He Cries Differently

My daughter was upset about something or other this morning.   When she’s upset she’s loud.   If the phrase, “drama queen” gives you a mental image, go with that.   She’s not always like that but she is more often than not louder and more emphatic the more upset she is or the more attention she wants.

My son hates to be in trouble.   He gets mad, he gets rigid and he pushes and pushes to get his way—to have control of any facet within a situation.   But when we get more and more angry or insistent with him he gets upset.   He still pushes back, but he hates to be in trouble.   He’s afraid of being rejected or not loved.   Helping him understand that we’re not going to love him any less is something we need to work on.

Today we were at an Easter egg hunt at my in-laws club.   My son was being all kinds of disagreeable.  We were waiting for the “go” to run off in the field to collect the eggs and the guys had an idea to all line up against the backdrop of colorful eggs on the green grass for a photo.  Everyone lined up but my son.   Or rather he lined up but wouldn’t face forward.   Or look up.  Or smile.  

They gave up on the photo and then the hunt started.   I had been tough on my son as had multiple other people because we wanted only a moment of his time—to be remembered for years to come.    But he wouldn’t cooperate.    As the group of men broke up I saw my son look away and then wipe tears away from his eyes.   I didn’t even know he was crying.  

My son cries differently than my daughter.   I went over to him and picked my seven-year-old child and he put his head on my shoulder.   I rubbed his back and we talked about how hungry he was.   He felt better once he’d eaten.   I think he was glad he did the Easter egg hunt.   For a while before he was insisting he hated egg hunts.

The Big Boy Update:  My son has had some dry skin over the past several days.  We put on medicine and lotion but it wasn’t helping last night because his penis was now both itchy and stingy.   He complained to his father, “I have the worst penis ever.   Cut it off!”   This morning I asked him if he was glad to still have his penis now that hit felt better.   He said he was.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Yesterday as we were walking through the terminal on our way to our connecting gate a man told me, “she’s beautiful.   I have two at home but I’m off on a multi-month work commitment in the middle east and won’t get to see them for a while.   She reminds me of my children.”  My daughter was disheveled with hair everywhere but she was moving along with her cane at a nice pace, following the sound of my voice through the airport.   I told him thank you for the very nice compliment.    After he left I told my daughter he had said she was beautiful and wasn’t that nice.    She said, “I’d rather be different than beautiful.”  

Did You Run From Boston to Here?

Today we travelled to be with my in-laws in Florida or our children’s spring break.   My husband’s two brothers and their families were also converting on my in-laws for the Easter weekend and holiday.   We didn’t start traveling until the afternoon though.   This morning my son’s school had the second Grandparent’s Day.   My parents went today and saw my son both in the classroom as well as sing and preform with his classmates.  

The flights were fairly without incident.   We arrived, got out bags, Nana picked us up.   Our other family had arrived on earlier flights and were at Nana and Papa’s house already.   As we were pulling into the driveway we saw Uncle Bob coming in from doing a run around the neighborhood.   My son knows Uncle Bob is good at running.   He got out of the car and said, “Did you run from Boston to here?”  

The Big Boy Update:  My son has learned how to “floss” or do “flossing” as a dance move.  Another class had the move in their routine for Grandparents day.   He’s pretty good at it.   My son tried to teach both me and his sister.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   We had just arrived at the airport.   Our parking space wasn’t a long walk from the terminal.    Everything was going smoothly with no one complaining, dawdling or losing their temper.  Then, my daughter slowed down and said, ‘ow, my bunions hurt”.    I laughed.   I couldn’t help it.   But in the rush of the pedestrian traffic I don’t think she realized I was laughing.    Next she said, “what are bunions?”

Grandparents and Special Friends Day

Every year at my son’s school there are two days where grandparents or other “special friends” come to visit the students.   It’s a special time where the children get to show off what they’ve been doing during the year.   My parents are usually in town this time of year and would come one of the days.   My daughter attended the Montessori school until this year so my parents would spend half of the time with her and half of the time with my son.

This is exciting to the children.   Children love their grandparents and being able to have them in their classroom is a special thing.   For the second of the two days we’ve invited “special friends” of our honorary Uncle Jonathan and Margaret.   My son was ready for them this morning, looking forward to the day.

I volunteer in the mornings, giving a presentation to the guests on what a day in the life at Montessori school is like for the children.   Montessori school is a little different than traditional schools but we think it’s the best choice for our children (or child now as my daughter is at a school that has trained vision impairment teachers helping her).  

I like talking about what the children do.   I have posters with lots of classroom pictures on them with the children working.   The grandparents love to look for their grandchild in the photos while I talk about what “work cycle” is and what it means to be in Children’s House Extended Day and how the toddlers participate in making bread every day.  Oh, and flower arranging and leaf washing and other things that sound silly for a child to do but make perfect educational sense when you understand they why behind it.

Tomorrow my parents will come to see my son at school and watch him preform some songs with his classmates (which he was pretty excited about).  

Then, it’s spring break.   Both children are off next week and everyone is looking forward to that.

The Big Boy Update:  My daughter was doing a game where she’d say, “say your name if you like bananas” or other item.   We’d say or not say our name.   My son responded to one of her questions with the answer, “Grey”.   He told her, “I only like it a little bit, so I only said half of my name”.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  This is a bit graphic, so come back tomorrow if you don’t think you can handle it.   My daughter has had a rash and we’ve been putting some cream on her bottom and around her vagina for the past several days.   Today I came into the bedroom to find her with her pants off, trying to tell if the rash was still there.   I could tell one spot was bothering her so I asked if she wanted me to put on the medicine.   She did and when I came over she was craning forward to see.    She said, “it looks like the state fair.”   I tried not to laugh in surprise and asked her, “your vagina looks like the state fair?”  She said, “yes, it has red and white stripes.”   There were no stripes, but we don’t know what she can see or how things look.   She loves the state fair.   It would seem there were similarities.  

I Never Really Knew What a Number Sign Looked Like in Print

My daughter got a new braille machine today as a present from Mimi and Gramps.   They wanted to get her something she would enjoy and be able to use for school.   This new brailler is high technology in comparison to the other braille machines on the market.   Even though the process is simple, just imprinting up to six dots at a time, the machines themselves need to be rugged while at the same time accurate.   That, and they’re not inexpensive.

When the brailler arrived today we opened it up and plugged it in.   Other braille machines are like old-style manual typewriters with keys you have to bang.    You still do that with this machine, but that’s because you have to hit hard enough to imprint the dots on a page of card stock braille paper.   But there’s a digital display, it speaks to you and it has a memory.

My daughter started typing on it right away and it called back to her every character she typed.    If she was spelling out a word it said the letters and then pronounced the word when the space key was pressed.   It also knew about contracted braille.

Contracted braille is like our contractions.   We can write “can not” as “can’t” and braille has similar shortcuts, but it’s a little more like shorthand.   For instance the letter ‘y’ all alone means ‘you’ and the letter ‘l’ represents the word ‘like’.   When my daughter typed a contracted word it pronounced the word and not just the shorthand letter(s).

As my daughter typed she made some mistakes.  She discovered some new contractions she hadn’t learned yet from making mistakes—and that was exciting to her.   What was exciting to me was the screen that showed each letter at about an inch in size.   She could look at the screen and see the uppercase or lowercase letter.   She could also see symbols.

She was typing a number and did the indicator symbol, “indicating” the next letters were actually numbers instead.   What appeared on the screen was the pound sign, or hashtag as it’s more commonly called today.   She looked at the symbol and said, “I never really knew what a number sign looked like in print.”  

The new brailler also has memory.   She can scroll backwards through what she’s typed and we can store a writing session on a USB drive and then bring it to the computer to save it or print it out so we non-braille readers can see what she wrote.

We’re all very excited to see what she does and learns with her new brailler.    Thanks, Mimi and Gramps.   Her brailler is something she’ll use for years to come.   It’s her main method of writing and is very important to her.  

The Big Boy Update:  My son knows I like things salty.   He told me after dinner the other night, “just so you know, there is such a thing as too salty”.   I told him I hadn’t met a dinner that met that criteria yet.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Our neighbor, Blake, came over to watch my daughter for an hour tonight while I ran an errand.   She had a great time with him and hugged him when he left.   As he was shutting the door she called out, “I can’t wait for next time, you’re my best friend forever, Blake.”

Acting Like Children

My mother took the children to dinner tonight while I went to a meeting with my husband.   She had to get them into the car and drive them to the restaurant, where my father was meeting them.    My children are great sometimes but they’re children and they were having a time getting ready to go.

My mother doesn’t lose her temper often but they weren’t listening and were being unkind to each other so she snapped at them.   She told them to stop, that they were acting like children.   My son said, “but we are children!”

The Big Boy Update:  My son and daughter were in the back of the car, bickering about getting the seat belts strapped in.   They were in my mother’s car so my daughter wasn’t as aware of where things were.  My son was trying to help her and she didn’t want any help.   My son got frustrated at her and said very uncharacteristically, “I wish you could see better”.   It didn’t seem to upset my daughter any more than the rest of the argument.   Later I had a little conversation with my son about how we all wished she could see better.   I asked him if he thought saying that might have made her feel bad.   He hardly ever says anything about her vision to her and is helpful a lot of the time.    I didn’t want him to think I was upset at him, but I do want him to think about what he says in the future, just like any other hurtful comments he might have about someone.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter made a, “starship” with Mimi yesterday.   It was constructed of pieces from a set of Tubation tubes that she and her brother like making into various contraptions from time to time.   My son’s creations invariably are sword-related.  Her starship though was sort of here, there and everywhere with it’s most notable feature being a whistle on one side.   She wanted to bring it downstairs to show Gramps when he arrived.    Upon reaching the bottom of the stairs it had fallen into a few pieces.   As she felt around for the pieces she told us, “it’s a delicate thing”.

Prince Valiant

My parents clipped lots of things out of magazines and newspapers when I was younger.   There was no internet or even personal computers until I was older, so print media was the main way information was transmitted.   My parents were both educators so reading was important to them and was something they enjoyed.

Every Sunday my mother would give me the comics section of the newspaper (or the “funnies” as they were sometimes called) and I would read through the ones that were age-appropriate for me.   There were a lot I didn’t get as a child, but as I got older I understood more and more of them and their humor made sense.

One comic I never understood was Prince Valiant.   It was beautifully drawn but the content was above me.   I didn’t realize my father was cutting them out though until one day I was in the basement and saw a stack of them.   I asked him why and he said someday I might want to read them.

My father could be described as a pack rat.   But he’s really a collector.   He has collections beyond the limits of the space he has to store them, so collecting Prince Valiant comics seemed a reasonable thing to me for him to do.

Years later I asked him if he still had the collection and he said he didn’t.   I don’t remember if he had thrown them out of if they’d gotten water damaged at some point.   I don’t know that I would find the same enjoyment out of the comic strip today that he did back when I was a child.   I just looked online and apparently the story continues, with the latest installment being this past weekend.

My parents still do a lot of reading and still clip articles and comics.   They both bring me things from time to time that they think I’d enjoy.

The Big Boy Update:  We went out for Sushi last night with my parents.   My son decided he wanted to have sushi instead of the more tame chicken teriyaki.   I was skeptical he’d actually eat the sushi, especially when he wanted to order some of the more exotic items on the menu.   But he liked the food and ate a good bit.   He said at one point, “this shrimp is dead!” meaning he was making sure it was dead as he pulled the tail off.   He also wondered about the red things on top of one of his pieces. My husband said it was fish eggs called “roe” and that it was like the chicken eggs he ate for breakfast, only from fish.   The best part was watching my son eat the shrimp head, which he thought tasted pretty good, although he only ate one of the eyes.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter ran to find me on Friday night as she was having a snack.   She had a strawberry in her hands and asked me, “can you take a picture of this strawberry?  Because it’s the cutest one I’ve ever seen.”

Counting Cows

When I was young we’d go to visit my mother’s sister and her family sometimes.   Or we’d go to visit my father’s mother.   Both trips had us going through long, country roads on the way.   Today those roads are likely still there, but they’ve been outdated by faster highways with more direct routing.

What I remember for both trips was a game we would play to pass the time: Counting Cows.   You would pick a side of the car and when cows came up on your side you would count them.   The first one to ten cows would win the round.

On any given trip we could easily play the game multiple times.  There were farms that had only a few cows so you had to keep a lookout to see most of the time.   There were also an occasional pasture with many cows, effectively ending the game with a quick win, but mostly the rounds took a while.

There were other things that gave points too.   An abandoned building was something like five points (each cow was a single point).   I remember the number one thing for points was a burned down house with only the chimney remaining.   Surprisingly, there were a number of these around.

We had fun playing Counting Cows.   Sometimes we’d stop if the view was particularly nice.   I vaguely remember (or have a memory of a memory) of a huge field of yellow daisies.   It was on a slight incline from the road so you couldn’t see the end of the field of daisies and it looked like it went on forever.

We got out of the car to pick a few.   My mother put one in her hair and my father took a picture of us, with my mother in her 1970’s hair style and clothing from the time.   It’s a beautiful picture with the field of daisies in the background.

We don’t get to see farmland on our trips much anymore, or count cows.   We’ll have to come up with a more modern version of the game to play when we go on trips today.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was saying or doing something in the tub and talking to his sister tonight.   I overheard him say, “I’ve done that like a million times.   It’s easy to impress parents.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We had an event at my son’s school today.   My daughter didn’t want to go, complaining, “it’s not my school”.  I told her it had been her school for multiple years and that maybe we’d see her teachers, Anne and Susan at the event.   What she said next was interesting, giving me an insight into how she perceives her world.   She said, “what does Anne sound like?  I can’t remember.”