Fall Wind

I was lying in bed last night, listening to the wind blowing.  You know when you have one of those realizations and you think, “that was obvious, if only I’d bothered to think about it”?  We’ve had a protracted entering into fall this year.   The weather has been indecisive, taking us from chilly mornings to hot afternoons and back into summer-like temperatures.    I think at this point fall has finally arrived, or at least the trees have decided it has.

To sidetrack for a moment with clothing—it’s been hard to know what to wear in the morning, looking at the temperatures upcoming for the remainder of the day.   I have to change the wardrobe my children have available to them because if I don’t, they’ll continue to prefer their summer clothes over the warmer, fall wear I’ve added to their drawers.   Because I thought fall had finally arrived about two weeks ago, I pulled out all their shorts and replaced them with pants.   Short sleeved shirts were mostly removed and long-sleeved shirts added in their place.   Only fall got confused, and so did they.

My son handled it fairly well when we told him, “wear something light, because it’s going to get warm by the time you go outside to play at school.”  My daughter did her best, but her mental image of her wardrobe is a bit different than that of a sighted child, but she did very well considering.    We’ve changed them over from sandals and flip flops to shoes with socks required.  That’s been the toughest for them to remember as they come downstairs without socks on most days.    But as of this weekend, I think fall may finally be here for good (we shall see).

Back to the wind though.   As I was lying in bed I realized I could be placed somewhere out of time, in a nameless house in the southern United States and asked to identify what season of the year it was, simply by listening to the wind.    Fall leaves sound different in the wind.   They’re dry, they’re ready to fall off the trees and you can almost hear them crunching together in the wind.

I have a feeling my daughter would know this fact years before I finally realized it as a middle-aged adult.

The Big Boy Update:  My son comes downstairs every so often in the middle of the night with a hand that’s fallen asleep.   He must roll over against the railing of his bed bunk bed or just on top of his body and his hand loses circulation as a result.   When he comes downstairs I’m usually quite asleep but I wake up enough to rub his hand, shake his arm, jiggle his fingers and wiggle his hand around until it wakes back up.  At that point he goes back to his bed by himself.   Yesterday morning I woke up right as he was coming into the room in the morning and my hand was asleep.   I called him over and asked if he could help me wake my hand up.   I watched him do everything I do to his hand for about a minute.  Then he said, “there’s one more you do, but I can’t remember it.”  I told him he did a fine job and thanked him for helping me.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter does NOT want to be touched when she gets hurt—and she gets huts a lot.  She runs into things, gets hit by people coming at our by her that she doesn’t see or just has accidents all children at her age have.  Only she has a lot more than most people do due to her low vision.  She screams and cries and the one thing we want to do as parents is pick her up and console her, which is exactly what she doesn’t’ want us to do.   As soon as she’s hurt she’ll even cry out, “don’t touch me!”   We’ve learned to let her work through it without saying anything other than, “would you like an ice pack?”   She recovers quickly, but I hate it for her.

The Run I Didn’t Do:  This morning I got up at six o’clock to run with my neighbor.  Our plans were to run for two hours but I felt terrible and she had a migraine so we managed to walk around the neighborhood for two miles and then I went back to bed and slept until nine o’clock (my thanks go to my husband for letting me sleep in).  I found out later she ran five miles after I left—traitor!  She snuck that in on me.  Glad she was feeling better after I left though…