Handwritten

There are things I do well and things I do poorly and things I don’t really care about doing and then there are things that just hurt.   One of the things that hurts is handwriting.   It’s not writing a little not on a scrap of paper saying, “Trash Day” so we don’t forget to put out the trash bins in the morning.   It’s the writing of paragraph-length or longer text that starts to get to me.

It is either one or another thing or a combination of two things.   The first thing is I don’t think I learned how to write well.   I seem to hold a lot of stress in my hand when I write.   Given today’s computer/phone/tablet-based society there isn’t a lot of call for my handwriting muscles to be flexed, so my hand gets tired easily.   The other part that I think is the more limiting factor is my spinal cord injury.

There are things I can do that seem easy to me, like running a marathon.   It’s fun, it’s exhilarating.   It’s not painful in that regular, “you’re going to pay for this” kind of way.   Handwriting little notes at the bottom of formal letters, however, yells out, “stop, this is going to hurt later.  no really, quit now.”

I don’t know why running for hours at a time, swinging my arms the whole way is fine, but sitting with a little, dinky pen in my hand for ten minutes causes me to cramp up.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is totally potty trained.  He however doesn’t seem to be wanting to take a break to go lately because for the last three nights he’s said when it was time to get his pajamas on, “there’s a yiddle bit of poop in my pants.”   And yes, it was a just a ‘yiddle’ but a yiddle is too much.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   My husband and I picked out this dress we really liked in a catalog.   We don’t buy from catalogs much, getting most of my children’s clothing from hand-me-downs or used clothing stores.   But in this case the dress just looked like something she’d love.   It arrived and we were disappointed to discover it was in two layers: an under dress and an over dress, both made from very slippery material.   My daughter did like the dress, but she kept lifting up the top, colorful layer all day.   At some point I just took it off her.   When it was time to get dressed for bed she told me, “mom, my topping’s gone.”

Back Seat Upgrades

My children got an upgrade in their car seats recently.   They have not one, but TWO cup holders each.   They are thrilled.    There’s more to it than that though, because they’re in the next stage of car seats.    These new seats allow them to use the included car seat to strap themselves in.     This is the upgrade I’ve been looking forward to.

They have gotten good at strapping in themselves fairly quickly.   They need to stretch the seat belt out, pull it downwards towards the connector side and then click it into the receptacle that’s down a bit below their sitting position, which is necessarily higher up.  My daughter insists on doing this herself, although her vision is preventing her from doing it quickly as finding the little insert spot takes some steady aim and clear sight.    She’s getting faster at it though.

The other advantage is the car seats aren’t connected directly to the chairs themselves, so we can move them to the back seat (third row) for longer trips or special occasions very easily.   Both children think sitting in the third row is pretty amazing stuff.    We’re going to save it for special occasions and rewards for now.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is becoming a calmer person for a lot of his day.  I believe this is due in large part to the start of the school year.   He understands there are times to be crazy, go crazy and make other people crazy, but he’s also more focused and generally more present a person for more of the day than he’s ever been before.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  I mentioned to my children we were going to go to one of their favorite stores and would the like to guess which store I was talking about?   My daughter piped up immediately and said, “I want to go to the place with my butter cups.”  I had to think a bit and ask some follow-on questions to figure out what she was talking about.   It turns out she was wanting to go to Five Below, a store where everything is five dollars and under.   She can pick anything she wants at the store—my son gets a gun-type thing or a transformer-isa toy—but she always ends up picking the ten pieces of candy in a bag for a dollar.   She loves the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup minis there.   My daughter’s name is Reese.   They’re her “butter cups.”

Telling Signs

This is one of those posts about my daughter’s vision.   It’s been a tough time determining if her vision is improving, degrading of maintaining because my three-year-old isn’t inclined to provide us with insightful information.

What we get is what we can observe.  Today I think I observed some improvements in my daughter’s vision.   We decided to play the road signs game on the way home from one of our errands.   Because my son was in the car and his vision is what we would call, “normal” under regular situation but we might refer to as “exceptionally perceptive” when compared to my daughter, we had to put constraints on the game.

I told them to look for road signs on the side of the card their car seat was on and to let me know when they saw a sign and to tell me what color it was.   For my son, this was child’s play.   If he could read, he would have been calling out street names and block addresses.   For my daughter, getting a “I see green, mommy” for an overhead highway sign would be a big sign of success.

But I was surprised.   My daughter was noticing more signs than I expected.   She was seeing smaller signs than she’s seen in several weeks.    I wouldn’t have guessed she could see so well, given what she saw at the store not one hour before…

We were looking through the toy and holiday isle while we waited for my husband and brother-in-law to get done selecting merchandise.   I asked my daughter if she knew what was on the large boxes in front of her.   They showed pictures of gingerbread houses, something she’s been talking about for the past week or so.   She had no idea.

Maybe it’s the Atropine working close-up though, because her far vision seems to be improving.

The Big Boy Update:  There was a lot of noise in the car this afternoon.   I suggested we play the quiet game.   My son, seeing the situation for what it was, said, “I want to play the whining game.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   My daughter has had my wrath put upon her several times recently.   My big complaint is that she doesn’t need to say, “mommy” at the start of every thought to me.   I have even yelled, “PLEASE STOP CHANTING ‘MOMMY.’”  She’s been working on it too.   Today she said, “You didn’t want me to say ‘mommy’ or ‘Courtney,’ right?   Okay, I’ll try again.”    She did, and she got it right.

Sometimes It Doesn’t All Get Done

I’ve put on the way back machine for tonight’s post.  I was working as a co-op at IBM for several months at this point.   I was still in college, but I had gotten into the swing of doing things within the department and team I was working on.    I didn’t have a good understanding of work in the business world, but that’s what I was there to learn.    I was also there to do any and all of the little jobs the team members could come up with for me to help with.  

There were co-ops that got boring, mundane, time filler and time killer jobs to do but the team I was working with wanted to give me things that I could learn from doing.   As I think back on it now, I was fortunate to be placed with that group because I did indeed learn a lot and I had a good time doing so in the process.  

I struggled with something for a while without telling anyone though.    I had lots of things to do and some of those things were more important to get done than others.   It wasn’t in the prioritizing of the work that I had an issue, it was that some of the things they had asked me to do were just not going to get done at the rate new things came along.   

The types of things I hadn’t had a chance to address were the kinds of long-term, lower priority projects like, “Come up with an organizational strategy for past product builds.”   We were working hard on just getting the builds out, going backwards and tidying up the older builds, which may or may not have been a complete mess, just wasn’t going to get done…unless there was a bored co-op with nothing else to do, in which case it would be staggeringly dull busy work I could fill my days with.

My manager came in one day and asked how it was going and if I had any questions.   I told him I was worried because there were some things I didn’t think I was going to get to with all the other things I had to do.   Also, there weren’t any due dates on these other things and could he help me with that?   Coming from a college environment, there are always due dates.      He said with all seriousness to me, “sometimes, things don’t ever get done—and that’s okay.”   

I wasn’t going to write about this tonight, but I was going through my list of things to do and in so doing, marked several things to archive that I didn’t even start and as of today, don’t think I’ll ever do.   It reminded me of that day with my manager so many years ago.

The Big Boy Update:  My son said to us today, “are you thinking what I’m thinking?”   Without stopping to hear my of my daughter’s answers he said, “I’m thinking about Reese.”   He did not explain what he was thinking though.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   Eighty-four questions today about what food could she eat or when was it going to be meal or snack time or what was for dinner or that she was hungry.   Eighty-four times I had to try and distract her and get her to focus on anything else.   I offered healthy foods like carrots and apples but they were mostly rejected.   There were likely more than eighty-four times, but I just started counting after nine o’clock.   May favorite one of the day was, “Mom, is it snack time yet?  Because I ate all the apples.”

Prednisone Reduction

Despite our concerted efforts, my daughter has gained over two pounds in the past two weeks.   We have been fighting the side-effects of the oral steroids, one of the five corticosteroids she is currently on.

I have been diligently dialoging with her rheumatologist about an alternative to the oral prednisone she is on, which is causing behavioral, mood and hunger issues.  As of today we are reducing her dosage by half, and will hopefully remove the oral steroids moving forwards.

The Big Boy Update:  A phrase I find myself using with my son frequently of late is, “the future of XXX depends on your curtesy.”  My son’s courteous response has been a much-repeated topic of conversation of late.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:    My daughter has been crossing her eyes a lot lately.   I asked her eye doctors about it and they’ve said it’s okay and not hurting anything.   I’ve asked my daughter about it and she says it feels good, so I’m ignoring it for now.  

Teach Them to Cook

My next-door-neighbors have two children we like to have sit for our children from time to time.   Both their son and their daughter are much loved by my children.   I’d go so far as to say they may prefer them over us some days.  

One of the things I have been impressed with since they moved beside us is their ability to cook.   Both of them not only are able to prepare a meal for our children, they both like to make them something to eat.   

When my children are older, I hope they’ll feel comfortable making a meal for themselves and others.    My husband is with me on this, we plan on teaching them to cook from a young age. 

The Big Boy Update:  No reference for this other than to say my son said it unprompted during the middle of the afternoon when he was eating snack:  “when I was in Mommy’s tummy I was jealous.” “Of what,” my husband asks?  “Of her burping.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   My daughter’s vision is getting better.  I think?  I hope?  I think it’s “I think” and not “I hope” but since we’re seeing small improvements, it’s hard to tell.   One thing that broke my confidence today for quite some time is a statement my daughter said after I’d picked her up from school.   I knew one of her teachers wasn’t at school today because she had called and asked if I was available to sub (I wasn’t.)  My daughter said, “There was a different teacher at school today because I didn’t hear Miss Timmie.”

I Feel Like One Big Blob of Worry

I try not to worry about my daughter’s eyes, but it’s very hard some days.   I heard the above saying from an article I was sent and it does sum up how I feel sometimes.  

But not all times.   My daughter seems happy, although we worry she is harboring stress and anxiety she’s not letting us know through avoidance techniques and overall not wanting to talk about the situation.

My day has taken over my night and I’m plain short on time so I’m keeping it short tonight.  And I am fine almost all of the time.   It’s just sometimes when the worry creeps in between the cracks and blows open a wide chasm of worry.   But not today.   Today has been good.

The Big Boy Update:  One of the acoustical songs from the Frozen soundtrack came on the other day.   It was rather ominous sounding.   My son said, “this sounds like a worry song.”   Then, he listened a little more and said, “and a hurting song.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is definitely seeing things, although she’s not been focusing on her vision lately because it’s so poor.   But last night just before bed she opened the door to the porch and as she walked outside she said, “Mom, I’m seeing the darkness.”

Fitness Update:   I didn’t think it was going to happen with the dire rain weather predictions.   That, coupled with the scheduling nightmare my friend and I have had trying to get together, but we did get to run today.   We didn’t think we could wedge it in, but we made twenty miles before I had to dash to the school for a little substituting at the end of the day.