Every morning, I walk four houses worth of kids to school. This morning walk may be the best part of the day, except for the moment I fall asleep at night (I do like to sleep). Ruby comes along and gets a treat from the school crossing guard! After I drop the kids off, I run for 1.5 miles around the neighborhood. “Run” is too ambitious a word, it’s more like slow trot.
I like keeping the house humming with activity, but ever since we came home from vacation, we have been just a little too busy. Jeremy’s been out of town and back and furiously working, I’ve been trying to manage work which has been more challenging than usual and I’ve made more trips into the office – lots of attorney’s phone calls and arguments. Also, as I become a more experienced patent examiner and I’m ready to take on more responsibilities, my work is being scrutinized more carefully by reviewers, which has also been a little stressful. Vince has a schedule which needs carpool and neighborly coordination. And Edda is still crying at bed time. Again tonight, it was the same thing, totally happy during the day and at all meal times and at school. But when it’s bedtime, plaintive crying for no apparent reason. I guess we’ll try the Prevacid again and if that works, I guess that’ll be that, but I suppose if it continues I’ll need to set up an appointment with a GI person (although it could be something completely different than her gut). I am a much calmer person when Edda is happy all the time (and it’s OK if she’s mad if you don’t have the right video in the DVD player or if she’s tired of waiting in line or something that has some REASON to be mad/sad), but this inconsolable, unknown crying which lasts a long time is so hard to take. I hope it ends soon.
I’ll leave you with a little bit of knitting, which since this photo was taken, I’ve managed to mess up because of miscounting # of stitches on the way home on the Metro. I’ll have to rip out some rows and start again. Oh and as an aside, I met a person on the Metro who saw me knitting and told me she reported to Wendy of Wendy Knits! fame who is a manager at the Department of Labor. Knitting has it’s own online world which is incredibly active and there are superstars and Wendy is one of them. Ahhh, so close to (knitting) fame! Almost as exciting as the day I let Bob Costas cut in line in front of me at La Guardia or the time I talked to Mia Farrow for 10 minutes about how warm to keep a house.
Here are some things I find interesting on the web:
A review of the Bard Conservatory playing at Alice Tully Hall, you can see Bob, Jeremy’s dad, in the photo in the background playing cello.
A science catfight! Is global warming caused by man? Jeremy’s coworker from UCS got onto Colbert Report.
A girl with Rett Syndrome composes music and types full sentences.
Seth saw that I was going to be out of photo-commission for a while and offered to let me borrow his Canon 30D, which is a couple of notches better than my regular Nikon D40.
It has been 18 years since I last used a Canon, when I bought a Canon EOS 650 which I hated so much. I replaced it with a Nikon F2 which I liked much better. I have been more of a Nikon girl ever since, but I know more professional photographers use Canon and I like the lens selection better with a Canon. I’m very excited, there are separate controls for the aperture and shutter speed which makes me very happy. (OK, this is a boring post). I really need a haircut and Edda just woke up again. She’s still not sleeping well. Sigh.
Last weekend, Rena & I took a trip to Death Valley, Las Vegas, Victorsville CA, Los Angeles and back. There are several pictures taken in this trip for sharing:
It’s Friday evening – Vince is out with friends and Jeremy is flying somewhere over the eastern side of the United States. I’m home on the couch watching Edda watch Finding Nemo. I tried to use mom and dad’s old camera, but it’s so unusable and unresponsive, it feels like I’m taking photos back in 2002. So I’m wondering if I really will go without photos on this blog for a month or if I’m going to go out and buy a point and shoot camera. Jeremy’s always thought that we needed a P&S camera as he hates lugging my camera around and sometimes he’d like to take his own photos.
The lack of photos means that I need to focus more on my writing which places me in a spot I am a little uncomfortable with because I don’t usually proofread my entries and I am a lazy writer – run on sentences, nouns and verbs which don’t match, a lot of extra, useless words and lots of cliches.
It has been an exhausting week, we still are not unpacked from the New Mexico trip, I’ve had a stressful week at work which has compounded my jet lag to make me a little insomniac. Also, I went to Edda’s yearly IEP meeting on Thursday, which was fun and productive, but also exhausting in it’s own right so I’m beat.
It has been a good year for Edda in terms of school, but also a good year for me. At last year’s IEP meeting, I was an emotional mess. I was still trying to work out my own educational goals for Edda. Was inclusion appropriate? Was a special needs school appropriate? I was fanatically, frantically and irrationally focused on Edda learning to read. Why was I focused on this goal? Well, at the national conferences on Rett, there are speech therapists who get up and talk about Rett Syndrome girls who can read, there are murmurs among parents who say that their daughter is included in a regular classroom and doing 4th grade work. I was enchanted and determined. So last year, I diligently went to seminars with Linda Burkhart and I bought a touch screen computer and switches and I made flashcards and laminated them. All this work led me down a road of intense self-imposed pressure that if I couldn’t make this work, I would have failed Edda. There were a lot of stressful sessions (not for Edda, who for the most part, enjoyed them) where I’m holding up pictures of animals/letters/number/pictures for Edda and trying to make her choose with her eye movements and I really couldn’t say for sure if she understood anything, everything was so inconsistent. I was going crazy, I needed to take a step back.
This year, I’m calmer and happier. I am not staying up late laminating cards. I am not stressing out about Edda learning to read, I’m focused on Edda enjoying her life and more importantly trying to balance everything so I don’t go crazy. It’s not to say that I won’t go back to laminating the cards and looking into other more high-tech modes of communication for Edda, it’s just that I had to take a little mental break from Rett Syndrome (if that is really at all possible) and enjoy Edda for just who she is at this moment and not just spin spin spin around in circles about what I should/could/need to do for Edda just so I can keep my head on straight.
Edda’s IEP meeting was very relaxed and informal, since her school isn’t changing and her services will still be the same I felt very much at ease – although it was very hot because it was 91 degrees outside and the school’s air conditioning isn’t scheduled to be turned on until next week.
So this is Doris’ birthday present to me. (Sorry for not getting it posted sooner, Doris) Laff the funny thing is that I knew what Doris was getting me before she did. She sent it from some website that’s gives out random gifts that are at retail, worth more than $10. So here it is. Thanks sis! It’s a “Le Pinch”. Some wind up toy that supposed to climb over books and stuff on a table. If I had a video iPhone, I would record a video of the thing in action, but sadly, I’ll wait until June. 🙂
Still in Austin on Easter Sunday, we celebrated with a hunt and Cascarones!
Toured Austin. Doesn’t that wheelchair look too small for Edda? In January, I called the wheelchair company and they couldn’t believe that I needed to buy a wheelchair, they insisted that they lasted at least 4-5 years. So I said OK and now I look at this photo and it looks too small to me…
A pedicab ride:
Bookpeople:
On Friday, we flew to Austin where we spent the weekend with our pals the Strickers!
Vince learned to fire rockets (I got a good picture of the Port-A-Potty Rocket!)
Here’s Edda hanging out with the folks hiding from the sun during the rocket countdown (you can see them wayyy in the background of the flying port-a-potty picture).
Sheila has a new job with the school system where she does hearing and vision testing for the kids all over the county. Turns out I no longer have 20/20 vision in my left eye.
After a few hot days, it was brrrr cold. We wanted to go to the Gila Cliff Dwellings, but we were flooded out:
And went to a trout hatchery instead, where the manager of the trout-ery was very nice and informative about his operation…
Back to Silver City to have lunch at Jalisco’s cafe, where Ruben had fun tormenting Vincent ;).
