The Best Zoom

Google Meets, Zoom meetings, Facetime, voice conference calls, electronic meetings of every shape and flavor have been the primary way for adults and children to communicate during the Safe at Home time of COVID-19.    It's just a normal occurrence to the children and they think nothing of it.   Calls in pajamas are one of the best plusses I think we would all agree on here.

I've attended good and bad calls.   There is the problem where someone is new to the technology and can't figure out how to mute so they keep crashing into the call with their accidental audio.   Sometimes the resolution isn't great due to a poor connection on one end or the other or, and this is more likely, the ISP is throttling the data because there are just too many conferences going on at the same time and there's not enough total bandwidth to get all the children in video conferences at 9:00AM.

I had one birthday call that was a nightmare to tell what was going on with terrible resolution and an almost psychedelic flickering of faces to the forefront as everyone tried to talk unintentionally crashing into each other's sound.

Tonight I had the best video call though.   My nephew, Kyle, is graduating today.   He's at home and there is no graduation ceremony.   His diploma may be in the mail at his condo in Florida and he's not sure how or when he'll get it.   So tonight, his mother coordinate a call with close family.  

Kelly got it just right.   She hit the Goldilocks Zone for a Zoom call.  We could all fit nicely tiled on the screen and we didn't have to be on mute if we weren't the current speaker.   We congratulated Kyle and then had a good time catching up as a family.

The Big Boy Update:  My son heard Madison, Kyle's girlfriend for many years, say hello to him on the call tonight.   He got shy!  He disappeared and tried to come up with something he needed to do outside, which I didn't let him do.   I think he remembers her and still has a crush on her which started over four years ago.

The TIny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter wrote a "Biopoem" today about Kyle.   It's a certain format of poem that starts and ends with the person's name and describes them in the lines in the middle.   She read  it to him on his graduation call tonight.   It was cute.    

Nothing

My daughter found a flashlight the other day.   I watched as she held it up and put it directly in front of her eye.   I know you're probably having the same mental reaction to yell, "No!  Don't ever look at bright lights directly."   Other things like how it will damage your eyes come to mind as well.   But in this case, I just stood there and watched her.  

I asked her what she was doing when she pulled it away from right in front of her eye.   She said, "I was checking to see if I could see anything with the right eye."   This is the eye that sustained the most damage from the infection and follow-on months, years even of ocular challenges.   Failure to thrive is a phrase I would say could even be used.   She had a collection of things wrong or unstable in her eyes.  It didn't take much to tip the scale, causing a catastrophic collection of events to occur which ultimately took all the vision from the eye.

I asked my daughter, "could you see anything?"  "Nope, nothing at all," she replied in a rather upbeat sort of, "I just verified something I've been suspecting for a good while now and it's good to have an answer" kind of way like a lab technician might note results on a clipboard.

She then wanted to shine the light in the left eye.   This is the eye that has some very unknown amount of vision.   It's so hard to tell what she can and can't see.   Is it shadows and large forms only?  She zips around the house and any areas she knows well.   She isn't completely accurate and can still bump into walls.   She doesn't know where things are in front of her or far away.  I don't think she can tell colors but maybe she can know that something isn't a dark or light color.  It's very hard to tell.  

It's easy to want her to see more than she does so I always wait until I have proof she can see something.   She can magically see a lot of times.   This is a term I'm using for situations where my daughter will tell you or someone about a thing that would indicate she could see it.   She's tricky.   If she's heard someone else talk about it or remembers it from before or any number of ways in which she could "see" something when really she "knows" it.

When she held the light up to her left eye the other day, I let her do it because she needed to find out what she could see for herself.   I asked her if she could see the. W light and she said, "of course" in a tone of voice that said she couldn't believe I'd even asked her that.   Then I asked her if she could see shapes and things and she told me she could see lots of things.   We didn't get into more than that. She says she's only half-blind.   Finding out what that sighted part sees is very hard to nail down.

The Big Boy Update: My son likes to be a parent.   He wants to mostly be a parent when it comes to doling out punishments.   This typically means his sister.   I think in part he's trying to help.   It doesnt come across that way to his sister though.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter came into the bonus room where I'm working here and stated, "I need this room" in a definitive tone.   I told her I was still working but she was welcome to work with me here.   She got her braillewriter and a stack of about fifty sheets of braille paper and left.   I asked why she needed to leave and she told me it was something for mother's day and she liked to talk to herself out loud while she typed and so she had to go to another room.

Butt Quarters

This is a strange post.   You can tell by the title, right?  It's something my best friend from childhood messaged me about two days ago that got us both a big chuckle.

Have you heard of, or do you remember the drinking game called "Quarters?"  It's fairly simple, as most drinking games are by necessity.   It has to be simple enough to do when you're drunk.  In the traditional game, or in the version we played (I'm sure there are numerous variations) you bounce a quarter on a table and try to get it to land in a shot glass or other cup.   If you make it, you get to pick who takes a drink from their glass, if you miss, you have to take a drink.

My best friend and I were living together in the first location I ever lived alone—a small townhouse I'd later buy and live in for many years.   I'm not sure who's idea it was, but we decided to put the cup on the floor and the quarter between our butt cheeks (pants on, of course).  You then had to waddle across the floor, making sure not to drop the quarter in the process, until you were standing over the cup.   You'd then let go and hope the quarter landed in the cup.

The same drinking rules applied once the quarter was dropped.   Nothing like a little physical humiliation added to a drinking game, eh?  I don't know if we heard about the game or made it up, but she messaged me the other day telling me she heard it mentioned by someone online and it brought back memories from over half our lives ago.  

Good times.

The Big Boy Update:  My son knows I've been stressed out over the workload my daughter has.   It's more the complexity of completing the workload and the number of online meetings she's attending that are making her day a busy one and me frustrated as I try to ensure we're getting everything done on time.   He told me I was doing a good job and I should know I was a really good mom.   He is my sweet boy.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Chelsea, our music therapist, and I worked for several hours today to create a single sheet that would introduce braille music symbols.   We were pretty proud of ourselves and we thought my daughter would be excited.   She was anything but.   She shut down and refused to do anything.   The problem was that the braille dots that represent certain length and key notes are also braille letters or contractions.   She was unable to disassociate the two so she could see the braille cells as music information instead of letter information.   We're going to have to back up and start more simply to get her engaged.   She wants to learn, but today was just too much at once.

Summer School

When I think of summer school I think of remedial work to catch up or redo something that wasn't completed in the course of the main school year.   I have a rather negative connotation of summer school and yet I spent a good bit of time in summer school during my college years.   I took a calculus course the summer before college started so I could be ahead for my freshman year.   I took classes in the summer at Auburn University because I could add those in without interfering with the main school year at the college I was enrolled in.   I didn't once take summer school classes for a negative reason, and yet it still seems like a negative thing.

We have schools in this state that are on the year-round system.  My daughter is in school all but one month in the summer.   This year things might be different though.   Her "track" and all year-round tracks have been put back on traditional calendar schedule for now.  It won't work that way for the start of the next school year.   There are four tracks and only enough room for three tracks to be housed in the school buildings at one time.  We'll find out what the plan is soon enough though.

I'm worried though.  Summer camps are canceled.  The pool has an unknown opening date and our yearly visit north to my brother- and sister-in-law's house for a week may not happen—all dependant on when COVID-19 modeling predicts it's safe for us to reemerge into society again.   Right now we have a little more than a month of school to go before summer break begins.  

What am I going to do with two children for two-plus months at home?  Summer school.   Or at least a bit of work to do each day to keep the children engaged.  I asked my daughter's VI teacher today if she would be up for sending us some bonus work for the summer.     She said she could.  

School is work here, but it's keeping everyone busy.   No one is complaining about being bored, and that's saying a lot considering.

The Big Boy Update:  I don't know what my son did, but he wrote my daughter this note and then asked if I could make a copy of it that could be printed so she could read it.  He took the printed copy to her and she was touched when she read it, asking how he had gotten it in braille.



The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter wanted to spend the night camped out on the trampoline last night.   It was very warm and no prediction of rain or cold weather.   She was out there, zipped inside the trampoline walls, until 4:16 (she knew the exact time) when she heard something.   She played with a little toy that lights up and makes noises she got from Aunt Kelly and family a while back. She thought she might have felt a raindrop at that point so she decided to come in.   She didn't need her brother out there with her, she was fine camping out all by herself.  

No, Thank You.

We have a very busy neighborhood.   The weather has turned into those perfect springtime days.   Mornings are already in the sixties, the sun is up long before you roll over to hit your alarm, and the air is crisp and fresh after the frequent showers that wash away the pollen of the last several weeks.

We hear the word "inclement" used to describe weather with negative characteristics yet we rarely seem to use the opposite word, "clement" to describe mild, beautiful, lovely placid weather.   What we've been having lately has definitely been clement weather.

My daughter has been going on walks with Keira, one of my daughter's friends.   They made a standing 4:00 afternoon walk plan as of yesterday, but this morning my daughter must have been bored and went on a walk earlier.

I found this out because she called me.   She has an Apple Watch so we can keep track of her GPS location and so she can call us if she is lost or if she needs us.   What she hasn't really had access to or realized is that her Apple Watch was paired to a phone—her phone.   There is really no way around this.  The watch is an extension of the phone, even though you don't need to ever move the phone anywhere off the charging stand to have the watch work, you still have to have it.

My daughter has been wanting to use the phone to call her grandparents and other relatives and when she's been at home, I let her put the phone on the play set in the back yard and then swing high in the swings while singing to my mother at the top of her lungs.   The wind noise with the watch might have been unbearable—my daughter is an excellent swinger.

Fearing for the safety of the phone, I got a protect-it-all case that has a belt clip as well as a cord that goes around your neck.   Also, it's orange.   These are characteristics my daughter liked very much and now she's been wanting to use the phone.

If you're thinking an eight-year-old with her own phone and Apple Watch is a little much, I hear you. She can't use the phone or watch in the same way other children would.   She's not sending text messages.   She can't see the screen so she's not playing games.   It's purely a way to call people when she has a need or to socialize.  So for this little eight-year-old who couldn't spend any "screen time" if she tried, because she can't see the screen, the phone is a good thing.

Back to the busy neighborhood.   This morning my daughter put on her shoes, put the phone around her neck over her pajamas, and got her cane.   Then she set off on the navigation assignment from her orientation and mobility teacher and started walking around the neighborhood.

There were people out walking this morning for exercise.   Out of politeness, people cross the street to get out of each other's way.   Isn't it interesting that two months ago that type of overt avoidance would have seemed rude?  My daughter had to let people get out of her way because she's doing a good job if she doesn't bodily run into a mailbox, although with her cane, she has a high chance she will find them first.

Today, people moved out of the way of my daughter.   People who saw the cane and realized she was carefully finding her way—and was blind.   I don't think that many people realize how very blind my daughter is.  We have a large neighborhood and there are many people we don't know.   My daughter was asked if she needed any help to which she said, "no, thank you."   She was also asked if she needed a ride home to which she also said, "no, thank you."

People respected her and let her find her own way.   I found out she was out walking when she called me on the phone and I realized she could use Siri to make a call, but she had no idea how to put the phone on speakerphone.   We fixed that when she got home.   Every day my little unstoppable girl does another thing we, as sighted people, find remarkable.   To her, it's freedom.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is at the age where hugging me isn't cool anymore.   Today, I brought him a caramel steamer (steamed milk with caramel).   He made the love shape with his hands at me and mouthed that he loved me "a whole lot."   Tonight, I'm going for a real hug when he least expects it.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter went on a second neighborhood walk this afternoon with Keira.   She wanted to dress up in her full Cinderella outfit with all the acoutrements including her hair in a bun and makeup.   I was going to the grocery store so Blake did her makeup.   Makeup is not something Blake has a lot of experience with.   My daughter loved it.   Blake said it turned out a little more "Jokerish" than he intended.

They're Too Close

In the scope of my life, we have been isolated for a very small portion of the time.   The imperative to keep personal distance between other humans, not in the immediate circle of your family or those you're co-mingling with during isolation, has become almost ingrained.   It's everywhere.

Conversations between adults invariably have some facet of the discussion on one aspect or another related to COVID-19.   Social media communication is related to Coronavirus or some aspect of life affected by it.  I can't get away from it even here.  It's changed our lives in the short term.   For some people, it will change their lives forever.

At some point, we'll get back to normal.   Today, though, I am stuck in "protect and keep others safe" mode still.   It reminds me of something that happened relatively frequently to me when I was a child. When I was a child.

Perhaps not a child so much as a youth.   I loved swinging in a hammock in the back yard where I grew up.   The hammock was strung up between two trees that were slightly too close together.   If your goal was to lounge in the hammock it didn't work well because the hammock would droop too far down, and you felt like you were in a V formation.

It worked to my advantage, though, because I sat sideways in the hammock at the centermost point.   I could get a nice swing angle going and pump with my upper body while my legs would be crossed in front of me.

I could get up pretty high in that hammock.   I would wear out the S hooks, and it would crash to ground if I didn't replace the hooks every so often.    It is perhaps because of the crashing to the ground that I would think of safety when I got into the hammock.   I would sit down, put on some music on my Sony Walkman cassette player and then remember to put my seatbelt on before beginning to swing—only there was no seat belt.   It was a thing you did to keep safe, though, and I thought it more times than I can count.

Today I was changing the desktop background on my Mac.   I picked a picture from our family reunion.  Thirty-ish people all standing close together on stairs so we could all fit into the picture.   As I selected the image, I thought to myself, "what were we thinking, we're all way too close to each other?"

The Big Boy Update:  My son lost screens at lunch today for behavior.   I missed the incident, but I heard about the consequence.   I had an idea, though, and told my son we could do something if he would be interested.   But we had to not tell his sister, on account of some things she does not like to share, and this would undoubtedly be one of them.  If he would like to ride around the neighborhood for at least two miles, he could wear her Apple Watch to track the distance.   And, perhaps he could redeem himself and get screens back early if he did.   It worked.  He biked all around the neighborhood and found out how much distance different areas of the neighborhood are.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter continues to collect snails for her terrarium.   We put one slug in, but after reading more about slugs she decided she did not want it in with the snails.   The problem was, the one slug was the size of a grain of rice and the second one was an eraser head size.   We looked and found the larger one and removed him.   She brought an earthworm a few minutes ago and accidentally tore him in half as she showed me.   She was very upset (she is always gentle.).  In this case, I told her, it would be find.   She would now have two earthworms.

Lighter By Contrast

My hair is looking lighter recently.  I haven't been putting products in my hair that would have caused it to lighten up.   I haven't been spending loads of time in the sun that might cause it to lighten naturally.   In fact, I'm not sure it's lighter at all.   But it seems like it is.

It's possibly a hair optical illusion.   During the COVID-19 stay at home time I, among millions and millions of ladies out there, have had hair growing in that is not the same color as the balance of the hair on our heads. It's reached the point now that I would have made an appointment and had it topped off so that the roots match the rest of my hair.

I have an appointment.   I made it about a month ago.   I contacted my hairdresser and said I wanted to make a best guess appointment for when the stay at home order would be lifted.   I'm going to message her this week and move the date out by another month I think.

My hair grows slowly but this is about as long as I've gone without getting it colored.   I've colored it for so long, I'm surprised there's not more grey hair than there is.  Why does it look lighter than normal though?

I think it's a contrast thing.  The darker, more "boring brown" roots make the ends look much lighter by comparison.   I was holding the ends up tonight and placing them beside the roots.   There's a decent color difference.  I like the color Sue changes my hair to better than my natural one.   Maybe we should start taking "Inches Bets" on how many inches of grown out hair we ladies will have before COVID-19 is over.

The Big Boy Update:  My son has been going through the LEGOs lately.   He has been going through them with extreme attention to detail and organization.   He found the Nexo Nights LEGOs and remembered how he and I used to play together on our iPads.   He asked if I wanted to watch the show with him tonight and we had a nice time talking about what we remembered and then, at just the right moment in the show, pressing pause and holding the app up to the screen to unlock a new feature of the game.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter asked if I could message Keira's mother to see if she would be interested in going for a social distanced walk together after school today.   The two of them set off at 3:30 and were out for close to two hours.   Our houses are connected via back yards but the two of them haven't had a chance to get together in several weeks.   It was nice to see them chatting and walking together.