The Bounce King

I am so glad we got the trampoline and even more glad that we decided to upgrade to the larger one.  What I'm not happy about is that I can't use the trampoline much.  Or rather I shouldn't use it as much.

It's odd that I can run a marathon and yet I can't do something simple sitting on the floor, putting a puzzle together with my son.   I have two things going on.   The first is the fusion I have in my cervical vertebra.   The fusion reduces the motion points I have in my neck and makes doing some things, like looking into the back seat while driving, very hard to do.  The other situation is the osteophytes in multiple places along my spine.  These are bone spurs or places of additional growth.

These two situations make it such that certain things hurt a lot because it puts pressure on my spinal cord or the nerve bundles coming out one of the foramina.  The question is: is it bad or damaging for me to jump on the trampoline?

There are certain types of jumping that is easy on my spinal cord while some things are jarring.   The trouble is, when you're on the trampoline with another person or people, you don't control how they jump and any minute you might get a bounce boost when your and their jumps are just right.  There are multiple things that hurt, which might not be that bad.   It might be the things that don't hurt but that stretches something in the wrong direction and I'll pay for it later.

My husband, on the other hand, is jumping every day.   My daughter loves when he double bounces her.   I know I've written about this before, but wow, are they getting good at it.   My daughter sits crosslegged and predicts the bounce before it happens.   She drops her legs partially as she'd launched
into the air and flails her arms around to balance and keep upright.   As she comes down, she pulls her arms and legs back into the starting position, almost making it look like time is going in reverse.

My husband is very good at double bouncing.   I've tried with my daughter but I in no way compare to her father, The Bounce King

The Big Boy Update: I watched as my son came upstairs, went to the knife block and got one of the good knives and start to head back downstairs.   When I asked what he wanted to do with it he said clean the popcorn machine.   I said we were going to have to find a better tool than a knife to clean it.   He looked sad, not mad that we'd taken the knife away.   I think he really did want to hep.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  There had been some injustice done the other day.  It was hard to understand the true horrificness of the bickering that had gone on between my daughter and her brother but from the wailing and crying, it was bad.   As my daughter got the part in the story where she felt things couldn't get any worse she took a deep breath and said, "bless my heart."

Embosser

I've been wanting to write this post for a while now but it hadn't happened yet.   I've been so excited about this that I feel like the title of this post should have at least three exclamation marks after it because today, we got an embosser.

What, you might ask, is an embosser?  It's the tactile version of a printer.   We send words and images to a printer and it prints them out in toner or ink so we can see it whereas an embosser does the same, only with dots.

The majority of what we'll be using the embosser for will be braille.  The embosser, coupled with a sophisticated text to braille translated piece of software gives us the ability to print anything for my daughter in braille.   I said sophisticated for the software because converting text into a piece of printed braille is not as simple as you might imagine.  I'll spare you the details but it's impressive what the software can do.

Why is this exciting?  We already have a braillewriter, what does this do that that doesn't?   It's all a matter of source.   My daughter (and I) can create braille on her braillewriter.  That's us, pressing the keys, one character at a time.   We have never been able to print in braille and I can't count the number of times I wanted to.

For instance, you want to make cookies and your child wants to help.  We can print the directions so she can tell you what to do next.  Emails.  Send one to my daughter and I'll emboss it for her so she can read it.   Books and anything else she would want to or could benefit from reading we can send to the embosser.

We can, and have, read things to my daughter.   We have to because we had no other choice until today.   It is going to enable her in many ways.   She's already excited about using it.   Tonight I printed two short stories my mother-in-law wrote and put a binder on it.   It was so fast.   In the morning when my daughter wakes up she'll come downstairs and find it at her place.

Now to get into the technical bit of what the braille is in that booklet.   I've written about contracted versus uncontracted braille before.  Uncontracted has every single word spelled completely out.   We can see so much at a glance this doesn't present a problem for us.  A blind person has to read every character under the tips of their fingers.  Contracted braille takes less space, replacing some letter sequences with shorter "contractions."

There are about 180 contractions she will have to learn to fully read braille.  Remember how her braillest at school was formatting the books she was reading at the level she'd progressed to?   Now I have that power—I can do that too!

I opened Nana's story file she emailed us into the software used to reformat the text into braille.   We need to do this step because sending an alphabetic text file to an embosser that's designed to print braille is not going to get you the output you might have expected.  Hence the software which converts the text into braille.   There are options you can select to indicate which learning cluster you want to go from.   The software then converts the file into learning level appropriate output.

It's going to be an exciting time here while we're in lockdown.   Technically next week is my daughter's spring break but we haven't let on yet.   It is far easier to keep both children in school or ot of school at the same time and since my son has lots of work assigned by his teacher for next week, we decided to continue school for her in the mornings too.   With the new embosser, she's practically looking forward to it.

What Does He Look Like:  I'll go into this more later when we've had time to do get up to speed with it, but for tonight, it's picture time.  The embosser also prints anything else you want and provides a graphics tool to convert things into printable format.   My husband worked on this tonight so my daughter could feel a picture of her brother.

They Were Inspirations

My mother-in-law has been using this time we're all sheltering at home to do something useful—and fun.   She's writing a children's book.   She started with some short stories she would read over the phone to the children at night.  My son was interested in being involved and my mother-in-law wanted to get the children involved so the next day she and my son got on the phone. 

I heard my son talking about different characters and the super powers they had.  Mt son had a lot of ideas and I heard my mother-in-law say at one point she wasn't sure she was going to be able to fit all the characters into the book.   She's been working on it though as chapters arrive via email and we or she reads them here. 

My daughter wanted to get into the action as well so I told her she could write Nana a letter with her ideas.  I've been having her do various things during school hours while we've been waiting to get more work material from her teachers.  She wasn't that keen on writing a letter at first but she got into the letter once she got started and ended up writing five pages.  

She had some good ideas in her letter, which we sent to Nana.   Nana is thinking about her second book already and my daughter hopefully said in the letter, "I hope you use at least one of my ideas."  I asked her where she got all of her ideas from and she said, "oh, they were inspirations.

My daughter wrote to Papa the next day and in her letter to him, she said she hopes Nana will publish her book.   My children love their grandparents.  Wouldn't it be fun to have a book your grandmother wrote on your bookshelf?

The Big Boy Update:  My son came upstairs today during school hours and got a sheet of braille letter stickers out of his sister's desk drawer while she was working on some reading comprehension. He came back later and asked if I had any braille number stickers.   I found some and didn't ask what he needed them for.   A short while later he came upstairs with his chess set all labeled so that his sister knew what the different cells on a chessboard were called.  She was very excited about this and about having him teach her chess.   He came over and asked me if I could add tactile tape to mark off the grid so she would be able to discern each space and I did so on my next break.  I'm hopeful we can get them playing chess together soon.   

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter loves our dog.   The dog loves her just as much.  Matisse seems to have a sense of when she's needed emotionally by my daughter.   This was last night at bedtime after my daughter had nearly smothered her in little girl love.   It didn't seem to bother Matisse at all as she put her head on my daughter's shoulder while she went to sleep.

 

Kandinski Work

As I write this there is, on the floor above me, and entire living room transformed into another couch cave fort that involves even more furniture than the one from. yesterday.   But this is an aside.   The real work done today was by my husband and son.

Work has come in for my son from not only his main class teacher but the resource teachers including music, art, Spanish and P.E.  My husband and son have managed his work schedule for the week, adding in these additional subjects.

The routine we've gotten into is my Son at the breakfast nook table with my husband as teacher guide while I'm upstairs in the bonus room with my daughter.   My daughter needs to be upstairs because this is where her braillewriter is.   I sit at my son's desk at my laptop and my daughter works at her desk and on her braillewriter.

I came down late morning to find my husband and son at the table with large pieces of paper and my expensive marker set,  My husband said they were being careful with them because he knew that was the first thing I was going to say.  

What were they working on?  Arc class and their own piece in Kandanski style.  My husband showed my son this painting:

My son created this: 

I really like his piece.  My son was in the living room, workign on the fort and my husband was in the dining room as I leaned over the piece to examine it more closely.   I yelled out one of my favorite colorful swear words and my husband looked up.   I was frantically trying to get the chocolate ice cream I'd just dropped on his work off without noticable damage and my son was too busy to see what had happened.  

The Big Boy Update:  I've been falling asleep late afternoon for an hour or so after "school" lets out here.  My son woke me up tonight to say dinner was ready.   As I walked into the living room my son stopped me and asked if he could give me a tour of their new blanket fort.   There were so many rooms and they had fortified the blankets in place well.   I asked if they'd named their fort like people do for boats, beach houses or mountain houses.   They're working on a name for tomorrow as we let the fort stand overnight. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter wanted to do spelling words every day.   Seeing as I didn't have spellingn words from her teacher I looked up words for one year higher's spelling bee.   I thought third-grade spelling B words would be enough.   Some of them are good and she's learning spellings for them.   Some words though are just "too easy, mom."   When that happens, she asks for bonus words.

Couch Cave

My children are at the age where the like to rearrange the house to go along with their play.   When I was young my parents had a long couch.   It was the longest couch in the world, I was pretty sure.   I think, and this might just be my childhood memories decaying over time, that there were four seat cushions on the sofa.

I know it was more than two because of how we'd set them up to make a tunnel.  My mother would put the seat cushion vertical at the front edge and then she'd prop the back cushion across the back frame of the sofa over to the vertical pillow.

By doing this from one end of the sofa to the other, you had a hideout or a secret tunnel.  I remember climbing up on the armrest at one end and crawling into the couch cave.  It was darker in there and there would be a bit of grit from time to time that had slipped through the cushions and onto the base cover.

I would then crawl to the other end of the couch and climb out of the hole at the armrest.   I did this loop again and again.  There was giggling and games my mother and I played together.   I feel like I had fun on that couch for years and years and years, only that's child time talking.   It was probably only a few years because I wasn't that old when they redecorated the living room and the couch was gone.

Children percieve the world differently.   I thought of the couch as large but I think it was the opposite—I was just small.   I had to be if I could crawl into the small opening between the two pillows without knocking down the fort.

I thought about the couch pillows today when my children were making another fort using both of our couches, all the dining room tables, every pillow in sight and, of course, all the blankets.   These messes happen a lot.   Someday, perhaps not that far off no more pillow forts will be made.   I know I'll miss it when they do.

The Big Boy Update:  My children were on a call with their cousin Sydney this evening.   I missed the beginning of the story but I was almost certain they were talking about kissing.  I listened in/. They were talking about first kisses and if "he" had kissed anyone and if he would tell them if he had.   My son jumps into the conversation at this point and helpfully says, If you've seen Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix movie then you know kissing is wet.:

The Tiny Gitl Chronicles:  My mother sent me an email a few weeks ago about what she and my daughter had done the day before.   Here's the story my mother shared:

For the next game, Reese said: “Mimi, I want you to make a maze for me.” I wasn’t quite sure what she meant, but I thought that surely I could make a maze. So I positioned her at one corner of the room, and I laid out some trash cans, pillows, a small stool, etc. Then I went to the diagonal corner of the room and told her to come to me. Very quickly she made her way toward my corner. When she got there she stopped and said emphatically, “Mimi, in NO WAY, was that a maze. That was an obstacle course! Let me draw a maze for you.” I gave her some paper and a pencil and she drew a very good representation of a maze. “This is what a maze looks like”, she said. And I said, “But Reese, with all this furniture in the room, I just don’t think there’s room for a maze.” And with a sigh, she said, “Well, I guess we’ll just have to play another game.”

It Takes Two To Teach

I never knew the weekend could be so good.   My husband and I worked with our two children to deliver the educational materials their teachers had sent since the cancellation of school earlier in the month.  We're not "teaching" the children in the same way that a home school parent would be doing, we're just delivering the material and helping them complete it where needed.

This is challenging for each of my children in totally different ways.   My son does the bit where he loses his mind at us on a regular basis.  In order for him to work well during school hours, we're giving him Adderall.  Of important note here, this is by his request.   It helps him focus.   He can get work done when he takes it.   We're even letting him help decide how much he should take and if he prefers the long-acting or the short-acting option.

My son doesn't like the Adderall for any other time except school.  It helps him work, something he wants to do but has a hard time doing when he can't slow down his racing brain.   There is a price to pay though—he gets emotional.   He will get upset and react in a way that is way overboard and not age-appropriate.  It's like he's regressed emotionally into a more child-like state.   However, if he can just sit down and do the work, he does a beautiful job.

The biggest challenge with him is the change.  There are new things coming from his teachers regularly as they try and get a consistent work week planned for each child, including online lessons with the teachers.   For the most part, every work he's doing is similar or exactly what he was doing at school but the overall package is anxiety-provoking to him.  Friday was a good day, today was not.   Hopefully, with the new work schedule now in place, things will go more smoothly for the remainder of the week.

My daughter has the opposite "problem" as my son.   She wants to work.   She wants to work and gets done with assignments so quickly that I can't get through the teacher emails to figure out what to try and do with her next.   All of her work requires pre-work to get it ready, like putting a book on her refreshable braille display, preparing materials in braille by me or coming up with things she can do that are mentally stimulating, if not exactly where they are in the curriculum.

The VI teachers have been working on a way to get materials to us.   They have to first compile it and then they have to get it to us.   Today I got an email that they could drop materials at a food bank within a time window and we could pick it up there.  No meeting.   No saying hello.   Drop off and pick up.   That's fine, it's materials.   We need materials for my daughter.  Badly.   Today I kept her reasonably busy, but she fills in with extra work while I flounder to find the next thing.   For example, today she wrote four word problems for me to solve.   They were good ones too.

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Thank You Note Writers:  My children both wrote Liam and his parents a thank you note for the butter chicken they cooked for us.   Their son, Liam, who is in my son's class, wrote a note explaining how butter chicken was his favorite.   He started with, "I washed my hands before I wrote this."  So the three of us washed our hands thoroughly and then wrote Liam a thank you note back.   I wrote one too, practicing my braille writing skills.   We sealed the notes up with sealing wax and some fun sealing stamps and then the entire family walked over to their house, placed the notes on the front porch, rang the doorbell and left.  

Tug of War

I've had dogs before, but only small ones.  I've had cute little fluffy dogs that like to sit on your lap, be petted and are generally sweet when they're not barking at people at the door.   I've had my share of "yappy" dogs in my time.   Our dog now is a completely different sort.  

She's larger by far, at thirty-five pounds than any dog I've ever had.   She is very gentle and loves attention.  I don't think we could have picked a better dog for our family—specifically for my daughter.   She will let you grab her, roll her over, snuggle her, and basically do anything you want to her physically without a complaint.   She has never once complained about the physical attention she receives, even though I worry she's being treated in a way that's controlling by my daughter.

She likes to spend time on the bed with us at night, but only some, preferring to spend the majority of the night in her cage or lying with her face against the air vent whenever cool air is coming out.   She always greets us as though we've been away for an eon, even if it was only for a short jaunt to the grocery store.

You can touch any part of her body without her minding.   She lets me groom her, trimming her hair wherever needed, including getting matted bits out with uncomfortable brushing and cutting if necessary.  She sits still with scissors right in front of her face as I cut the hair around her eyes so she can see better.

She listens to any commands I give her, something she's done since we sent her to training.   From time to time I need to remind her of her training by putting the collar on her for a day, but for the most part, she isn't a defiant dog at all, complying to any and all commands, even if there is something enticing or exciting she wants to see.

And she does something else I've never had a dog do—she fetches.   My prior dog was small and would have liked to fetch only she had dislocating knees as a juvenile and had to have significant surgery on both legs to keep her kneecaps in place.   This limited her ability to run and jump.   She also didn't have much interest in chasing after things or returning anything thrown.

Matisse loves fetch.   It took a bit to train her to drop the ball or stick in order to have it thrown again.   This is something she does well with me, but not with the rest of the family as they haven't spent as much time with her on this game.   She also loves to play tug of war.  

I love this game with her and am amazed at the strength of her bite as well as the carefulness with which she plays the game.  She will bring a stick to me in her mouth and hold it out, waiting for me to grab both sides.   She holds on to the stick, repositing to get it so she has a good grip and then we play tug.   I pick her up and spin her around, listening to her growl in play.   When she releases the stick after having enough of the tug game I throw it.   She brings it back, ready for another go.

I've had so much fun, watching her run at top speed to fetch balls and sticks.   She's a much bigger dog than I've ever had, but she's a perfect size, I've decided.   I don't know how we lucked out with such a gentle and understanding dog, but we did.   I wasn't sure we wanted to get a family dog.  Now, I can't imagine our house without Matisse in it.

The Big Boy Update:  We've been lazy this weekend.  I'm still in my pajamas this evening as I write this.   My son, screen time returned after several days without, played a game on his iPad beside me as I played the same game: Cell to Singlarity.  It' a game of evolution.   He and I are having fun seeing who can evolve the most things together.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We opened a window in our bedroom to talk to our neighbor yesterday who was lounging on a hammock swing she'd put up between two trees.  My daughter wanted to climb out the window and then found out where the window was in relation to the perimeter of the house.  This is something we can see, but she had to experience it.  Today, she walked around the house, behind the bushes, until she found the window and then knocked to be let in.   Tonight she wants to find the window to the bathroom so she can climb in at the tub for her bath.