Mental Tic Tac Toe

My daughter and son love to do things on the Amazon Alexa.   Recently they’ve figured out how to play television shows on it thanks to a tip I got from my sister-in-law about Hulu connectivity.   We’ve had to take the Alexa Show away at night in preparation for the next morning.  Alexa lives in the kitchen at the bar where they eat breakfast and they’ll start playing something and get distracted, running them late.

The earlier alarm time has been helpful for everyone.   For two days now we’ve had extra time in the morning and the children have asked if they can watch Miles From Tomorrowland before it’s time to go.  Because they’re getting ready on time—early even—so we’ve brought the Alexa back out as a reward for good planning on their part in the morning   My son sits in the chair with his jacket on and his backpack on his back—and he hasn’t put up angry complaints when we need to leave at eight o’clock.   Hopefully this trend will contuse.

Watching shows is relatively new with Alexa because until recently we had an Alexa that was audio only.   During all the time we’ve had Alexa they’ve learned different things they can do.  Games, asking questions, having stories told to them, playing music and even playing games with music.  For a long time, I’d go through the weekly emails from Amazon that listed new things you can do (like having Alexa talk to you like Pikachu) and tell them about them.   But at this point, my children are figuring out new things on their own based on suggestions she’s offering on the screen.

We were in the car the other day and my daughter asked if we could play Tic Tac Toe.   She found out about this from Alexa.   There are so many things you can do that are perfectly suited to a blind child.  But Tic Tac Toe wasn’t one I was expecting.

My daughter has excellent memory, but she also has a way to picture things in her mind and keep track of them in a way that might be more difficult to an adult.   She’s good at mental Tic Tac Toe.   She knows the game will end in a tie if both players play well, but she definitely has the advantage when it comes her opponents making mistakes.

The Big Boy Update:  Mt son asked me in the car today if there was a song called Frere Jacques.  I told him there was and that Nana liked to sing it to him in French.   He was asking a question he knew the answer to though to see if I knew the song too.   We started to sing it together and then he said, “our school song is to this tune.”  And do you know what?  It is.   So we sang some of the original song and then some of his school song as we headed to drop off.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has called me twice now on her ride home from school.   She has a GPS watch we use to keep track of her location as she’s in a taxi and her ride is fairly long.   She can do only a few things with the watch, but calling people is one of them.   The icons are quite hard for her to see and she commonly calls the wrong person so we have only a few people she can call.   The first time she called today was to let me know the dog was in the front yard.   How did she know?  She had just gotten off the phone with dad and he told her so.   The second call was to sing me a song.   It was actually quite beautiful.   She made up the tune and lyrics and at the beginning I thought it was something she’d learned at school until she started saying specific things about me as her mother.   She ended by saying, “and I love you even when you go Pancake Splat.”   The children are loving that name for when I get upset.  So far no pancake splat has happened though.  Thankfully.

I Don’t Even Know...

…sometimes where to begin.   Today was one of those days with my son.  Not so much with him but with a conference we had with his teachers.   We’re trying lots of things but nothing seems to be working.  We had another discussion with Dhruti after school.   My son knows nothing about any of what was discussed today.   We’re still figuring it out as parents.   We may know more soon.   I wish I knew how to help him.   We all do.  Everyone is trying everything they can think of to help.

The Big Boy Update:  My son came down tonight after I got home from dog training class.  He had been asleep when I got home but had had a nightmare.   I was just starting to wash the dog when he came in.   He helped me get her toweled off and then asked me if I could go up with him and read to him.  He wanted me to read a comic book to him.   He can read it just as fast as I can now and spent most of the time correcting me, showing me how the intonation should have been done and what the voices of the different characters sounded like.   Then he gave me a big hug and went to bed.   He even let me give him a kiss goodnight on the head.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter had dental work today.   Only she didn’t.   She had residual memory of prior dental work and once she got in the chair sort of lost it.   The valium didn’t help and she never made it to the nitrous oxide.   They said they would do a special kind of treatment on the tooth and just watch it and if it didn’t get worse they’d just leave it until the tooth fell out.   My question is why didn’t we do that in the first place?

Pancake Splat

We had a family meeting tonight.  We had two things to talk about and to get the children’s input.  The first was morning routine and how it seemed like we were being rushed in the mornings.   Did the children want more time in the mornings?  If they did, we could get up earlier, but that might mean we needed to go to bed earlier.

My daughter was all for getting up a full extra hour early (her initial suggestion).  She falls asleep early so this would be no great hardship to her, but the rest of us didn’t want to take that option.   We decided on setting our alarms a half-hour earlier with a follow-up alarm fifteen minutes later.   My son, who has already been having a hard time getting up because he’s staying up late reading at night agreed he might need to read less and go to sleep earlier.  We shall see how that actually goes with him.

We’ll see how to goes with my husband and me too.   We appreciate the time we have after the children are asleep and we’re both asleep soundly in the mornings.   The children both pointed this out.   The earlier wake up time may be more difficult on us than it will be on them.

The next thing we had to talk about was non-negotiable behavior as part of our family contract.   It was at this point that I completely lost my temper at my son.   I’d been nearly a model parent for a week, working with some of the things I’d been discussing with his Integrative Therapist.   My son was doing everything in his power to be rude, disrespectful, mean and above all not listening.  He was manic.   I tried lots of options we’d talked about but in the end I gave him a taste of his own medicine.

The thing was, we needed to talk about something he had done at school—used threatening words that were very strong about me after he was late getting ready and didn’t have his lunch box because I sent him out the door and wouldn’t let him take it due to his poor planning.  He was the one this conversation was primarily about.

After I blew up I calmly asked if I had threatened anyone or said hateful things to anyone when I was angry just then?  They said no.   Did dad or I ever do that?  They said no.   We explained how adults could be sent to jail for making threats to harm someone and we wanted to help them be successful children today and for the rest of their lives.  

My son and I had a nice conversation afterwards and he hugged me and read a note I’d written to him last week when I found out what he had said from his teachers.   He admitted he was angry and that he didn’t really mean that.   I said I understood getting mad and being angry but that he had to find different ways to express his feelings.   But regardless, I would love him always, no matter what.

Then, as we were getting ready for bed, I suggested we come up with some way to describe what had just happened when.I got mad.   Some way for us to say, “watch out, if you keep going down this path mom may well blow up.”  I was hoping that by naming the thing they would want to avoid it just hearing it might happen again not unlike reminding a child if he doesn’t get dressed he might have to go to school again without any clothes on.   (They typically don’t want to do that more than once.)

My son and daughter decided we should call it, “pancake splat” like when you flip a pancake over and it goes splat on the second side.   I didn’t get how that was connected with getting mad, but I said sure.   I also said I didn’t know if I could say that without laughing.   My son said that was part of the point that maybe it would help diffuse the situation some (he actually said those words).

I don’t want to do it again.   My throat was sore from yelling.  Maybe it was a good lesson tonight though.

The Big Boy Update:  My son wanted to take something of mine to school today for sharing time.   It was delicate and he left it in his backpack or dropped it or something.   It came home in pieces.   He was pretty upset about it.   I don’t say anything other than asking how it happened.  He said he could tell I was sad.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter lay on the floor in a ball with a blanket over her throughout the family meeting tonight.   She does this because she doesn’t need to see (or can’t) and she can listen better that way.   But she falls asleep like that too.   We had to end the meeting when we realized she was nodding off.

Ringing The Bell

The dog doesn’t go to the bathroom in the house anymore.   It was simple.  I was just doing it wrong. She stopped going in the house almost overnight once I changed how I was handling taking her out.   She’s fast now too, not sniffing around all over the place.  She’s had a few incidents, but it’s been our fault more so than hers.

The thing I’ve been wanting her to do is let us know when she has to go out.  We started crating her more of the time when we weren’t specifically playing with her or feeding her or if she hadn’t been out in a bit.   She wasn’t overly upset about being in the crate, she’s a puppy and they sleep a lot.   But I still wanted her to be able to go over to the door and communicate in some way that she needed to go out.

I didn’t mind if she wanted to go out to spend time outside (and I think she’d prefer to live out there, honestly).   But she doesn’t bark much.   I got these bells like you’d see on a counter.   An old-fashioned “service bell” she could ring by just stepping on or tapping it.  Only she wasn’t doing that either.

We’d ring the bell before taking her out and try to get her to ring the bell but she wasn’t connecting the bell ringing with the door opening and her getting to go out.   She picked up on so many things so quickly that this one thing surprised me.

Then two nights ago I decided to just put the bell in front of her and train bell for treats.   It took about ten minutes.   She was whacking the bell with her paw and getting treats and thought this new game was lots of fun.   I walked away and she stopped though.   Today we did it again and this time after I walked away she kept ringing the bell.   I’d come back and treat her again.   She did this for a while, watching me return every time to treat her.

Later tonight she went over to the door, rang the bell and I came over, gave her a treat and took her out.   She did that twice and both times got to go out.   Tomorrow I’ll see if she remembers the connection.  

The nice thing about the house training though is we can keep her out of the kennel a lot more.  If she can let us know when she wants to go out with the bell, I think we’ll have the whole house training thing down.  

The Big Boy Update:  My son’s “freestyle” dance during his school’s Winterfest was caught on a friend’s phone.  He sent the video to us and my husband posted it online to show his Fortnite friends. One lady said, “I don’t know anything about your family, I’m not sure I’ll be able to tell which one your son is.”  My husband said not to worry, she’d know.   When my son started breaking into the Fortnite dance moves she just started laughing, saying she should have known.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  After six weeks out of school, my daughter started back today.   She wondered who she’d be sitting with at her four-person table in her class.   She came home and the first thing she told me when I asked how her day was was who her new table mates were.   She’s excited to be sitting with different friends this quarter.

Boat Knots and Such

We’ve been in school this weekend.   Friends of ours have been visiting.  They’re staying with us but visiting with other friends while in town.  During the time they’ve spent with us we’ve been doing various things, including mostly a relaxing weekend, but we’ve also been in sailing school.

There will be four adults on the sail boat come July when we go on a ten-day tour of the islands surrounding St. Thomas, our departure port.   We’re responsible for a forty-four foot catamaran boat we’ll be renting and the job of maneuvering and sailing is non-trivial.

We started out by learning boar terminology for directions surrounding the boat.   Saying, “at nine o’clock" isn’t boat-ish enough.   There is a lot of tradition in sailing and boating in general, including saying, “Arr!” with a number of things.

We all studied up and my children paid careful attention (when they weren’t goofing around).   We have a good bit more to learn.   I think my husband and I may need to go to YouTube school before July to get a good handle on things because we’ll be fifty percent of the adult crew on board.

The Big Boy Update:  My son, whom I thought wasn’t paying attention to the boating directions on Friday, turned out to have paid more attention than me as he told Richard all the directions (with a little assistance) tonight.   He’s going to be a good sailor.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is the best knot tier in the whole family, but she fell asleep on the floor for the second night running and missed out on the boating lesson again.   We’ll catch her up before the trip though.

The Man With The Mustache

This is, in part, a story I’ve heard retold so many times I’m having to go on memories of memories of a memory at this point.  The other day, my mother just happened to tell the story again.  Her version is different than my memory, but that’s what happens when lots of time passes.   Either way, the essence of the story is the same in both of our recounting.

When I was young my parents had two telephones: one in their bedroom and one in the kitchen.  This was back in a time when you always answered the phone when it rang.   There were no telemarketers, automated appointment reminders and no voice mail.  It even pre-dated the answering machine age, so when the phone rang, you jumped up to get the call, because it was someone you knew who wanted to talk to you.

I suppose there were a good bit of wrong numbers at that time too.  The two phones my parents had were rotary dial.  Dialing a phone number was prone to error because we had to actually remember phone numbers and do the whole dialing out every time.  It was easy to get a digit wrong or mis-read what was written down on a piece of paper.

The phone in the kitchen had a very long cord on it.  I remember once my mother was taking a call from Southern Bell about their service and happened to mention the long cord.  The customer service representative on the other end said she didn’t have down that my parents had an extra long cord (the one from the phone to the receiver) and if we had one, we should be paying a monthly fee.   My mother thought quickly and said that it probably wasn’t long, the coil was just very stretched out.

For this story though, we were all sitting at the dinner table.  It was dark outside so it must have been winter with an earlier sunset time.   The phone rang and I jumped up, eager to take the call and see who it was.   The person on the other line was an adult male that I didn’t recognize.   At that time I didn’t know to say, “may I ask who’s calling” so when he asked to speak to my mother I told him to hold on.

I walked over to the door, utilizing all of that long phone cord and told my mother the call was for her.   My mother asked me, “who is it?”   I replied, “It’s a man with a mustache.”

Both of my parents broke up laughing as my mother go up to take the call.  I remember her laughing as she repeated what I’d said to the caller.  I was a little bit embarrassed by the whole thing but when I realized they were laughing in a good-natured way, I felt clever, saying something unexpected.  I don’t know what it was about the voice but it sounded like he had a mustache to me.   The other day when mother was telling the story she said I had been right, the man did have a mustache.   Of all the details I remember from that story, whether the man actually had a mustache or not, I don’t remember.

The Big Boy Update:  We had Bring Your Parents to School day on Friday.  He was showing us all the different things he’d been doing at school.   We looked up and realized we only had ten more minutes before the morning’s visit was over.   When we told him he said, “time flies when you’re learning.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We went to an African American festival today with Mrs. Aagaard, my daughter’s retired braillest.  She knows just what to do to introduce my daughter in a way to people that in no way says she’s blind, and yet conveys the message clearly.   She asks if my daughter can touch things.  People are very happy to help.   Today my daughter touched a civil war uniform, felt what an officer’s hat was like from the time and got to see how long and heavy the guns were that the soldiers used.   There was a lot for her to feel and experience.  One booth was about a women’s boarding school (or perhaps “charm school” is more appropriate).   She felt what a place setting was like for a formal meal, asking why there were three forks and three wine glasses.   Then she had her hair put up in a traditional African head wrapping.

Boats and Ropes

Our friends came to visit tonight.   They’ll be visiting all weekend on and off, staying with us but also  catching up with other friends in town.  We got some Chinese food and had boisterous conversation while we ate, discussing various things as including plans for our sailing trip in July.  My daughter was wanting the, “raise your hand if you want to talk” method of conversation to be implemented but it fell flat as multiple threads were happening simultaneously amongst food, wine and desserts.

After dinner Richard transformed our living room into a boat and had everyone sit inside the defined perimeter.  Children who strayed out were warned with, “man overboard!”  We learned boat directions including: dead ahead, dead astern, off the port beam, broad on the starboard bow, broad on the port quarter.

The children had had about enough of sitting still (which they hadn’t done much of even during the lesson) and were left to their own devices.   My son enlisted Andrew in some playing of Super Smash Brothers, or Fortnite, or Mario Kart.   I’m not really sure but I do know they were trying to find Andrew some time later and he was hiding.   He had come back down to the living room, where the rest of us were busily reviewing the different ways to tie a bowline knot from various orientations and was hiding under a blanket.  

I wasn’t sure if Andrew wanted to be found or not so we let him stay hidden for a while before we let my daughter play hot and cold to locate him after she explained she couldn’t see him because she was blind, but she was looking and could we please help.  Once found he played with her and the dog and then returned to play video games with my son after my daughter went to sleep.

I’m hoping there isn’t a quiz on the boat terminology tomorrow because I don’t have them memorized in my head yet.  

The Big Boy Update:  My son’s school’s Winterfest was today.   He sang four songs with his class and did one group dance.  There was one song that had an instrumental interlude where all the children did freestyle dancing.  He did his Fortnite dances in his bowtie and jacket.   Some of the parents commented later about how good he was.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter love spending time with Mimi.   She’s been doing things every day with her.   Mimi gives her undivided attention and there is nothing in the world more that she loves.   Mimi has a lot of love to give.