The Unexpected Conference

My husband and I had a conference with my son's teacher tonight.   We got an invitation to conference yesterday and the conference was after school.  It was only two weeks into the school year and conference days don't happen until a third of the year has passed.   So something must be up.  Was it my son's Adderall not working well enough?   Was he not working or being disruptive in school?   I didn't know what it was, but I approached the conference with a bit of trepidation at seven o'clock tonight. 

The conference came at a bit of an unexpected time in another way as my son's class has been on a field trip today.  Ty[ically, this annual field trip would be a multi-day, overnight event at a camp an hour away.   Due to COVID-19, the class is doing the field trip in two day trips.   We have to drive my son to the location and pick him up both days as opposed to the class going as a group.   It must have been a long day for his teachers so having a conference tonight must have meant trouble. 

We hurried through dinner and met downstairs at my computer to make the meeting.   When we first got on, she told us about how well my son had adjusted to the class already.   He was working hard and playing hard.  He took redirection well and was always interested in lessons when he was invited to attend.  

This is typical of conferences: starting out with the good because there's always good to report, and then getting to the part that's not so good.   Only there wasn't any bad.   It turned out it was a two-week, new school year conference she was doing with all the parents.   She had nothing but good things to say about my son.   Perhaps it was a honeymoon period, she commented, but she doesn't get the sense he's anything other than ready to be in school and happy to be a member of her class.  

She told me something I didn't know: that for the last two years, any time she had been the teacher to escort my son to the car at pickup, he'd been telling her he wanted to be in her class.  He's told me as much before but in different ways.   I knew he was looking forward to being an Upper Elementary student.   We talked about how he seemed to mature some over the end of the year last year during distanced learning—how he got better at working independently without the need for direction.  

I told his teacher I thought she was a part of his transformation as well.  He seems to really take to her style and enjoys working with her.   Overall, it was possibly the best unexpected parent-teacher conference I've ever been on.  I'm so happy my son is enjoying school and is being both a happy and productive member of the class. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles: Our nephew, Kyle, stopped in today on his way to Florida where he lives.   He's been stuck at home in New Jersey since before he remotely graduated from college in the spring.   He's finally going back to his own place after living with his parents for months.   He brought with him a huge box of American Girl items for my daughter, sent by his sister, Coco.   My daughter is so excited to have so many new things to play with.  She now has more shoes for her American Girl doll than she does herself.  I think I counted fourteen different types of shoes, including ice skates.  

The Big Boy Update:  My son loves his new class and teachers.   When he got in the car today as I picked him up from his day at camp he said to me, "Miss Michelle and Miss Allison are the best teachers."   He loves being in their class. He's waited to be in there for two years and now that he's there, he's most definitely not disappointed. 

Why Does She Care

I had ordered two things recently that came in the mail over the last two days.  My daughter has been having the best time playing with Nora, the new next-door-neighbor's daughter.   They're doing all sorts of outdoor social distanced things like putting tents up, dragging the Radio Flyer wagon around and bringing all their dolls outside.  

Since they're both bringing things back inside and doing a lot of the cleaning up, I don't mind.   The two ladies can be occupied for hours.   Every now and then I peek out and they're chatting and having a grand time, so I leave them be.  

I went to the garage last week to bring out some sidewalk chalk sticks for them as well as some egg-shaped chalk.   They had the sidewalk and part of the driveway covered.   We haven't had chalk in the bucket by the door in a while and even though they know where the chalk supply is, they hadn't gone to get any more.   Sometimes prompting a thing helps, and in this case, it kicked off some collaborative play. 

We were almost out of the huge bin of chalks my mother had gotten for the children.   I think she was the last one in the line of people to get them chalk and it all has been used.   Since we were down to two colors and four sticks, I ordered some more in a variety of colors which to them, is a big deal.   Most of the colors are the light versus the lighter option of a pastel, but some of the choices are dense pigment.   They like this, I hate it coming in the house on the soles of shoes and bare feet. 

As we picked up the back yard over the weekend I saw the huge, round plastic tub I'd gotten for big bubble making.   I had some long sticked bubble wands but at some point, they were borrowed for a birthday party and never came home.   The tub had been used for sand with the luminary project and afterward had lapsed into disuse in the corner under the deck.   

I thought my daughter and Nora might find them fun, and upon asking them they agreed that yes, making huge bubbles would be a fun thing, so I ordered a pack of the plastic wands as well as two rope-based bubble-making tools that handled right, could make even bigger bubbles.    

The wands came in today, along with a bottle of Dawn dish soap, purportedly the best for the recipe I was using that also called for corn syrup.  (It really does work well.)  My daughter was more interested in the two boxes after last night's trauma when her father accidentally recycled her special, apparently best friend box in her room she'd named Robert.   But when I showed her the bubble rope and sticks, she got excited. 

She asked me to text Nora's father to see if she could come out to meet her in the front yard, and could I tell her she'd be in the driveway, please?   I did, but Nora's family was busy today so we're trying tomorrow.  My daughter had music thirty minutes later so it worked out for the best. 

I have made the bubble mix, have the wand sticks affixed to the tops so they won't fall off like they commonly did last time, and the chalk is ready for when they want to draw on the sidewalk.   My question is: why is my daughter excited about these activities?  She can't see the size of the bubbles and the chalk becomes a mess when she hops around on top of what she's drawn in her bare feet.   She cares though.  And she's excited about both.  I really am glad she can enjoy the activities in a different way than sighted people.   

The Big Boy Update:  I was cleaning out a bad advancer clog this morning in the 3D printer before taking my son to school.   I was trying to get one last print in before taking a drop to my daughter's teachers where I'd be picking up materials for her.  I came upstairs just as it was time to leave and my son said to me, "are you going to be able to step away from 3D printing to be able to take me to school?"   He got me on that one and we both laughed. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter did not want to go to her next meeting today.   She wanted a break, had just gotten to the swings when we reminded her there was an extra meeting today.   She yelled up from the swings.  "I am on my last thread!"

So Many Models

There are so many 3D models I want to print.   My daughter's VI teacher gave me a list of some things they might be able to use and it's kept me occupied or perhaps obsessed if my children and husband are to be polled on the subject.   It's fun to print something for the sheer purpose of printing it, but to have a use for something makes it much more interesting. 

One of the things I've had a lot of fun on is mathematical objects.   A blind child can feel a die and know what a cube is.   What about the other platonic solids or even the Archemedial solids?   What about Scutoids?   (You know you want to look that one up.)

I've also been looking for articulated models that are print in place.   There is a gecko that is not only adorable, it's movement straight off the printer is mesmerizing.  I printed an articulated flapping bird and a shark that moves and has a jaw that opens and closes (with teeth).   

Then there were the snowflakes.   I found a collection of twelve snowflakes, all different,  that a blind child can feel to understand how snowflakes are all different.   

I'm getting a strange sense of deja vu that I've written about this already, so I'll cut this short because it's late and I need to de-clog the advancer on the printer again (the maintenance is just part of the job).   I wrote some emails on the same things as above, but my mind is a complete blank at this time today.   

Tomorrow I'll get back to printing some things for my children, as they're sad I'm giving away a lot of the things I've printed, like the different varieties of leaf shapes.   The one thing I've had the most fun with that I'm looking forward to printing another copy of though is a hinged square that unfolds and then folds back up as a triangle.   See?  Math.   So many fun math things to print.   Well, so many fun things to print just in general.   

The Big Boy Update: My son sometimes insists on having his food delivered in special ways, like the noodles in one bowl and the sauce in another.   I don't pander to this paricularness, but my husband doesn't mind.   It's not a bad thing, it's just a level of inflexibility I don't like to encourage.  Tonight, it came back to bite my son when he got so particular and angry about how the meatball was placed in the bowl next to the pasta that my husband snapped.   The catering days are over I think.   My son wasn't happy about it.   He shouldn't have yelled at his father, who had made him dinner and then served him in the manner he had done many times before.   Unfortunately. my husband couldn't read my son's mind and was unable to know exactly what configuration he wanted tonight. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  It was room cleaning day and when my husband went upstairs to check on things, he grabbed a cardboard box against the wall.   After he'd broken down all the cardboard and taken the bin out to be recycled for tomorrow, he disovered it was a precious box to my daughter.   She wailed and said she'd named the box Robert and she loved the box and fitted inside it.   Life was darned near over.   My husband felt badly for not mentioning it or asking her, he was just cleaning up for recycling day.   We both assured her there would likely be another box in the mail soon from Amazon.   She was not mollified, but she did calm down enough so she could go to sleep.

In Their Rooms

We have entered a new stage in the lives of my children.   They shared the same room for over eight years until last year, in a bold streak of maturity or possibly the desire to get away from her rambunctious brother, my daughter moved out to our guest room.   It took us a while to start calling my son's room his, instead of theirs.   It took us about the same amount of time to call my daughter's new room her room, instead of Nana and Papa's room (that being where they stayed when they visited.)

My daughter promised to stay with my son two nights each week, but that never happened as they both very quickly settled into the single life at home.   What's changed now that didn't happen at all before is my children want to be in their rooms alone.   They do a lot of playing around the house and outside and sometimes they do things in their rooms together, but for the most part, when they go to their rooms they want to be alone. 

They listen to audiobooks there and play with toys while listening to audiobooks.  They read for homework or do other child things in their room.   They shut the doors too because an open door might be an invitation for the other to barge in—and they are starting to like their privacy.   

It's a different feeling here these days with the children in their rooms, doing their own things.   It's a nice break some of the time.   What I suspect though, from talking to those who have older children, is this is the beginning of a stage that doesn't end until they leave home.   My children will be hitting puberty soon enough (has it been that long since I was pregnant?) and then they'll want to sleep late and avoid us as parents because we're uncool.   

The Big Boy Update:  My son has a loose tooth.   We haven't had loose teeth here for a while but it looks like the next stage of baby teeth are on the way out.   

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter spent all day today playing with Nora, the six-year-old new neighbor next door.   They play only outside and remain social distanced.   They have done chalk creations on the sidewalk, swung on the swingset, and played in the fort.   They even brought out tents and had a camp out in the middle of the day.   My daughter is so happy to have a new friend to play with.  We're very happy to have such nice neighbors move in.

So Many Ways To Fail

When someone sends you a file to print on your printer, or when you download a file from somewhere, or if you want to print something from a web page, the chance you'll get what you expect out of your printer on the paper is fairly high these days. 

A long time ago there wasn't such a thing as PDF files.   There wasn't standardization in print formats and communication between you, the software you were using, the data you wanted to print and the printer was much more complicated.  I don't even think about it today, I just press Command+P, the print dialog box opens and I press enter and thirty seconds later I have a paper in hand that looks just as I expected it to. 

3D printing is more complicated.   We are perhaps still in the infancy of 3D printing from a configuration standpoint.   There are similarities, but there are also differences.  For paper printing, there is just toner or ink.   For 3D printing there are all sorts of materials you can use from plastics to rubbery substances to carbon fiber or metal-infused filaments.   You can choose to print the same model with any of those materials.

Printing a document is two-dimensional.  3D printing has a Z-axis in addition to the X&Y axes, and that can cause all sorts of problems. To start though, the printer prints the first layer of the model.   That first later is the most important, because everything else builds on it.   If the first layer doesn't stick, your printer will keep trying to print, spewing out melted filament, but the prior layer(s) aren't there for the next layer to land and dry on.   And you just can't deposit melted plastic in the air and expect it to stay where you want it to—it has to have something to adhere to, which traces back layer after layer to the initial layer. 

There are just so many ways for a print to fail.   I had heard about this from the videos I'd watched before we got our printer.   Typically, when something bad happens enough times, I just want to step away and be done with the thing for a while.   In the case of 3D printed models, you can have things happen like stringy plastic all over the place, a gummed up nozzle, a plate bed that's gone out of alignment, filament that doesn't seem to want to print no matter how you tweak the settings or a situation so dire that the entire print head has to be taken apart, cleaned out and disposable parts replaced.   

All of those have happened to me, plus some others.   And yet only once have I wanted to walk away for a while.   I let a print go for a while without checking on it.   My thought is at this point, that one area of the print bed had gotten misaligned when I had accidentally put pressure on it while cleaning the bed up between prints.   That misalignment had prevented that initial and crucial layer from adhering to the plate bed because when the nozzle had extruded the filament, it was too far away from the print bed to land on it and stick down.   What happened next was two full hours of filament coming out of the nozzle and sticking to the bits extruded just before.   A massive ball of melted and subsequently hardened plastic surrounded the hot end of the extruded head. 

It was so much filament it had melted up into the workings of the extruded, causing me to take the whole unit off the machine and try and get the plastic out from around delicate wires and other parts.   I had to put the unit back on twice, reconnect it, have it heat up, and then disconnect it so I had a chance to pull away some of the plastic that was now partially melted.   

But for some reason, none of it bothers me.   It's like a puzzle, figuring out what settings are needed for the various filaments (there are hundreds).   Discovering what nozzle diameter and layer height produces the best models and what filaments look the best in different situations.   

I keep failing, but unlike the typical me, I'm not disheartened by it.   I suppose I'm looking forward to figuring this out—knowing what I need to do to get a quality print every time (or most of the time.)  My husband hasn't been that interested in printing much but tonight he has a model that's going to take over three hours to print.   I got it set up with the settings I think have the best chance for success (it's a difficult model to print because there are a lot of overhangs with no support in mid-air).   I kicked off the print before writing this post and I am happy to have just checked on it and it hasn't failed yet.   I think it will print successfully based on what I learned from the past two prints.   The question is, will it look good when it's done?   

There are a lot of ways to fail in 3D printing, but when you get something right and the resulting model is in your hands, looking beautiful or doing something interesting, it's all worth it. 

The Big Boy Update:  I had been working in the basement on kicking off the next 3D printed model and was leaving to go back upstairs when my son called out from his computer with this single statement, "I just had an idea: what if I had an army of girlfriends?!"   He was playing Minecraft.  Hopefully, there is something in the game that explains this statement from my son.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles: my daughter loves Nana's next-door-neighbor, Susan.  Susan has an elevator like my parents do in their house in the mountains.   My daughter can work their elevator and loves going up and down in it, she told me.   Apparently, both my parents and Nana's neighbor's elevator need braille numbers on the buttons so when my daughter visits she can know which button to push without asking.  

Computer

My husband, after more than four years, upgraded his computer.   The result is my son now has a computer for the first time.  He'll be needing one for school soon enough to do assignments on, but for now, he's mostly excited about it because he can play games with his father. 

Perhaps most parents wouldn't be excited to see their child in front of a computer playing Minecraft, but I have a BS in Computer Science and spent my career pre-children doing software development and education in the industry.   So when I came downstairs today and saw for the first time my son at his own computer, I had to take a picture for posterities' sake.  

Oddly enough, this is to me a lot like the first day of school.   And yes, he's going to play a lot of games on his computer, but children learn at school through play.   The statistics on video gameplay aren't as negative as you might suspect, some studies reporting positive benefits to playing video games.  

That being said, too much of anything can be bad, and my son would overdose on screen time if we let him.   It'll be another balancing thing for us to work with my son on.   

The Big Boy Update:  My son at his new computer, creating something in Minecraft

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter scrapes herself when she bumps into things.   She also scratches a lot.   The combination of that and late summer hot weather in the back yard and her legs are a complete mess.   My husband and I just put fifteen bandaids on her legs in the hopes we could give them a chance to heal and/or not be scratched by my daughter. 

The Playground

Today we had our special lunch with my daughter's retired braillist.   We met at a park and ate under a shelter that had easily forty picnic tables.   We weren't certain why the tables were all pushed to the outer edges of the shelter but since there were zero people in the area, it was fine with us.   We stayed at our respective tables and had our lunches while we talked. 

My daughter was excited all morning about going and had even made some extra gifts for the hedgehog she would be giving away later at lunch.  She had gone through areas of the craft room she has permission to pull items from and then had gone through my 3D model completed prints bin, which she did not have permission to go through.   What she's gotten from the bench in the mechanical room at the 3D printer was an aborted vase base.   It was the shape of a small cupcake tin and was something I was going to throw away, so her repurposing it to a dessert bowl into which she put some plastic sprinkles (that look just like the real thing) was a nice choice.   

She got a paper party favor bag from the wrapping paper area and a sheet of tissue paper.  Then, she'd found some silk mini flowers and put them all in the bag.   The tissue paper was a blanket for the hedgehog and the flowers were snacks.   After that, she headed off to virtual school for the morning. 

I had a doctor's appointment I needed to go to that couldn't be done virtual after dropping my son off at school.   When I returned, my daughter was ready to go to lunch and walked out into the garage when I pulled up, opened the back door, got in, and sat down.   I told her we had just a few minutes to go before we were ready—she stayed in the car and waited.

Lunch and conversation ended and we were going to go home but we had one more stop to hopefully make.   My daughter had heard there was a playground in the park.   We walked over to find signs that the governor had closed the parks.   It turns out that tomorrow's playgrounds would be open again so we were one day off.   Can you imagine the disappointment of a little girl who felt she was promised a playground? 

So wen bent the rule, thinking how much difference could eighteen hours make?   Hopefully not too long a jail sentence.  What we did tell my daughter was that we only had a few minutes to play before she had to get back for her next class. 

It was hot out.   The three of us had our masks on.   What surprised me was that there were other families at this playground and no one had a mask.   Typically what I've seen is respect and compliance from people out of a desire to prevent the spread of COVID-9.  I want people to respect my decisions, so I respected theirs, but we kept my daughter in another area and I told her and my husband we'd be not only hand sanitizing, we'd be elbow-down sanitizing when we got to the car and then thoroughly washing our arms when we got home.  

The Big Boy Update:  An hour after dropoff this morning I got a call from my son's school while I was in with my doctor.   I knew they'd call my husband, but I was concerned.  One hour prior, my son hadn't had a fever, but why else would they be calling?   You're going to laugh, as did I, when I got a text message from my husband ten minutes later saying, Greyson's teacher wanted to know if we could pick up some crickets for their gecko named Geiko for the upcoming long weekend and drop them off at the end of the day?   I'll take cricket purchasing over a fever phone call any day. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  I told the story above about how my daughter created a care package for her hedgehog earlier today.   It still amazes what she accomplishes.   She can't see but she can find very specific things, some in locations within locations and some things, like the container she put the jimmies in, she explored and discovered.   Amazed.  Truly.  And I'm around her every day.