Mayonnaise

I love mayonnaise.   I don’t know how to spell the word well, but I love it mayonnaise nonetheless.   My husband hates mayonnaise.  He has been known to throw a perfectly delicious hamburger out the window, just because it had mayonnaise on it.   Or wait, was that the time he got cheese on his hamburger?  

Maybe we should circle back to me, and how I love mayonnaise so much that I’ve been known to eat mayonnaise sandwiches.   I’ve debated if it was really necessary to have tuna fish in tuna salad, forgoing the latter for extra mayonnaise.   There is no such thing as too much mayonnaise as far as I’ve been able to tell thus far in my life.

I was on vacation this past weekend with my in-laws, husband and children.   We were in a time share they were spending the week in after we stayed for the first weekend.   I was making a sandwich just before we departed and assumed there would likely be no mayonnaise in the refrigerator because maybe like son like parents and mayonnaise was low on their priority list of condiments to stock for a week-long stay.

I was pleasantly surprised to find a jar of mayonnaise in the refrigerator door and said as much to the room in general as I prepared to spread some onto my bread.    My mother-in-law immediately said, “oh yes, I don’t travel anywhere without mayonnaise.”

I knew I liked her for a reason.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was interested in a catalog today of children’s items.   My husband got him a pen and told him to circle all the things he wanted for his birthday and Christmas (because he kept asking about Star Wars items.)   About ten minutes later I heard my husband say from the next room, “ah, I see you circled everything on this page.  Oh, and you circled everything on this page too.   And I see you also circled everything on this page.  Okay, okay, you can keep working, you still have time before bed.”   We had to promise to keep the catalog and pen out so he could continue his work for tomorrow.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   My daughter is remembering all sorts of things of late.   I don’t know if it’s the temperature starting to change or the feeling that fall is coming, but she’s asking questions I about things I’m surprised she remembers.   Today she asked me, “when is it time for bring your head housing?”  It took me about three minutes to figure out with follow-on questions to figure out she was asking when it would be time to do gingerbread houses.

Heavy Wiring

Did I mention we were having solar panels added to our house?   I honestly can’t remember if I have. We’ve been looking at and considering for two years now and it’s finally happening after lots of evaluating, considering, applications and approvals.

The panels aren’t up yet, but we’re prepared for them.   We had two crews in our house today getting their exercise going from the attic to the basement to the attic to the basement, etc. trying to get all the wiring in the places they needed to be for when the panels are up on the roof and ready to send their sun-powered energy direct to our house.

A thank you goes out to our builder again, for his foresight in recommending we put chases in the house.   The addition of the PVC chase from our attic to the basement mechanical room has made this installation much more straightforward than it otherwise would have been.

One of the crews today was scheduled to be on the roof, but due to weather otherwise known as rain, they worked inside alongside the first crew.  Tomorrow if the weather holds, we should have panels on the roof.

The Big Boy Update:  My son has been such a help lately when his sister has been upset.   She’s taking prednisone and it has thrown her off kilter, off balance and out of whack.   When she’s been her most upset, screaming at not wanting breakfast because she hates all food and all drinks and is also complaining she’s starving at the same time, he calmly eats his meal and tries to be helpful if he can.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter’s vision is so hard to quantify.   My husband messaged me last night while I was out, “on one hand she lost interest in the TV, saying she had trouble seeing it. On the other hand she is now making a Mario level and I asked her, ‘can you see better today?’ and she said, ‘yes.'”

Paitence, Persistence and Positive Attitude

One of my parent’s good friends is a retired ophthalmologist.   My  mother was talking to him today and catching up.   He asked how my daughter was doing and my mother gave him an update from when she saw my daughter just a few days ago.   He told her he had some advice, and would she pass it on to me.  

My mother send me an email with his advice in it and I think the timing could not have been more appropriate.   Here’s what he said:

Patience — recovery will take time.
Persistence — Stay the course with the treatments the doctors are using.
Positive Attitude — this will be transferred to your daughter. She needs to sense a positive environment, not a negative environment.

I have been trying to have a positive attitude personally, and with anyone who asks how my daughter is doing, but it’s been growing more difficult.   It’s been weeks and her vision hasn’t gotten much better from what we can tell.   I understand things are healing and through that process her vision won’t necessarily show improved vision quickly, but it doesn’t help when I see her unable to do discern the most basic of things.

Several times recently I’ve delivered a less-than-positive update to someone who’s asked about my daughter.   Tomorrow, I’ll remember my parent’s friend, Gerry’s advice.

The Big Boy Update:  We were at the beach this past weekend eating at a Mexican restaurant on their outdoor patio.  Small birds were swarming at the periphery of the area, looking intently at our table.   My children discovered they could throw food to the birds and they’d come up to eat it.   My son loved doing this and nearly refused to eat his meal, he wanted to feed the birds so badly.   He said, “I named all of them ‘Cutie’.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My mother’s friend, Gerry, also suggested we don’t ask my daughter questions about her vision, and that’s something we try very hard to do.   My daughter did, however tonight, ask for a vision game.   She asked for the game I played with her that threw me into a tailspin of despair when I thought she couldn’t see anything out of her right eye.   She asked if we could play the game where she tells me the color of the jelly bean with one eye.    We did the game and she could tell colors of beans in my hand about six inches from her face in both eyes, which was a relief to me.

Credit Card Jacked

Saturday morning on vacation this weekend I was woken up by repeated text message ding sounds from my phone.   I’m not unaccustomed to text messages incoming in the early, dark hours of the morning, what with all the running coordination my neighbor and I do, but this was unexpected.   It was multiple messages all within the same minute.    I grabbed the phone and looked at a collection of messages that looked like this:

Given that I was a) asleep and b) not outside the United States, I think we can all guess what was happening.    I wasn’t upset, because with the great text message at point of sale feature a lot of credit cards have now, I knew about the fraudulent charges as they were happening.    I grabbed my phone, went into the bathroom so my talking wouldn’t wake up my husband and called the number.

The fraud person verified it was me while I logged onto my Bank of America account on my iPad.   I noticed the charges—more had come in by now—weren’t showing up on my card.   The gentleman helping me, Andrew, said, “the transactions are being blocked before they ever get to you.   They were flagged suspect when they came in.”

As he and I talked through the card being cancelled and a new card being sent to me, he said, “boy, they are really trying to use that card.”   About that time I got several more charges, this time at over $400 each.   Shortly after that he had disabled the card and the messages stopped.

I’ve never had anything like this happen to me.   It was fairly exciting for a few minutes.   But it didn’t keep me from going back to sleep afterwards, though.

The Big Boy Update:  At lunch today we were talking about friends and toys when my son piped up and said, “don’t forget, I have a hologram of everything I like.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  I wish I could say my daughter’s vision was better today than it was the day before or even the week before, but it’s so hard to tell.   There are easy, close, simple things she can’t see at all and then other things in the same range of vision she seems to be able to see.   She can’t see much at all at a far distance from what I can tell, and that doesn’t seem to change.   We went on a big carousel today and at the top she could see a large, blue roof, saying she saw the blue umbrella.    Again, sounds depressing, sorry.  I was hoping to have a better frame of mind today, but it’s so hard to watch her stare blankly into space and not even try to look at things around her.   Tomorrow, I’ll put my positive hat back on and report more.

Back Seat Bad Idea

We have a different kind of car seats now for the children that can be quickly and easily moved from one car or seat to another.   On a whim, last week I moved one of the seats to the third row.   We had a nice time having an adult sit beside each child.

For school, the seat was returned to its usual spot but this weekend we moved the seat back again to the third row, because it’s a lot easier for an adult to get into the second row and eliminates crawling over a seat from one side.     This, however, turned out to be a bad idea.

There were arguments.   There was crying.   Jockeying for position to get first in the car was observed and parents yelled (that would be me.)  

Unequal is never as good as equal when it comes to children.

The Big Boy Update:   My son wanted to catch fish with fishing nets my mother-in-law had gotten for them today.  My son didn’t catch any, but my husband caught several small fish at the edge of the shore at an inlet.   My son wanted to feel the fish and we let him reach down into the bucket to touch the fish.   He touched it, snatched his hand back and said it tickled.   About that time the fish jumped out of the bucket.   My son screamed and ran after it as it swam away.   He was so excited, running in circles in the splash, he confused the fish and my husband re-caught him.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   My daughter asked us to close the doors to the laundry room closet on her this afternoon.   When she was shut inside in the dark she yelled out, “I am the queen of night!”

The Countless Coins

When I was young we would go to Wilmington, NC to visit my father’s mother.   My grandma lived in an old, creaky house that managed to be warm and inviting in some areas while being dark and scary in others.    There were rooms that were never opened, food in the refrigerator that looked like it had been wedged into the back for years and old, unknown things in corners of rooms that were exciting to an inquisitive young child.

I’m sure the house had been painted at some point, but the amount of paint flaking off seemed to be more than what was holding on.   I spent a lot of time looking at the paint because there was a front porch swing and I loved swinging.   There was a massive, old tree in her side yard.   As an adult I can appreciate the majesty of that tree (which lives only in my memory) because there were huge branches going all across the whole of the side and back yard.   The trunk itself must have easily had a diameter of seven feet.    And those branches, oh the branches.   It was a tree climber’s dream.  I spent many fun summers days at my grandmother’s home where she raised my father and aunt.

My grandmother had several siblings.   One of them lived across the side street from her house.   I didn’t go over there much as it was more on the scary side of houses than the interesting kind.   I do have one particular memory of their house though, and that was of the coins.

I was too young to have any interest in money myself, but I did know what money was, especially coins.   We went over to my great uncle and aunt’s house one time for a dinner or something because I was there for a while and I got to wandering around.    I had noticed there were some containers with coins in them in the main room and didn’t think too much about it.   But when I went to one of the rooms off from the living room, I didn’t expect to see buckets and bins full of coins, arranged in somewhat haphazard manner, taking up a lot of the floor space in the room.   There weren’t as many containers in the other areas of the main floor, but when I got to looking I notices more vats of money in other places I hadn’t seen initially.

As an adult I would have been intrigued.  I would have wanted to know just how much money a bucket full of nickels or dimes or quarters was worth (they were organized by kind.)   I would also have been interested enough to have to go and ask what was up with all the money, in clearly non-trivial quantities, left unattended around the house.   As a child, I was too shy to ask.

Later, when I had come home after my week’s visit, I asked my father about the coin mystery.  He said it was because they owned a laundromat and the coins were from their machines.   So the mystery of the money’s source was solved.  But why were they all over the house and not deposited in a bank, getting back into general circulation and taking dramatically less floorspace up?   Was my uncle distrustful of banks?   Did he hate rolling coins to deposit them?   Or did he enjoy being surrounded by the success of his business?   I may never know.    Maybe my father does.

The Big Boy Update:  At dinner tonight my mother-in-law saw a brindle-colored greyhound dog and said, “look at that beautiful dog.”  My son looked over and said, “no, he’s dirty.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We were on the highway after lunch today, heading out of town for a weekend’s vacation.   My daughter asked from the back seat, “are we going lemon speed?”   My husband told her that yes, we were going the speed limit.

Fitness Update:  Okay, four one-tenth mile runs with seven pound weights in each hand doesn’t sound like much of a killer workout but this morning I asked my husband to bring me the Advil to the bed, because I didn’t want to get up to get it.

Oh Say Can She See

Are you singing the US National Anthem now?  Sometimes titling a blog post is obvious and sometimes it’s challenging.   Sometimes, as I sit down to my computer to write something here, it just appears out of no where.   Tonight, the first line of the national anthem appeared.   The question is, is it relevant?

With everything going on with my daughter’s eyes from a technical perspective, I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about the observational side of her vision.   What can she see?  If she were older she would be able to describe what was happening.   She may not be completely aware of how her vision is changing over time.   Is she able to compare what she can see now with what she remembers seeing before?  What we can tell is she doesn’t want to talk about it, so she is aware things have changed and she can’t do or see things she could before.  

Here are some examples of things we’ve observed.   And when I tell you these things, keep in mind some of the time, small children just don’t want to answer questions, so we’re guessing only a portion of these observations are accurate.

- In the dark we talked about car lights.   I asked her if she could see red lights and white lights and if she could tell me where she saw them (red lights being brake lights in front of us and white lights being the oncoming lanes of the highway.)   She could see the red lights, but couldn’t discern the yellow flashing turn signal.

- Road signs (huge, big and small) she can sometimes see them, just before they pass us.   She can get the color correct some of the time, but if the sign has words or other things on in large contrast, the sign usually is “white” to her as the colors blur together.

- She doesn’t recognize people from far away or even middle-range.  If you get close to her (don’t speak or she’ll know it’s you from your voice) and she’ll recognize you and not be even remotely surprised that you’re there.

- She knows where to look for an elevator button and is happy to press the up button or the button for floor number three, but she can’t read the numbers on the buttons some of the time.   She got confused the other day because the button labels were round and black and to the side of the steel button on a steel panel.   She was only able to see the contrast of the label and not the row of buttons.

- She couldn’t see the peas on the counter today at her place.   She was looking around the counter with her hands to try and find the remaining ones to eat.

- She will use an iPad for a time, but pulls it very close to her face, usually within three inches.  

- She has been willing to watch some television, but we’ve found a way to pull a bar stool up closer to the television over the fireplace.   We’ve heard her middle-range vision is better than her near vision.

- She was on the play set in the back yard and I was on the porch.   I asked her, “how many arms do I have up?”   She responded, “two!”  then, “one!”  then, “three!”   I counted that one as a big, “I don’t know.”

When I read over this list it sounds fairly depressing, but she is getting enough information to function in her daily life on most levels.   People don’t know she has a visual issue going on most of the time unless they’re around her for a while.   I fully plan on putting up a version of this post at some point in the near future, listing all the things above that she can do with ease now that her eyes have healed.

The Big Boy Update:  My son explained to me you call the bad guys “mega monsters” when they’re hugenormous.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  I got to sit in a car beside my daughter the other day.   Typically, my children are in the back seat and the adults are in the front or third row of the minivan.   This past weekend we put one of the car seats in the third row and I got to sit beside her.   She thought it was loads of fun to sit beside an adult.

Fitness Update:  Measly two miles, but I did run some of it carrying fourteen pounds of extra weights.   That’s not fun.