked her what she saw out of it and she said, “only black”. My son knows a lot about his sister being blind, but in some ways he’s missing key parts of the picture even though he’s been with us through the whole vision journey.
I said to him more loudly this time, that I was sorry we got upset at him, that we just get scared when anything happens to his sister’s eyes, and that it absolutely didn’t mean we cared for her more. He seemed to understand it. Knowing him, he’ll be her biggest protector now.
The Big Boy Update: I walked into school today with my son, carrying a tree branch with a basketball-sized wasps nest on the end. It was an impressive specimen and frightening if you’re afraid of wasps. My father brought it over for the children. He’s had the nest in his shed for about ten years. It was beautiful. His classmates were all interested when we came into the classroom with it.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My mother took my daughter to the mall today. They were playing on the internal play ground when a mother and her daughter showed up. My daughter asked her her name and age. She answered “Amelia, and 5 years old.” They played for a minute or two and then my daughter said “I’m blind. Do you know what that means?” This is the first time I’ve heard my daughter talking about being blind to another child like this. She’s processing the vision loss and accepting it in a way she hasn’t done before. The vision loss is trauma, and one that’s repeated again and again as she’s lost more vision and had to endure more medical things surrounding it. That she can talk about it now and not avoid the subject, even when we try to talk to her about it, is a very good sign.
Sunday, March 31, 2019
Like the Stork?
We’re very matter of fact with the children about life and their experience in the world. We discuss the cycle of life with them in terms we hope they can understand. They understand all things grow old and die—and that it can be sad, but that’s what happens to us all. They’re too young to understand their mortality, but we don’t want to shelter them from things by avoiding subjects.
We don’t sad, “someone has passed” or use other euphemisms, we say that the cat died, for instance, and that that’s what happens when we get old. We talked about how our prior dog, Lucy, died because her heart wasn’t able to continue on. We’ve told them they are very fortunate to have four grandparents who are alive and love to spend time with them. They also know that they will live longer than their grandparents as well as their parents. My son will ask about exceptions and we tell him that unless something unexpected happens, we as humans live a long life.
They know people can get sick and that usually we recover from the sickness. Since they’ve been sick before with colds, fevers, ear infections, etc., they understand what we mean. We always say how it’s sad when something or someone dies, but that’s part of life. As a result, they’re not afraid of death in an unhealthy way, but they’re also full of life and want to live a long, long time.
I remember when I was a child. I don’t know what the surrounding situation was but I was in our neighbor’s yard, playing with their children, Jeff and Joey. We got to talking about dying and I remember vehemently believing I was going to live forever. I wasn’t going to die—ever. I just wasn’t going to do it. That one little memory has helped me to understand what it might be like for my children when we talk about life.
We also talk about birth and reproduction. All in terms the children can understand. They each had different questions about why we were getting the dog spayed. They both thought it would be wonderful to have little baby dogs. But they were okay that we weren’t going to have any with Matisse.
I was talking to my son about this the other day and I told him G-Money (my best friend’s husband’s nickname my son has for him) was a doctor that delivered babies. That the type of doctor he was was call an obstetrician. My son said to me, “he delivers babies like the stork?” I laughed and told him that yes, he delivered babies, but it was a different way of delivering babies.
I don’t know where my son heard the stork story, could have been anywhere. It’s not a story we’ve told our children, but it’s a great mental image—even if it’s a nonsensical one as an adult.
The Big Boy Update: My son got cranky last night about his screen time. He lost the ability to track his time and is now dependent on us to grant and time his use. He isn’t trying to cheat so much as he loses track of time when he’s engaged.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter is very occupied with her friends and the, “conveyor” they have from the deck to the play structure. Just a few small chocolate eggs are keeping them busy for a good period of time today as they haul the bucket back and forth.
We don’t sad, “someone has passed” or use other euphemisms, we say that the cat died, for instance, and that that’s what happens when we get old. We talked about how our prior dog, Lucy, died because her heart wasn’t able to continue on. We’ve told them they are very fortunate to have four grandparents who are alive and love to spend time with them. They also know that they will live longer than their grandparents as well as their parents. My son will ask about exceptions and we tell him that unless something unexpected happens, we as humans live a long life.
They know people can get sick and that usually we recover from the sickness. Since they’ve been sick before with colds, fevers, ear infections, etc., they understand what we mean. We always say how it’s sad when something or someone dies, but that’s part of life. As a result, they’re not afraid of death in an unhealthy way, but they’re also full of life and want to live a long, long time.
I remember when I was a child. I don’t know what the surrounding situation was but I was in our neighbor’s yard, playing with their children, Jeff and Joey. We got to talking about dying and I remember vehemently believing I was going to live forever. I wasn’t going to die—ever. I just wasn’t going to do it. That one little memory has helped me to understand what it might be like for my children when we talk about life.
We also talk about birth and reproduction. All in terms the children can understand. They each had different questions about why we were getting the dog spayed. They both thought it would be wonderful to have little baby dogs. But they were okay that we weren’t going to have any with Matisse.
I was talking to my son about this the other day and I told him G-Money (my best friend’s husband’s nickname my son has for him) was a doctor that delivered babies. That the type of doctor he was was call an obstetrician. My son said to me, “he delivers babies like the stork?” I laughed and told him that yes, he delivered babies, but it was a different way of delivering babies.
I don’t know where my son heard the stork story, could have been anywhere. It’s not a story we’ve told our children, but it’s a great mental image—even if it’s a nonsensical one as an adult.
The Big Boy Update: My son got cranky last night about his screen time. He lost the ability to track his time and is now dependent on us to grant and time his use. He isn’t trying to cheat so much as he loses track of time when he’s engaged.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter is very occupied with her friends and the, “conveyor” they have from the deck to the play structure. Just a few small chocolate eggs are keeping them busy for a good period of time today as they haul the bucket back and forth.
Saturday, March 30, 2019
Do I Have To Be Blind?
I mentioned this last night, that my daughter just casually asked the other day while getting dressed, “do I have to be blind?” This give a little insight into her mind, or perhaps the mind of a child. She doesn’t remember being able to see, well, anything she says. I know she understands a three-dimensional world and how sighted people can see things beyond the range of what they can interact with tactilely. She understands some of this because of sound and how sounds have direction and magnitude, but sight is different.
Through sight we can take in vast amounts of information from a single glance. The, “picture is worth a thousand words” phrase comes to mind only in this case it’s more like, “is worth a thousand data points”. On a piece of paper in an instant we can tell there are drawings, or a picture or a cartoon. We can See that there’s a title, subtitle, multiple columns, different fonts, maybe a bulleted list. Important things might be highlighted with color and the main topic can be clear from the instant sight-reading of words.
A blind person has to read through the information one character or braille cell at a time. Periodicals are printed in braille and available to blind people. I can’t even imagine the challenge in just getting to the article you want to read in a braille periodical. I have a very small sample of what this is like from some of the children’s braille books I’ve downloaded or read with my daughter.
As a sighted person we see the cover page and open the book. There is a lot of junk at the beginning in small print at the bottom of the page about ISBN number, author, publisher, printing date, print version, etc. There is the interior title page. There is the chapter index. Pages have numbers and once you get through all that hoopla, you get to the start of the book proper.
It doesn’t take a sighted person long to learn to flip until you get to what looks like the actual first page of Green Eggs and Ham. My son picked this up well before he was able to read well even. Braille books aren’t that easy.
While most of us don’t care about all that, “hoopla” before the start of the story, it can’t be skipped—it has to be included. And that means typically lots and lots of braille you have to skip through to find the start of the book. Skipping isn’t so easy though. You can’t visually see that the small font is over and now you’re looking at a great big title on a page standing alone. Braille Cells are Braille Cells. There are ways to indicate bold, italics, strong type, etc., but it’s still a sea of dots on paper. I don’t know how a braille reader finds their way quickly through a book, let alone a periodical.
Think about all the stuff on a single page of periodical. There are the ad blocks, the tiny type, the captions to pictures, the veritable sea of information our eyes sift through in an instant to find the particular thing we’re looking for on the page. Or pages when we’re scanning a magazine in the checkout line to find out how to lose ten pounds in ten days, just like J. Lo.
I downloaded some books to put on my daughter’s Orbit reader a while back. There is a site I can get all manner of books in braille format to load onto the Orbit refreshable braille reader. Once I load the book, my daughter can have the braille pop up on a single line. She presses the down arrow and it goes to the next line. At the time I last did this I could barely read braille. It was nightmarishly confusing to try and get the reader to display the beginning of the story because at twenty-four characters per line, it took forever to get to the story itself.
I went back to the file, opened it up on the computer and cut out the large chunk of information before the story. At the time, close to a year ago, the books my daughter wanted to read were things like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The entire story was less content than the introduction information at the start of the book.
I just looked up and realized the title of this blog post has nothing to do at all with what I ended up writing about—the challenges of quickly sifting through information as a blind person. So let me circle back to the beginning to end this post.
It was poignant that she would ask, so innocently, if she had to be blind. What do you say to that? I told her that some things we couldn’t control. I said I’d love to be eight feet tall so I could slam dunk the basketball, but unfortunately I was always going to be 5’4” and wouldn’t ever be able to dunk the ball. I don’t know if that made any sense at all, I though after I said it, because she probably has no memory of what our basketball goal was like in the driveway.
But it seemed to make enough sense to her and she seemed to be happy with the explanation. I wish I could have told her a different answer. We’d do anything, if we had a choice about her being blind.
The Big Boy Update: My son was in the car with my parents several days ago. After riding around for a bit he asked my father, who is a careful and deliberate driver, “Gramps, can you get a ticket for driving too slow?”
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter is having Aditi over for a sleepover tonight. Aditi is the other VI student in my daughter’s class. The ladies have been having a good time having planned out an Easter egg hunt (which my son and I did for them) and s’mores after dinner. They’re now up in the bonus room, preparing to stay up all night. As an aside, Aditi is significantly visually impaired, but she seems near 20/20 vision in comparison to my daughter. She can see, well things. She knows what’s. “over there” and can do lots of things my daughter will never be able to do again. Aditi is very sweet and exceptionally mature. Her mother and I decided we’re going to get the two of them together much more often since they get along so well.
Through sight we can take in vast amounts of information from a single glance. The, “picture is worth a thousand words” phrase comes to mind only in this case it’s more like, “is worth a thousand data points”. On a piece of paper in an instant we can tell there are drawings, or a picture or a cartoon. We can See that there’s a title, subtitle, multiple columns, different fonts, maybe a bulleted list. Important things might be highlighted with color and the main topic can be clear from the instant sight-reading of words.
A blind person has to read through the information one character or braille cell at a time. Periodicals are printed in braille and available to blind people. I can’t even imagine the challenge in just getting to the article you want to read in a braille periodical. I have a very small sample of what this is like from some of the children’s braille books I’ve downloaded or read with my daughter.
As a sighted person we see the cover page and open the book. There is a lot of junk at the beginning in small print at the bottom of the page about ISBN number, author, publisher, printing date, print version, etc. There is the interior title page. There is the chapter index. Pages have numbers and once you get through all that hoopla, you get to the start of the book proper.
It doesn’t take a sighted person long to learn to flip until you get to what looks like the actual first page of Green Eggs and Ham. My son picked this up well before he was able to read well even. Braille books aren’t that easy.
While most of us don’t care about all that, “hoopla” before the start of the story, it can’t be skipped—it has to be included. And that means typically lots and lots of braille you have to skip through to find the start of the book. Skipping isn’t so easy though. You can’t visually see that the small font is over and now you’re looking at a great big title on a page standing alone. Braille Cells are Braille Cells. There are ways to indicate bold, italics, strong type, etc., but it’s still a sea of dots on paper. I don’t know how a braille reader finds their way quickly through a book, let alone a periodical.
Think about all the stuff on a single page of periodical. There are the ad blocks, the tiny type, the captions to pictures, the veritable sea of information our eyes sift through in an instant to find the particular thing we’re looking for on the page. Or pages when we’re scanning a magazine in the checkout line to find out how to lose ten pounds in ten days, just like J. Lo.
I downloaded some books to put on my daughter’s Orbit reader a while back. There is a site I can get all manner of books in braille format to load onto the Orbit refreshable braille reader. Once I load the book, my daughter can have the braille pop up on a single line. She presses the down arrow and it goes to the next line. At the time I last did this I could barely read braille. It was nightmarishly confusing to try and get the reader to display the beginning of the story because at twenty-four characters per line, it took forever to get to the story itself.
I went back to the file, opened it up on the computer and cut out the large chunk of information before the story. At the time, close to a year ago, the books my daughter wanted to read were things like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The entire story was less content than the introduction information at the start of the book.
I just looked up and realized the title of this blog post has nothing to do at all with what I ended up writing about—the challenges of quickly sifting through information as a blind person. So let me circle back to the beginning to end this post.
It was poignant that she would ask, so innocently, if she had to be blind. What do you say to that? I told her that some things we couldn’t control. I said I’d love to be eight feet tall so I could slam dunk the basketball, but unfortunately I was always going to be 5’4” and wouldn’t ever be able to dunk the ball. I don’t know if that made any sense at all, I though after I said it, because she probably has no memory of what our basketball goal was like in the driveway.
But it seemed to make enough sense to her and she seemed to be happy with the explanation. I wish I could have told her a different answer. We’d do anything, if we had a choice about her being blind.
The Big Boy Update: My son was in the car with my parents several days ago. After riding around for a bit he asked my father, who is a careful and deliberate driver, “Gramps, can you get a ticket for driving too slow?”
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter is having Aditi over for a sleepover tonight. Aditi is the other VI student in my daughter’s class. The ladies have been having a good time having planned out an Easter egg hunt (which my son and I did for them) and s’mores after dinner. They’re now up in the bonus room, preparing to stay up all night. As an aside, Aditi is significantly visually impaired, but she seems near 20/20 vision in comparison to my daughter. She can see, well things. She knows what’s. “over there” and can do lots of things my daughter will never be able to do again. Aditi is very sweet and exceptionally mature. Her mother and I decided we’re going to get the two of them together much more often since they get along so well.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)