Earning Screens

My children would like to have some screen time.   In the case of my son, he lost screen time for two week (conveniently just before school started) by threatening his entire family with a knife (as soon as he got home and could get to the knife block, he said).   So no screens.   

The children don’t get screen time during the weekdays, but on the weekends my husband and I like to sleep in.   We put their iPads and headphones in a spot in our bedroom, charging, the night before and when they wake up they’re allowed to take the iPads carefully into the living room and watch or play things for part of the day.   

The change at the start of the school year seemed a good time to change the expectation and process for the children as well.  So now, they have to earn screen time.   This can be done in several ways so far.   The other day they helped fold multiple loads of laundry.   This was done with a significant amount of complaining about how long it took and how much there was to fold.   Mentally I was, to say the least, unsympathetic, although I told them they were doing a great job.   After everything was put away they earned equal time in screens. 

My son has been doing a lot of math work with his iPad, which has helped him at school already.   My daughter has done homework as well as using my Mac bluetooth keyboard to work on the Talking Typer program from the American Printing House for the Blind.   She’s learning touch typing with audible support.   Her hands are small, but provided she keeps her fingers at a known reference point, she’s learning the QUERTY layout a few keys at a time. 

Tonight my daughter asked if she could earn screen time so I came down to write this blog post in order to free up my keyboard for her to do some work before bed.   When my son sees her on her iPad I’d venture to guess he’ll ask if he can earn screen time too.   The removal of screens has been positive for the children in multiple ways.   They didn’t like it at first, but they’re becoming more interested. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son and daughter played together in the pool today.   He’s a good friend to his sister, helping her whenever she needs it.   But he annoys her mightily as well.   He wants to play rough—drag her under, push her, pull her—and she doesn’t like that at all.    They’re working on a balance, but after a while my son will go off and find friends he can play with that don’t mind his exuberance.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   My daughter, through the generosity of family members, has raised money for her school.   When you reach certain tiers you get little prizes.   She’s “earned” a mini drone apparently.   They ran out and had to order more, which was sad to her as she told me, “I can’t wait to get the drone.  I’ve been wanting it for my whole life.”

Tactile Math

If you’re reading this blog, I’m sure realized you never know what you’re going to get on a daily basis from me.   Sometimes it’s about my children, sometimes it’s about me.   There’s a lot about my daughter’s eyes and sometimes it’s about a memory from my past.   I don’t really know what I’m going write most days until I sit down.   My least favorite posts are the, “here’s what I did today” as I feel like they’re the most boring.   But since I don’t have to read what I write it’s on you if you’re still here, still sticking around and reading the days in the life of our family.

Regardless of why you’re here, thanks for taking three minutes of your day to read about the trials, tribulations and hopefully as much in the way of cute and funny things that happen with my family and above all, my children.

Now, on to today’s post.   We get lots of work home from my daughter’s school.   To say that public school is different than Montessori school would be an understatement.  Are both children learning?  Absolutely, but the route they’re taking to get there is very different.   Different still is the way my daughter has to “consume” the school work.   First grade has far more work than kindergarten, but fortunately for us we have been given some very dedicated professionals in the field of vision impairment that are working to help my daughter be not only successful, but to excel.

My daughter doesn’t have a learning disability, she has a sensory impairment.   He ability to learn is just fine, provided the materials can be given to her in a fashion she can understand them.   The work to convert the materials is fairly daunting and impressive.   To say we are grateful to our great team of VI teachers would be an understatement.

Take last week’s math work the sighted students did:

Twelve problems, front and back of one page.   The child looks at the problem and enters the three numbers in the provided fields below.   But if you can’t see, what does your personal, handmade work from your braillest look like?

The top of the page says, “Fun Frames” and then the next two lines have the same text as the printed version, explaining what to do.   The picture shows problems one and two.   There were six pages just like this one with two problems on each.   The full braille cells (six dots) represent the twenty spaces. The stickers represent the number my daughter needed to count.   

For her to write her answer, there was a second, answer sheet.  She rolled that into her brailler, found the “1.        tens           ones           =            “ line.   She spaced over to the blank areas and typed the answers in the blank areas between the words and symbols.    And she got them all correct.   

It’s a lot of work to prepare her materials, but it helps her grasp the math concepts tactilely.   To compare, everything in the math world in a Montessori school also has a physical medium component.  I’ve written a few posts on work my son has done that has a physical representation to the concept itself.   It’s all very interesting to me. 

https://agewisdomperspective.blogspot.com/2016/05/hanger-art-artist-unknown.html

https://agewisdomperspective.blogspot.com/2017/03/montessori-math.html

https://agewisdomperspective.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-trinomial-cube.html

My daughter will soon move into traditional math problems using an abacus more.   She already uses one now and knows the numeric operators in braille for plus, minus, multiplication and equals.   It’s fun to watch both children learn.   And it’s nice they both enjoy learning. 

The Big Boy Update:   My son has been doing a lot of math work on the iPad to gain screen time (well worth the bribery price in my opinion, it’s making a difference).   Today when he came home from school he asked me if he earned screen time from the math work he did at school—because he did forty-five minutes worth.   “Unfortunately, no”, I told him.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter got home from school and went outside with her brother.  Thirty minutes later the music therapist arrived just as my daughter, son and friend, Keira, came up the basement stairs.   When I said it was time for music my daughter sighed and said, “oh.  How embarrassing.”  She then said she had wanted to play with Keira, so Keira and her brother got invited to music class, which was fine by me.  

A Much Happier Little Girl

We saw my daughter’s teacher today.  We had scheduled a conference at the first part of the school year, but due to schedules couldn’t meet until today.  My daughter was having a hard time at the beginning of the school year.   She was basically shutting down, collapsing into a ball and not engaging at all in the classroom or during her time in the VI room where she learns specific skills based on her lack of vision.

Today the story was totally different though; it was basically a conversation about how well my daughter was doing—excelling even—in school.   She has a voracious appetite for learning new things, asking for additional work when she gets the current assignment done ahead of the other students.

She is a very fast braillist as well.   This is something we suspected, watching how quickly she types on her braille writer at home, but was interesting to hear first hand from her teacher.   In the thirteen years she’s been teaching in classrooms with up to four visually impaired students at a time, my daughter has a grasp on braille she hasn’t seen before.   As a parent, that’s pretty exciting.

My daughter loves, loves, loves her time in the VI room now.   She was upset her Orientation and Mobility time caused her to miss VI on Tuesdays to the point they moved Mr. Adam’s O&M session to a different time so she could still make her regularly scheduled VI session.

She loves her class and has forged a bond with her teacher.   She also is working very well with her braillest.   Last year her braillest was with her every step of the way, holding her hand figuratively, to help her through things.   This year, we heard today, her braillest sits off to the side and only steps in when there is a need.   This is reasonable and appropriate as the other, sighted, students don’t have a personal assistant in the class.   My daughter’s first grade teacher said this is something she believes strongly in—fostering independence in a child who has the capacity to be successful in life if only those around her give her the chance.

So everyone seems happy now, which is a very good thing.    The only thing that’s a disappointment is there doesn’t seem to have been much vision returned from the latest edema, despite all the drops.   We go to Detroit on Tuesday to see Dr. Trese for an office visit.   Perhaps he’ll have more advice for us then on next steps and if there’s a path to return any of her vision.   And if there isn’t a path, the message today from my daughter’s teacher was that my daughter was always happy and eager to learn and that’s a good thing.   A very good thing.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is good at math, only he’s not got the basic easy problems down so well.   He gets the concepts of more complicated math like subtracting a three digit number from a four digit number, but adding two single digit numbers can trip him up.   So we got two apps.  They’re fun and he can earn screen time to do things he wants: one minute earned for every minute he does math on the iPad apps.  Today alone he’s done thirty minutes of math, including multiplication.   He’s getting better quickly and he’s having fun while he’s doing it.  Win.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter loves pasta.  She had two bowls for breakfast by request.   When I picked her up from Dhruti’s this afternoon I asked her if she wanted pasta for dinner.   She said, “why not?”

Back to Normal?

It’s been a long two weeks.   I titrated off the large dose of Lyrica I’d had to go up to over multiple years to deal with the nerve pain I have from the spinal cord damage I have and then dealt with the withdrawal symptoms including nausea, lack of appetite, exhaustion, rebound pain and pain.   I feel like I spent almost two weeks in bed.

None of it was fun but I wanted to wait it out until I was over the withdrawals to see what my pain level was really like.   The withdrawals from Lyrica aren’t that long in number of days, but this time they were more intense than the last time I did the same thing.   At that time I was at a lower daily dosage though.

In the end I’d lost weight I did’t need to lose and was still tired.   I don’t really know how much pain I was in.   That might sound like a strange thing to say, but it’s the only way I can describe it.   I was sometimes focused on the thing or things that hurt the worst because they were the loudest reporting to my brain.   It’s hard to tell, a significant portion of my body has nerve pain and I just didn’t know anything anymore other than I was in a serious funk because of the withdrawal side effects and, well, pain.

Things leveled out though with yesterday being the end of week two without any Lyrica.   Today I started back on a much lower dose.   And suddenly, an hour later, I felt hugely better.   Better, but without the same dosage as before.   So I’m back to normal.   Or as normal as I suppose I get.

So for now, I’m going to try and keep at the lower dosage and see if I can get the same results with less medication.   I’d rather be on no medication, but it’s better than the pain I suppose.  

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Runner Update:  My son and daughter are doing a Mini Miler race with Uncle Jonathan and Margaret.   Today was the first training practice at an elementary school track.   My son insisted he was faster than Uncle Jonathan but that Uncle Jonathan had more endurance.   And my son was fast.  He had good form as he sprinted in front around the track.   But he didn’t have the endurance.   Or at least he doesn’t yet.   My daughter ran with Margaret holding her hand at a much slower pace.   They both had fun.   Until they got tired and then they insisted on going home.   We told them this was training and they were only half-way through the hour.   That met with some choice comments from them, but they stuck it out.    They both did well.

Chalky Cleanup

We have the Nest Doorbell at our front door.   My husband likes technology so when Nest announced their facial recognition doorbell, he ordered it straight away.   I have to say, it’s pretty cool, as cool things go.   It records motion, recognizes faces and lets you know when people it knows are at the door.   It’s also made answering the door a thing of the past as my children love to run to the door to let their friends inside when they come to visit.

Yesterday we were out bowling when we got multiple notifications on our phones that children were at the front door.   My husband pulled up the camera feed and saw two neighbor children at the front door, but seeing as our children didn’t answer, they decided to play with the chalk that sits on the front porch instead.   And by playing with it, I mean they were drawing on the walls and throwing it.  

My husband talked to them through the doorbell (another feature) to tell them it was fine to play, but to please clean up the chalk.   At the sound of his voice, the boys scattered.   My husband sent a text to the neighbors and told them what had happened.   Let me say here that these boys are great children, but children are prone to be children and they were just having fun.

Later last night my husband went over to one of our neighbor’s houses to watch a movie and he showed them the video.   Both fathers asked for a copy of the video and said they were sending the boys over today to clean up the mess.    Today they did just that.   Both boys were so polite in apologizing.   They got soap and cleaned the porch probably much more than it needed to be cleaned.  

While they were cleaning the adults all talked and agreed we were all in this parenting thing together and fully supported each other in laying down laws and even punishments as needed.   We all want the same thing: respectful, maturing children.   But it takes time.  

I think the doorbell camera went over so well we won’t be the only ones on the street with the Nest Doorbell soon.   The other fathers loved it.

The Big Boy Update:  Before bed tonight I showed my son my Andy Goldsworthy art book, A Collaboration With Nature.   As an artist, he finds things in nature and then rearranges them into beautiful settings that couldn’t or wouldn’t otherwise appear.   It’s mostly a picture book, but it’s fascinating to me.   I had to promise my son we’d look through the rest of the book tomorrow as it was past bedtime and we had to stop tonight.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter loves cards.  We played Uno for an hour this afternoon after camp.   She wanted to change/make up/amend rules, but found out sometimes that didn’t always work to her advantage.   Having braille versions of the cards helped her be independent and play the game without help, albeit a bit more slowly as she had to read every card and couldn’t see her hand at a glance like sighted people do.

Bowling

My son and husband went bowling before school started at my son’s school last week.   My daughter, already in school for the year, missed out and was unhappy because she wanted to have a chance to knock down all the pins and get this thing my son was talking about, called a “turkey”.   Today we planned to bowl and take her with us.

There was a bit of a scheduling calamity involving things not being put on the calendar in conjunction with us forgetting we’d told my daughter we’d go bowling, but we’d promised, so we made it happen.  

Leagues were happing all day long, but all forty lanes would be open after five o’clock so we headed over at five-thirty, meeting my husband there as he came back in town from playing golf.

I don’t know what my daughter expected, but I think she had a good time.   She was most interested in the ball return, which ball was “hers” even though her and her brother’s balls were the same color and style.  

Things of note that happened:  my son knocked down the side rails two times in his exuberance, my daughter got a spare, and my husbands bowling shoes—which he hadn’t used in years—both fell completely apart in the first half-game.

No one got a turkey.

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Labor Day Update:  Both children are going to rock climbing camp today.   To prepare for this, we went and got donuts (with sprinkles) after lunch for tomorrow’s breakfast.  My son is excited about going but my daughter, for the first time ever, isn’t interested in rock climbing.   We’ll see if she changes her mind when she arrives tomorrow.

A Lot of Movies

It’s been twelve days since I’ve taken any Lyrica and I’m hoping I’m through the worst of it by now.   I don’t have the nerve rebound pain I was having at first but I’m having a second side-effect that’s plagued me for over a week now—no appetite.  Worse than that, I get mildly nauseated whenever I eat something so I have to try and eat fairly quickly before I’m forced to quit eating.   The result is I’ve lost weight and I have low energy all the time.  

I’ve been so low energy I’ve spent more time in bed than I probably needed to be in bed for a whole month.   It’s been a process.   I think that’s the most positive thing I can say about it right now.   Staying in bed has been challenging because I can’t get comfortable with the spine complications I have going.   Lying on my right side and my right shoulder muscles cramp up badly, lying on my left side causes muscular problems in my right lower ribs and lying on my back without the pillow at just the right height and my arms fall asleep while my neck cramps.  

I’ve spent some time in the basement in the reclining chairs my husband frequently falls asleep in at night, which has been helpful some.   And I’ve gone through more ice packs than I would typically use in six months.  But I have accomplished something—I’ve watched a lot of movies and television.

I don’t watch much television or movies.  We have movie night here on Friday’s and there is a joke that I only watch one movie per year, that being on my birthday week.   I don’t go to movies much either at typically two per year.   So I suppose I’ve been catching up.

I’ve been watching all the Marvel movies.   There are a lot of Marvel movies.   There are several I still haven’t seen so we’re watching Captain America: Winter Soldier tonight.  My son is most excited.   My daughter, less so.

I also got in some good documentaries on space and the space missions.   I love a good documentary. And now I must go, because my son has just run in the room to tell me it’s time to start the movie.   As far as things go with the stupid withdrawals, I’ve been able to eat more today than I have in a single day for over a week now, which should help with the low energy.  I am really looking forward to being back to normal.  Or normal-ish.  I don’t know what my normal really is at this point.

The Big Boy Update:  My son wants to see the third Avengers movie and needs to see (so my husband tells us) the second Captain America movie to keep the interwoven timeline straight.   I’ve seen all the Avengers movies.  I think he’ll like it when he does see it.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  There are movies that have a special audio track for the visually impaired. It’s called Descriptive Audio and is available in movie theaters on select movies and even Netflix has a whole collection of titles with the capability.   This afternoon I put on Captain Underpants with descriptive audio for my daughter.   It’s done very well.   Hopefully she can watch (listen to) movies like it more frequently.   It would enable us to have family movie night where she could enjoy the time too.