Zipper’s Trip to Zimbabwe

My daughter loves to play word games.   She makes some of them up, while others she hears about from other people such as her teachers.  She's always good at any verbal game because firstly, she's very verbal but secondly, she isn't distracted by all that pesky vision the rest of us have to contend with.  This gives her more focus on the important things, like who went where on what.

The game, as she first introduced me to it, was a travel game.   You would be going to a place, travelling o a thing.   The first person started with the letter A and would, for instance, go to Alabama on an antelope.  The second person would pick up with B, going to Billy's house in a buggy.   The game proceeded until the end of the alphabet was reached. 

This was a fun way for my daughter to end her VI meetings while giving her practice typing on her braillewriter.   She would say and type her answer and then her teacher would do the same on her own braillewriter.   The game translated beautifully to distanced learning as they took turns and could each type at their own end. 

My daughter got my son interested in the game a week or so back on our way to school.  Initially, he had no interest in playing but after a few letters, he jumped in.   There were variants of this game such as things you'd take on a camping trip (the more ridiculous the thing, the better). 

Tonight, my daughter wanted to jump in the trampoline with me and play 'popcorn,' her favorite game in which you try to jump as hard as you can around her balled up body until she breaks form.   I started the game while we played, saying when it was your turn on the mat, balled up, you had to think fast and call out who you were, where you were going and how you'd be getting there.  You kept going until you lost hold of your legs.

We took turns until we got to the end of the alphabet at which point we had to go inside.   She ended with her favorite cat, Zipper, going to Zimbabwe on a zebra.   

The Big Boy Update:  When I picked up my son from school today the first thing I said was, "we've got a bit of an emergency" to which  he immediately replied, "we have to hurry home because you have groceries that need to be put in the refrigerator."   He'd noticed the bags and knew what that meant.   I told him it was mostly the ice cream he and his sister had been asking us to get.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles: We had to sweep out the trampoline tonight.   It was dark when we were jumping, which didn't affect my daughter in any way.   She noticed what I couldn't see: that the trampoline was covered with leaves and small particles from the wind.    I told her we'd be on lightning game round while I swept: the first one who came up with a full set of who/where/how would call it out as fast as they could.   You couldn't call out an answer until you had all the information.   She's fast, we were about even on letters by the time I'd gotten done sweeping the trampoline deck.    

What Can She See? (Again)

It's time for another one of those, "what can she see?" posts.   We don't really know what my daughter can or can't see.  At this point, it's almost entirely a question of what she can see, because the question of what she can't see is just too comprehensive to explore.   When we discover that she can actually see something now, we get excited, because we've feared that the answer to that question has been, "nothing" for a good while now. 

My daughter knows her way around our house and has mapped out her paces so she deftly navigates around in a manner that would lead you to believe she can see a lot more than she really can—until you start really watching her.   Then you realize she's running into things all the time, and I do mean all the time, that if she even had minimal vision she could avoid. 

It might be a matter of what lighting makes for easier seeing for her though.   For a long time, we thought more light might be associated with seeing more, but we're discovering less light is far more beneficial when it comes to what she describes as seeing things.   

Tonight, I asked my daughter if she wanted to have the new light do-jobber put in her bedroom as she went to bed.  "Do-jobber" is just a word because I don't know what the thing is actually called.  It's a laser and LED globe that shines red, green, blue, and white light in a pattern on the ceiling as well as a green laser that spreads a pile of dots on the ceiling along with the LED lights. 

There are three levels of brightness.   You can have zero, one, or two of the LED colors showing.   The laser pattern can fade in and out or can be off.   I wasn't sure if she would see any of it.   I didn't test her color discerning capabilities because I didn't want to quiz her, knowing the blood that got behind her retina years ago distorted her color perception dramatically.   So I told her what I was shining on the ceiling color-wise. 

The first thing that surprised me was she thought it was too bright.   I had it on the red setting, which is the dimmest of the colors.   She could see each color and understood when there were two colors showing.   If I'd asked her what two colors, she probably couldn't have told me but perhaps someday if her vision remains stable, she'll know what red looks like to her now and will be able to guess fairly accurately. 

What she easily could do was tell me when the pinprick laser dots came on and off.   I wasn't expecting her to see those at all.   She asked me to turn those off because they were too bright.   In the end, she picked red light at its most dim setting and wanted to keep it on for an hour's sleep timer while she fell asleep. 

So she can still see something and some things, while not that bright to me, were very bright to her.   I don't expect her eyes to heal what with their poor vasculature, but maybe she's seeing a bit more than before.   She was wearing sunglasses too, adding to the dimming, and yet she saw it all.   She also has no natural lenses in her eyes and had no corrective lenses in her glasses, which made seeing the laser dots also impressive because she has zero ability to focus. 

I'm happy about tonight.  It's a lot of something that was more than I thought she could see at all. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son wanted to play music in the front yard while he, his sister, and the neighbors played kickball in the fashion they play at school that meets socially distancing guidelines.   He really wanted music to go with their game so I brought a Bluetooth speaker out and his iPad and showed him how to look up songs on Amazon Music.   He was so happy about it he brought the speaker in and wanted to have music playing beside him while we ate our dinners.   We asked him to not as we wanted to talk together during dinner. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  I dried my daughter's hair for the first time in a long time today.   She went to the chiropractor with me this morning on short notice—in her pajamas—as I had let her ride in the car with me to take my son to school and didn't know at the time she wanted to go see the chiropractor as her back had been bothering her.   She remained in her pajamas until bath time tonight.   Tomorrow she's back to getting dressed before school starts at 9:15

The Most Drops

 My daughter drops things.   She runs into things.   She can't see that the things on the desk are there or table or bed or floor even and things get knocked off or over all the time.   She will learn skills as she gets older on how to place things in such a way as to know where they are to protect her from knocking her own items over.   

That doesn't work when you're somewhere where you didn't place the things around, like sitting down to eat a meal at a location where the food has been set by someone else.  She's learned to be careful, because it's no fun knocking over your glass of milk because you didn't know it was there and you moved too quickly.  She very proprioceptive and is also quite careful, but she's also eight-years-old and likes to move quickly. 

For instance this evening she was working on a math assessment she didn't get to do during school because she and her brother had dentist appointments at the end of the school day.  She got up from the desk three times and each time she walked into the chair from the other desk that had been moved over to sit by her during the day.   Did she move the chair out of the way so she wouldn't run into it again?   Not until I suggested she did.  She didn't run into the chair hard, but it had to hurt to some degree.   She never complains unless she's really hurt, usually involving her head.  She's tough. 

My daughter knocks things over and runs into things.  But I have the most drops.   I drop things all the time—and I do mean all the time.  Yesterday I think I had dropped at least fourteen things and I didn't start counting at the beginning of the day.   Sometimes, after dropping something, I'll drop it again as I'm picking it up.   There is a reason for this, or I suspect two reasons, but one reason I'm going to either give credit to or place blame upon. 

I don't have full feeling in my hands.   I have a spinal cord injury and at this point I've had several surgeries to help things.   And while things improved rather dramatically after my nerves had healed, there was additional damage done during one of the surgeries due to the large amount of scar tissue I have in my neck in the area the doctor was working.  Most of what happened in that surgery has returned to the function I had before, but I remain with hands that just can't discern things tactually like they used to. 

That's part of the problem and perhaps the largest contender in why I drop so many things.   The problem is compounded three-fold.   First, I'm always in a hurry.  Second, I try to carry more than I should.  And third—and this is the most damning one—I seem to think I can feel things normally. 

Why it is after fifteen years I don't remember I need to take more care, pay more attention to and grasp more firmly to things, I don't understand.   Not everything I drop is a result of misjudging my grasp because when you've stacked things too high just because you don't want to make two trips to the attic and then something drops, it's the fault of the arms and ultimately brain that cause the drops. 

It got me thinking about the phrase, "I'm clumsy," which I've used to describe myself for years.  Other people see themselves as clumsy without have a neurological deficiency in their hands.   Does that mean they're rushing, not paying attention, and/or carrying too many things at once?  I'm not sure how a person can qualify for the label 'Clumsy' without having one or more of those characteristics.   

Fortunately, I have them all, so I definitely qualify for what I would say is clumsy.   Did I say fortunately?

The Big Boy Update:  My son has been showing both signs of maturity and impulse control, responding politely and immediately to requests from us as well as outright uncontrolled rage in the form of yelling at us for the slightest and unknown frustration from us.   He's moving in the right direction.  Less than two weeks at school and the upperclassmen and same-grade peers in his classroom are making a difference in how he behaves.   I think it's a combination of age as well as positive role models from school.   I like to tell him I'm proud of him when he does something positive or mature, but he hates when i do that so I'm looking for words that intimate the same thing without directly saying so, sneaking in the positivity any way I can

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My son, daughter, Rayan, and Keira were on the playset and swings late this afternoon.   The dog always wants to be out with them, but ever since our new neighbors moved in, the dog wants to go look for him so I have to leash her outside.   I went out and was hooking up the dog when I heard my daughter say to Keira about the game the boys were predominately in charge of creating, "This is boring.   It's all about killing."  Then, before Keira could respond, my daughter added, "well, I like the killing part."  Keira, ever the negotiator, said to her, "we could always suggest another game."  I wonder if they suggested one with less killing?

Open a Can of Worms

I've never seen a can of worms.   I don't know where you would buy one or what dish you would include them in.  Perhaps the can refers to a container in which you store worms for fishing.   Why opening the can indicates calamity is soon to follow is unclear to me.   And while the connection is unknown, I understand the connotation of the phrase perfectly well.   Today, I opened a can of worms. 

It wasn't my intention when I texted my sleeping husband this morning, saying I was thinking about buying something with a, "it's not expensive" addition to the end of the text.  Typically, if my husband or I want to purchase something, we don't need the express consent of the other one.   We discuss things that will be higher in price, but for the most part, we don't talk about things like getting new socks or a container to put my daughter's collection of stuffed animals in.   We trust the other person will make wise choices, or if they're rash choices, it will hopefully be an interesting kind of rash. 

In this case, I had been looking at videos online and had found something that was $250 so I wanted to talk to my husband about it because of price, but more because it was going to impact space and room organization, and I wanted to be sure he was okay with the potential change.   I had left the page up on Amazon the night before but when I got to the computer this morning the price was showing at $150.   I thought I must be missing somehing, so I went back to the review I'd seen the day before and linked to the site from his post and sure enough, the price was $250 there. 

So, I decided to just get it before things changed back.   I texted my husband saying I'd tell him about it when he woke up, and then got to work on some other things.   When he woke up, I told him, "I got another 3D printer."   I was expecting him to be angry or exasperated or to tease me because everyone knows how obsessed I am with 3D printing, but he just laughed good-naturedly and I told him all about it. 

This printer is entirely different from the one we currently have.   3D printing is done in two main ways.   We have the kind where a spool of filament is fed into a hot nozzle which melts it and then layers the now melted plastic into the model.   The type of printer I'd gotten this morning is a resin printer.   Instead of a filament, you have a vat of liquid resin, and light cures layers of the resin which build on top of one another. 

The first printer we have is more substantial and flexible and can do lots of things.   This little resin printer will do some things, on a small scale.   Some of the things I've been wanting to print are very, very hard for our current type of printer to print, but are just what resin 3D printers excel at.   

The title of this post was about a can of worms.   What happened was I needed to free up some space on the other side of the workbench—the workbench we got for my husband that I've mostly taken over with this 3D printing mania.   It wasn't about the $150 that I wanted to talk to my husband about, it was about the space and the use of his workbench.   

He was, like he always is, understanding.  He even had some good suggestions on what I could do with the secondary work table I'd gotten as I'd be needing it for the washing and curing stages after the printing was done (resin printing has more steps, but yields beautiful, finely detailed prints).   Later in the morning he was in the basement with me and I was asking if he really, really needed that miter saw in the workroom on account of it was taking up so much space (he assured me he did) when I noticed the reverse osmosis filter also needed replacing and could he please help with that too?

He got not only roped into rearranging part of the basement workroom but changing out two filters that spewed water all over him and took a good hour to get finished.   I don't know that it was how he intended to spend his day. No, I know it wasn't how he intended to spend his day.  But just like my husband always is, he didn't complain as he helped me.   

He hasn't been as interested in 3D printing as I thought he would be.   He told me today, "I haven't had a chance, you're printing day and night."  Maybe with two printers, he can get some prints in?

The Big Boy Update:  My son's shoes were missing from his trip to the beach where he went fishing with Blake on Friday.   We looked Saturday morning for them but ultimately gave up.  My son had no idea where they were.   It shows just how tired he was when he got home because I found out today his shoes are in Blake's car.   He had no idea he came into the house without shoes on. 

The Tiny Gitl Chronicles:  My best friend's daughter, Ellie, wanted to learn how to babysit and asked if she could do so with our children first.   My daughter absolutely wanted Ellie to come over, and today we were able to coordinate schedules for her to have a social distanced sitting of my daughter (my son mostly managed himself.)  Ellie could only stay a little over an hour, but she promised if we would have her back, she would do all the dishes—she likes doing dishes, she said.   My daughter wants her to come back as soon as possible. 

It’s Movie Night’s Fault

 Se this?  This is the dining room table I bought for myself years before I got married.  

When I got married to my husband this table went into the attic but when we built and moved into our current house, we, on not knowing what to do with the table when the mover's were unloading, told them to put it in the basement.   And here it's sat for almost ten years.   

It gets used all the time.   In the opposite direction as the piano is where the television is with sofas and chairs and where our Movie Night friends sit when we have movie night.   Someday, we hope to have movie night again. 

This picture of the table was taken a half-hour ago as a point of celebration because until this evening, the table has been covered in my husband's paperwork and other things.   He would work on it a bit, but for all intents and purposes, the table was unusable save for a spot to store things my husband hadn't gotten around to taking care of yet.  

My children are with Nana and Papa tonight and the big goal today was to get through the mire of stuff—and he did it.   My husband worked for hours and got it all taken care of.   We can now put together the big Lego project with my son we've been talking about.   

My husband came into the mechanical room (through the door in the picture above) and said, "do you know why the table got so out of hand?  I think I figured it out.   I had some ideas but when he told me I realized he was completely right.   He's always stored things there, but he cleans them up on a fairly regular basis—because we have movie night at our house.   People come over, sit at the table and eat their dinner or work on their laptops during the movie.   He has to clean up the table regularly. 

Despite COVID-19, mu husband told me he wasn't going to let the table get so out of hand again.  It was a lot of work today, on a day he'd rather have been doing other things. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son caught several fish at the beach yesterday.   It was several hours there and then several hours to get back home, but they fished for a long time and my son loved it all.   He brought home what looks to be a flounder that he wants us to cook.   He'll be allergic to it most likely, but we'll eat it so as to not waste its life. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is on the fourth book in the third five-book series currently.   Book five is released in early October.   She's going to have a hard time waiting to find out what happens. 

Direct Connection

Many, many, many people have contracted COVID-19.   I would say "countless" but for the first time probably in the history of the world, we know more about the actual number of people who have gotten an illness or condition than we likely have about anything else so significant. 

I've looked at the statistics on and off since the beginning of the year.   I've gone through periods of looking every day at the world, country, state, county, and even zip code numbers and calculated "how many people in X" have COVID-19 around me.   Statistics can sound both good and bad at the same time.  Saying only 1000 people in a million are infected sounds rather low, but saying one in a thousand somehow sounds more ominous.   How many people might have gone through the doctor's office, grocery store, pharmacy or, now, are connected in some way to my son's classmates at school?   In that light, it seems like a much higher probability we'll encounter someone who is positive for the virus. 

My son's school is taking exceptionally vigilant measures to keep everyone not only socially distanced, but surfaces, objects, doors, toilets, etc. sanitized and safe from one students to the next.  The school had an email come out today saying saying again that they highly recommend families do not travel if at all possible and if they must and go out of state, they should quarantine at home for fourteen days.   That was the prior message.   Today, that message was strengthened with a requirement that families who travel for the holidays must now quarantine for fourteen days. 

Any student or parent who has been potentially exposed does not come to school until the have a negative test result.   Any such situations are reported (anonymously) to all families, listing only what class the potential exposure happened in.   So far, we have had no confirmed cases at my son's school.  My daughter is at home, so her only exposure risk is from our situation here. 

Up until today, I know of people who know people who've had COVID-19 in our area but no one I know personally.   I looked at the statistics for our county and was both surprised and saddened by the death statistics.   There have been deaths, but not a lot of them.   While some cases can't be helped with any amount of medical intervention, we do live in an area heavily focused on medicine.   The sad part was that nearly fifty percent of the deaths were from outbreaks in two nursing homes.   I can't imagine the guilt of the administration and staff, knowing this happened to their patients.   I don't know the dates so this could have been early on but it still was tragic to see those numbers on my computer screen. 

Today my husband told me one of his clients had called.   She was planning on going to sign some documents for the upcoming sale of her house but had just found out her daughter had tested positive.   She had seen her several days before.  Her daughter is one of my good friends and was my matron of honor at our wedding. 

My husband and our family are fine as he hasn't seen my friend's mother in some time and although that's comforting for us, I'm more worried about Bonnie, who is older.   Hopefully she, and our friend will both be fine. 

The Big Boy Update:  Blake took my son to the beach today on a day trip to fish off a pier.   My son hasn't been fishing before but apparently, he had a great time.   We now have a fish in our refrigerator with both guts and scales still intact.   We're going to have to do something with him tomorrow lest it goes bad in our refrigerator

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and I (as her sous chef) made "Dirt Cups" today for her Friday fun VI Google meet.   My husband got the ingredients in advance (chocolate pudding, Cool Whip, Oreo cookies, milk, and gummy worms) and today, we made ten little cups with pudding mud, crumbled Oreo dirt on the top, and gummy worms crawling out from the depths of the "dirt".   There was a lesson entailed in this: my daughter had to read the ingredients list and description (page 1) and then follow the directions (page 2).   She had to keep mentally organized where she was on each page and where things were on the counter without being able to see anything.   She went to get things such as measuring cups and a cutting board.   She also had to decide when she should ask for help.   She did well but had a bit of a challenge reading the directions start to finish and then going back to find each successive step without re-reading most of what was on the second page.   Her teacher is exceptionally patient and always has something positive to say about what she's doing.   My daughter called me her sous chef the whole time after her teacher dubbed me that at the start.  After that meeting, she had another meeting with her favorite braillist, Mrs. B.   They were going to play a game and my daughter, learning from the last lesson, asked me for some help, calling me the, "sous game" which I didn't get until I realized she'd swapped 'chef' for 'game'.   

Let Me Count the Books

I had taken a picture of a stack of notebooks the other day and was going to write a post about them but other things came up and the topic got moved down the priority list.   I'm glad it did, because today, not two days later, I've taken a new picture based on how things have changed. 

The students in my daughter's class are doing distanced learning using Google Classroom in conjunction with some other sites and tools.   The organization and thought that's been put into the platform and by the teachers is impressive.  There is connectivity and continuity in many things where confusion abounded last school year when we were thrust into distanced learning on short notice.  

Lessons are still presented by live teachers.  Students can raise their hands and be called on to answer questions.   There is a chat section on the side where students type their name in to indicate they're present.  Additional tools are available to the teacher, such as something called Jamboard, where students can create their own sticky note with their idea and add it to the board, just like you would do in a brainstorming business meeting with real sticky notes on a whiteboard. 

There are other tools and fun features like interactive, graphical assignments online for the students to do. The students also have workbooks they used each day.   The teacher will say, "open your workbooks to page nineteen" as they begin their lesson.   My daughter has the same workbooks, only in her case the volume of paper and space is three three-inch binders thick for EL (English Language) and four three-inch binders for math.   She has VI notebooks for online class as well as independent learning work.   In addition, there are reading books the students can read online that must be converted to braille for my daughter.   And that's just the main things.   My daughter's braillist sends a daily email with other things for us to print out and have ready for her as needed.  

We had to come up with a rigorous organizational system to keep the pages of braille (which look like a sea of dots on white papers) from becoming a mess of confusion.   Here's what the staging area for my daughter's daily school looks like:

If it seems like a lot, it is.   Keep in mind though that our teachers at school manage this amount of material for each of the VI students they're working with.   Can I just say again, I don't know how they do it with such grace?  

It is at this point I want to send some thank you's out.  First and foremost, to Mrs. B., my daughter's braillist, who is one of the most organized people I know.   She has made a large collection of files not only easy to get to, but easy to print because she's formatted each of them so all I have to do is open each file up and send it to the embosser.   It's not just naming the files that she's good at though.   She has to take all the materials the other children are using and convert the materials in all kinds of formats into braille at the level my daughter has currently learned—no small feat.  She is very good at this I'd venture to say, given how quickly she gets things to us.   She makes it look effortless but from the small amount I've done in this vein, I know she makes a complex job look easy.  

Secondly, I want to send thanks to Ms. Sample and Ms. Crossey, two more of the VI teachers my daughter works with.   When they realized we were confused by the references to workbook pages and weren't keeping up with having materials printed and ready for my daughter each day, they did a mass printing and organizing job.  Within forty-eight hours they had seven full books ready for us to pick up at school.   

Another thanks from me to Ms. Sample and Ms. Crossey for surprising me with a box of printer paper already hole punched.   This is a side story but one that bears telling.   In March when lockdown happened and we ordered our embosser which prints braille (best decision ever) I ordered continuous feed braille paper.   At the time, supplies were frightfully low from companies who produced the paper possibly due to COVID-19 and I was only able to find and order unpunched paper.   

Brailled things tend to take up lots of room so putting them together so for small things we were doing nineteen-hole punching to create booklets.   But we could punch three or four sheets at a time.   For larger work, we would punch the standard three-holes, but we couldn't do many pages at a time there either.   My husband got fed up and ordered a forty-sheet at a time three-hole punch (which is wonderful as well as fun to use).   We were spending a lot of time punching holes though.  

I decided to see if I could order paper that had both the three-hole as well as the nineteen-hole slots already punched in the side of the paper and by now, there was stock available I could order.   That meant all we had to do was print and separate the continuously printed pages.   We could then put the pages right in binders.   Only it was sixty dollars for shipping for the heavy boxes of paper.   So I elected to have the paper sent "Free Matter for the Blind" which as you might guess by the name, is free.   Blind people can have printed material shipped to them as well as by them for free via the USPS.   However, it's not fast shipping.   But free was a lot better than $60, so I was on hold for the paper to arrive. 

On Tuesday, after the holiday weekend, I stopped in at school where my daughter's teachers put in my trunk the binders of materials they'd printed out and organized.   There was also a box.   I figured it was more printed material for her.   Much to my surprise, I got home to find they had given me a box of that precious, time-saving three/nineteen hole paper.   I've never been so happy to have paper with little holes in it in my life.   

It's a team effort to educate my daughter this year.   We have her teachers at school doing their work to get the teaching done remotely.   They are also getting us material both printed and electronically in a format we can give to my daughter so she can do the classwork with ease.   My daughter doesn't have any idea the effort that happens behind the scenes, but as her mother and as someone who has a small window into the world of her teacher's jobs, I am exceptionally grateful to them. 

The Big Boy Update:  I drove my son to his day field trip to a camp site today.  I put on his audiobook per his request but five minutes later I realized it was my audiobook.  He said, "no, mom, don't change it, I want to keep listening," and we listened to it the whole way there.  I had told him about the book the day before, saying I thought he might like it.   I didn't mean to force it on him right in the middle of the book, but he didn't seem to mind.   Part-way to the camp he said from the back seat, "my tooth fell out."  I had to come up with a container for it and ended up dumping my little pill container into a tiny pocket of my purse so we could save his tooth for tonight.   He wasn't bothered or even interested in his tooth falling out, what he wanted was me to press play so he could continue to listen to the audiobook.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter's legs are a total wreck of scabs and scrapes.   She scrapes herself and gets bruises often, but this was bad as she was itching things and making large scabs.   Today, instead of getting dressed like we normally require her to do, I told her she had permission to keep her long pajamas on—provided she didn't scratch her legs.   So far, she's done a good job of trying to leave her legs alone.