Kitchen Chicken

Do you know the game where two people hold out as long as they can before some bad outcome fails, seeing who will, "chicken out" first?   I remember several movies portraying this game in the form of two cars driving directly towards each other, one with the hero in it and the other the arch enemy or villain.   My husband and I have several unspoken games of "chicken" that we play against each other in our house. 

The first is with the microwave.   Microwaves get messy over time, even if you use a cover over bowls of soup or other food being warmed.  My daughter is microwaving a lot these days, most notably mac&cheese that always seems to bubble over.   The walls get splattered with pasta sauce and other things of unknown makeup sit on the spinning tray, having gone through who knows how many microwave iterations, and yet they haven't burst into flames. 

Who will get disgusted by the microwave first, cave in and clean it?   I think I'm typically the one to do this job.  I say I only think so because it's easier to notice something that's dirty and a mess than that it was clean and has been clean for over a week.   I'd guess I was the one that did most of the cleaning with this game of chicken.

The other is the compost bin.  We have a small bin in the kitchen that fills up rather quickly.   We pack it down and add more in.   It starts to decompose.   Neither of us wants to touch it, although someone will put it on the island with the silent message that it really should be taken outside and dumped down the hill. 

Sometimes it sits on the island for a few days.   We even joke about it, telling the other person we don't want to take it down, and wasn't it their turn?  I would guess we're about 50/50 on this one, but again, I don't know.   I just know I lose the game of Kitchen Chicken a lot.   I suppose I don't mind because I like things clean.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is doing baby talk again.   He's regressing and we don't know why.   He has a therapy session next week and I think he needs it.   Hopefully, Dhruit can help. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter got in more trouble today for being defiant.   She was escorted to her room and stayed there all day save for meals.   Late afternoon there was a lemonade stand and we let her go there by herself, using her cane and watch.   She did a very good job of navigating.   We told her she should do more walking around the neighborhood.   

The Horrors

I know I wrote about this before, but it's a phrase I think about often enough that it's going to come around again.  Many years ago I did a stint of consulting in New Zealand.   There was a family there that I spent some time with as the husband was with my company and was local to the area and they wanted to make me feel welcomed.   They had two young children, younger than mine are now, and they had a nickname for them, "the horrors."

It was always said in a loving way and from the way they treated their children you never would have thought they meant the phrase in anything other than a facetious way, but every so often, when my children are being little hellions, likely taking after me, I remember the phrase and think of my friends and their very sweet children from Auckland so long ago. 

Today was not a good day from a social standpoint with the children.   COVID-19 has made this hard for them, and they're not alone in this, but goodness gracious is it too much to ask for kindness?  Have we not taught them that resorting to violence is a bad thing?   And when did they stop being respectful?   It was a banner day in bad behavior here. 

A lot of it stems from situations in which my son has the boys in the backyard from the two neighboring houses.   They want to play with my son, which is fine.   Unless my daughter doesn't have her two outdoor friends (there was only one, but the second one can now play again.)  If either child is bored while the other child has their friends outback, we have trouble. 

We broke up a situation after lunch and took them to get shoes.   Their shoes were so bad they were tearing off at the bottom and looked like they'd been taken out of someone's trash.   We discussed how to deal with each other's friends in a positive way and had them come up with ideas on what to do to handle things when tempers flared. 

We got home and not ten minutes later my daughter was screaming bloody murder in the backyard.  We had to break things up again to the point that by the time they'd settled down to listen, my son's friends—who didn't want to include my daughter who was trying to force her way into their game—had gone home. 

My daughter's friends remained, but we weren't letting them out unless they agreed to work together and include each other in their play.    Again, not three minutes later this time, my son came in furious and crying—and he rarely cries—saying they wouldn't let him play and said he couldn't go into Nora's yard. 

There were threats, there was physical violence.   Vengeance and revenge wanted to be taken (by both children) and my daughter has been grounded inside for the rest of the weekend.   She is devastated because she won't be able to play until next weekend.   My son is also in trouble, but not to the extent of his sister. 

The details are far too complicated to easily explain but trust me, it wasn't worth the trouble they got into. But to them, it was all serious.   They want to be included and liked, only they're both going about it in the worst way if that's their goal.   We're trying to teach them some life skills in making and keeping friends, but currently the anger and hurt is blinding them to behaving in a way that would make friends something that was easy instead of hard. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son didn't want to get new shoes.  He hated new shoes.  He wanted his old shoes.   Then he tried on the new shoes (it has been a long time) and he remembered how much he liked getting new shoes.   He won't take his shoes off now. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter got some new sneakers and then she found a pair of booties.   She knows I wear that type of footwear a lot from going through my closet.   She wanted them badly.  Since they were discounted dramatically, we said she could purchase them with her own money if she wanted them that badly.   She bought them and can't wait to wear them to school. 

Into the Dark, Finding the Light

My name is Courtney Blum.  I have two children, Greyson and Reese, ages ten and nine respectively.  My husband's name is Chris and we live in North Carolina.   

These are things I've never said here before.  For the most part, I've made this story about my children, our family, and my thoughts, and I didn't need names or locations.   If you found this blog and you knew who I was, then you already knew me.  If you stumbled upon the pages here and decided to read on, knowing who I was wouldn't have changed anything.   So I remained relatively anonymous, mostly for me, mostly because I've never really felt comfortable having an online presence.  Today, that's changed and it all started with a business card and a man at Starbucks.  

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far before COVID-19 had descended upon us. a man I knew from Starbucks gave me his business card.   He did podcasts, he told me, and if I knew anyone interested in doing a podcast to please pass his information along.   

I didn't know anyone interested in podcasts, but I thought maybe I could be a guest speaker for an episode and talk about what it was like having a blind child.   I could make it funny and interesting and poignant and compelling, I had hoped.  I like to tell stories, which is one reason I enjoy this blog so much because every day I get to tell a story.  So I gave him a call.

He told me he didn't have a podcast, he produced podcasts for businesses and individuals.  It was at this point that I realized I'd been very silly, thinking I could have just talked about my daughter on someone else's podcast.  What was I thinking, that he was the Oprah of podcasts or something?   But I didn't hang up just yet. 

He didn't know I had a child who was blind, and as you well know, once that can of worms is opened it spawns a whole load of questions and conversation.   So we talked.  About both my daughter and podcasts.   I remember I was waiting for my car to be cleaned and we must have talked for at least half an hour.  

That night I thought about it.   About having a podcast where I talked about what it was like to raise a blind child.   I thought about it so much I called him the next day.  I called him several more times until we had hammered out what this podcast I'd envisioned might look like.  We weren't sure if it would be compelling or not, that would be on me.   We didn't know if it would be interesting to people beyond my immediate family and friends, but I didn't mind that so much.   By this time, we were both invested enough in the idea to give it a try, at least for a few episodes, and see what happened.

The only person I told then and have told through this entire long journey was my husband.   Because I didn't know if it would ever come to fruition.  That was a long time ago.   I think it's close to two years now since that first phone call.  We worked on things and then had to shelf it for a while.  COVID-19 happened and we couldn't record in person anymore so we thought we'd wait it out, which clearly didn't work.   So we picked up doing distanced recording with each of us in front of our own mics.  

From the start, we thought we had an idea of what would work, only it turned out to not work at all, so we scrapped it.   It took us a while to get into our groove, which we now both like.   Things got easier and we recorded some more.   We both thought we wanted to have several episodes to release at once, to be followed up with regular episodes once we'd done our initial release. 

It's been stressful some of the time, telling the story of your life.   But it's also been rewarding as well.   So today, with tremendous gratitude to Scott Fitzgerald who is my partner in this podcast in so many ways, that podcast is a real thing.   Scott made me sound good.   He kept the good parts and left behind the bad.  He spent untold hours editing and re-editing as we changed our minds until we circled around to what worked.   He made this podcast what it is. Without him, this would have never happened. 

So without further ado, here are the first six episodes of

Into the Dark Finding the Light.

Note:  be sure to play them starting at episode one.   The podcast makes a lot more sense in order!

Additonal:

* You can listen for free on each of the streaming services listed on the webpage.  As of this writing, episodes are still propagating out to each service so if you don't see all six episodes yet on your preferred service, come back in a bit and check again.   

* You can also listen to the episodes from the main page itself.

Some Sort of Social Something

When I got to school today to pick up my son, he wasn't at the classroom.   I talked to his assistant teacher and she told me he was currently talking with the teacher outside.   Greyson loves his class and especially his teachers, so I was surprised when he got in the car and Michelle told me he was getting physical with another student. 

It wasn't much, but it counted.   My son went on in the back seat about how he has no friends, well, except for these three friends, and that there were only three people who were nice enough to like him as a friend.   The classroom and its students had become "a toxic environment"

Michelle and I talked to him for a while with her standing outside in conversation with just my son.   He had, she told me afterwards, gotten physical with another student.   The details of the actual incident were never conveyed to me.  He shoved or pushed or did something. 

The problems he's having are social in nature.  He's getting offended and then getting upset and not interacting positively with the other students.  He's likey imagining insults and then retaliating.   He's causing most of the problems with how he interacts with people'

She and I talked about it, along with my son, to see if the change in medication might have been a factor.  He's had screens taken away for a while now, so I don't know if that has any bearing on the situation.  He has a lot strong feelings about not being accepted and belonging to before, but this seems like it's something underlying thats's causing hin to have so much anger 

The Big Boy Update:  My son was up at eleven-thirty last night, not tired at all because he'd been listening to his audiobook in his room.   I took the Alexa away and he fell straight to sleep.   Without screens and Alexa he's been doing a lot of artwork.   

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  The first day of the Braille Challenge was over fairly quickly.   My daughter thought she did well so far.   Tomorrow is the second half of the challenge.  We'll find out later if her scores are high enough to advance her to the next level of competition. 

He'd Be Right

I've ordered this tiny little 3D printer for the children to use.   It connects to a phone or a tablet and the children can pick all sorts of fun things to print, including printing pieces of small people that snap together with different tops, bottoms, heads, headgear, and other options.   You can draw a picture and it prints a 3D representation of the drawing, which I thought would be good for my daughter, but the feature I'm most interested in is the picture mapping. 

You can take any picture and it will turn it into a hills and valleys map that provides a tactile representation of the person or things in the picture.   I thought this would be an interesting feature for my daughter, so I mentioned it to her on the way to pick up my son from school this afternoon. 

I set it up for her, though, saying I wasn't sure if that was something she'd be interested in seeing (feeling.)  I told her a story about a book I had started to read a while back.   It was about a man who had lost his sight around about the time my daughter did.   He had said one thing that surprised him was that people automatically assumed he'd want to feel their faces when he got to know them.   

He likened it to sighted people not needing to know other facts about a person that weren't readily visible. He wasn't interested in what a person's face looked like.   It didn't factor into his mental image of the person at all.   I told my daughter this story and then intentionally ask her anything about how she felt about it because I was interested to see if she volunteered anything.  

She replied almost immediately when I stopped talking, "he'd be right."   I asked her if that meant that people's faces weren't important to her.   I asked her what she meant.   She doesn't care about people's faces, she said. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son spent a lot of time in the bonus room after school creating a game with paper and his colored pencils.  My husband didn't want to interrupt his creativity so he let him stay up later than normal.  He still hasn't read the three books that will get him some screen time back.   I don't mind. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has some tight spaces between her teeth.   he has been trying to see how many flossers she can break before she gets all her teeth flossed.   I told her it was an admirable goal, but only if she wanted to use her allowance money to buy replacement flossers.   

When You Assume

There's that old phrase about when you assume.    Today I did some assuming.   A long time ago, in a land far, far away from the current pandemic environment, I decided to redo our living room.   The furniture we had in there was circa before not only my children were born, but before my husband and I were together. 

When we built our house we put the sofas we had in the living room and they were fine.  Some day, I told myself, I'd redo the room, but for now, we had a brand new house and the furniture would just have to do.   It fit well and it served us for many years, but it was time to do the room over.   

Through a concatenation of events, I was working with Susan, who knows what works and what doesn't work.   She steered me in the right direction, decisions were made and orders were placed.   Last year.  Way last year before lockdown.  

For a while, I forgot about the order, and then it looked like it might arrive by Christmas, although we missed that by a long shot.  Yesterday we moved the sofas out of the living room and today, chairs, a sofa and end tables arrived.   Another chair and the large, coffee table that sits in the middle of the room, is still to come.   

Susan came over with some lamps we could decide on.   She had lamp shades to go on them and we started trying things out, moving them around.   We had an idea of what we wanted, but nothing felt quite right.   In order to get a feel for what she was looking for, I went up to my daughter's room and got the two lamps on her nightstands.    

The lamps there went with the guest room furniture that is now her bedroom furniture.   They're not children-type lamps, they're heavy, tall metal lamps with larger lampshades.   When I brought them down, Susan said that was just what the end tables needed.  They were right.   They fit.   I said that was great, that we could just use them.   

Susan laughed and said, "I didn't know we could have gone shopping in. your house for lamps."   I told her I didn't know that was an option.  She asked if my daughter would mind and I said I didn't think so because she couldn't see the light from them and she probably didn't know much about them since they didn't factor into her world view much. 

When my daughter came home we told her to go feel around the living room and see what the new items were but to be sure she had clean hands since she'd been eating a snack.   My husband and I headed to the basement to get some work done. 

I swear, it was less than two minutes later that my daughter roared down from the top of the stairs, stomping as she descended the stairs, "HOW DARE YOU TAKE MY LAMPS!"

Uh oh.   

I did what any good parent does when their child is upset by something that will pass.   My daughter was laying on the chair, crying piteously, saying "Bob and Bill" were her best friends (it seems like all the inanimate objects she bonds with have these names.)  And I lied.  I lied to her and told her the lamps had been planned for the living room redo since before she moved into the bedroom and that I didn't realize she had such strong feelings for the lamps. 

Then I tried the next parental tactic: bribery.   I told her we could go to the store and she could pick out lamps for her room that she liked.   Bribery got me nowhere though.   So we went for the third tactic, and this one worked: distraction.   Her father went jumping on the trampoline with her and five minutes later, she was laughing.  

I wonder though, will the lamps come back to haunt me?   My daughter still is upset about the river rock we didn't let her tack home from Hawaii. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son still has stuffed animals all over the floor of his room.   He got the dog to get under a pile of them last night.   My husband sent me a picture and I didn't notice the dog's head sticking out from the center until I'd looked at the picture for a bit.  Tonight my son was rolling around on the floor with all the stuffed animals.   They seem to make him happy.  For years he wanted nothing to do with stuffed animals. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   On Thursday, my daughter competes competitively in the national braille challenge.   She has practiced with me administering the test for her.   She did fairly well, but if she wants to be nationally competitive, she's going to need to slow down, take her time and think.   She knows more answers than she got right, she was just in a hurry to get sone so she could have lunch or go out and play.  

Enraged

My son is upstairs losing his mind.   He is furious.  Enraged.  Angry.   Mad.   He had thought if he waited me out that I would just give in and return screens to him.  After school he tried in his nicest voice, telling me how he'd done drawing and listening to audio books and doing things in his room and there really wasn't anything more he could do and he was bored and I said...

That's the tricky part.  He was going with the bit where you said, "but you said..." and thinking that would work.   When I explained that I hadn't said that, and that that's not how things were going to work, he got mad.   He yelled at me and told me I had lied to him.   I was, "A LIAR!" he said.   He appealed to me, saying when I was at his bed the other night before bedtime and was talking to him about screens that...

I'm not entirely sure what all his arguments were because he was standing at the top of the stairs to the basement wearing his mask from school still and mumbling.   He did take off his mask eventually, but by then he was yelling and furious at me. 

The fact remained, I told him, that he had not read three books.   The "real" books, which meant chapter books.   He asked me if certain books counted.   I told him he could bring them to me and I'd let him know.   And no, a Choose Your Own Adventure book wouldn't count because you could finish that type of book in only a few pages.   I expected him to read three age- and grade-appropriate books.   

My son was deciding for himself which books would count.   He does that, decides what something is or will be to his distinct advantage.   I told him I didn't want him to waste his time so he'd better bring the books he was thinking of reading to me because if it didn't count, he might be upset at having to read an additional book. 

He screamed and yelled and was unhappy when he saw me recording the tantrum on my phone.   He was pretending I'd changed the rules on him when he'd had conversations with his father about the three book requirement.   He was trying to play the situation to his advantage.   Only it didn't work. 

I told him he also needed to understand that just because he read the three books, I wasn't guaranteeing he would get screens back.   He had to read three books before I would consider it.   That was the minimum to start.   After that, if his behavior merited it, I would consider letting him have some screen time.   

I've been trying to be clear about things.   But I'm also taking a very hard line this time.   He's gone overboard on some things related to screens that my husband and I aren't completely happy about.   This is the first step into getting screens back.  He will have to continue to show good judgement and behavior to maintain any access to screens going forward. 

My husband is home and he's talked to my son, who has apparently magically finished one book already.   This is what happens when he won't let me confirm what books will, "count" towards his three books.   He's going to continue to rage.  And I'm going to continue to hold his computer mouse, iPad, Switch the television remotes under my control until he proves he's actually done the work to earn some screen time back. 

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Pencil Stabbing Discovery:  This weekend after my husband and son left to go skiing I went upstairs and saw on the floor of the bonus room several sheets of paper with hundreds of pencil stabs through them.   I thought it was possibly my son doing the damage, getting out his anger at me for the removal of screen time.   My daughter happily told me that no, she and he had done it together. I couldn't get out of her a reason why, other than it had been fun.