Testing to see if emailing blog entries works.

Well, we leave for China in just over three days and I'm working to
make sure everything is in line, including being able to post to the
Blog.
I'm really getting pretty geeked about the whole trip although I am
very sad Acer won't be going too. He's just too active to take on
such a long trip.

If there's a Kroger affiliate near you please help

This is for Seedlings books, a great place that sells Braille children's books at print book cost and also sends out free books several times a year.  We love this place and are glad that they are near Bill's parents so we can drop in to see it. Some Kroger affiliates are Smiths and Fred Meyer.

Beginning May 1, 2009, the Kroger Cares Program will be replaced with the launch of a new program, Kroger Community Rewards.  With this new program, members will earn funds for Seedlings Braille Books for Children just by using their Kroger Plus Cards.  Seedlings’ supporters can go online to register their Kroger Plus Card and select Seedlings as their charity of choice.  If you do not yet have a Kroger Plus card, please visit the customer service desk at any Kroger.  Then, after May 1, 2009, whenever a registered cardholder makes a purchase at Kroger using their Kroger Plus Card, that purchase will contribute to Seedlings’ rewards.  In addition, once a household member registers, then all linked cards used by family members will also begin earning funds for the organization. 

 

To register your Kroger Plus Card, simply sign up online at http://krogercommunityrewards.com/ and follow these simple steps:

 

·      Click on “Michigan” and then on “Enroll.”  Then, click on “Sign Up Today” in the ‘New Customer’ area.

·      Enter your zip code and select your preferred store.

·      Fill in the appropriate account information to set up and confirm your online account.

·      You will then get a message to check your email inbox.  Follow the instructions provided in that email to complete the activation process.

 

To select Seedlings Braille Books for Children as your charity of choice to receive funds from your grocery purchases, simply follow the next steps:

 

·      Login to your Kroger account by using your email address and new password.

·      Click on “Edit Kroger Community Rewards Information” and input your Kroger Plus card number. Update, confirm, and save your information.

·      Enter “Seedlings Braille Books for Children” or the number “82491,” click on “confirm” or “select,” and save your selection. 

 

REMEMBER, purchases will not count toward Seedlings until you have registered your Kroger Plus card(s) and have selected Seedlings as your charity of choice.

 

Thanks to all of Seedlings’ supporters who participated in the original Kroger Cares Program helping us to raise funds to support braille literacy. Since we started the Program on July 7, 2008, our supporters purchased and reloaded 531 Kroger cards which raised over $1,600 to date.  We hope everyone will continue to support Seedlings Braille Books for Children by signing up for this new rewards program beginning May 1.

 

If you would like additional information about the new Kroger Community Rewards Program or need assistance with the online registration process, please contact Julie or Dawn at Seedlings, 734-427-8552.  You may also call The Kroger Company direct at 1-800-837-4483 with any questions.

Itinerary is Here!

Hurrah!  We finally know when we're going to be where!  Here it is....

Date	Itinerary	Hotel
Sat, May 2	Arrive in BJ; Coordinator will meet you at the airport and help you check in the hotel close to the airport.	Shenggang Express Hotel
Sun, May 3	Coordinator will help you with the hotel/airport transfer when you leave for Hefei. Fly to Hefei by HU7307 (8:50a-10: 35a)	Holiday Inn Downtown Hefei
Mon, May 4	You will meet child today.  Start the adoption process (orphanage donation is 35,000 RMB, approx $5100 US dollars)
Tues, May 5	Adoption paperwork process
Wed, May 6	Sightseeing: Three Ancient River Village Bill will take flight back to Beijing by CA1580 (19:50p-21: 35p) Coordinator will pick up Bill at the airport and help him check in the hotel. Coordinator will help him with the hotel/airport transfer when he departure.	Bill will stay at Shenggang Express Hotel in Beijing
Thurs, May 7	Free day
Fri, May 8	Get the all paper back; complete forms for ACS
Sat, May 9	Fly to Guangzhou by CZ3874 (14:30p-16:15p)	White Swan Hotel
Sun, May 10	Free day
Mon, May 11	Medical exam for children
Tues, May 12	ACS appt at 9:30am
Wed, May 13	Go to ACS for oath and get visa in the afternoon (around 6:00pm)
Thurs, May 14	Fly to Beijing in the morning by CA1310 (8:00a-11:00a); Arrive in BJ and Family will go to Bethel Foster Home for the Blind and spend the night. CHI will arrange the transfer from the airport to Bethel.	Bethel
Fri, May 15	Return to BJ and CHI will arrange the Bethel/hotel transfer in the morning. Sightseeing: the Summer Palace	Renaissance Beijing Hotel
Sat, May 16	Sightseeing in BJ: TianAnMen Square, Forbidden City and the Great Wall (Juyongguan), lunch is included
Sun, May 17	Sightseeing: the Temple of Heaven in the morning; Lunch at Dai Jia Cun Restaurant; Hutong Tour & Chinese Acrobat Show in the afternoon. (Dinner not included.)
Mon, May 18	Return to the US

Thank You!

We are so blessed.  People have been popping up and handing us money, using the chip in and sending it through the mail.  The other day at church, Bill ended up with a twenty dollar bill, and has no idea who gave it to him!  We have turned our finances over to God, he knows how much money we need and when we need it by.  God truly does pour out his blessings when you need them.  He doesn't give excess, God's not into waste, but he gives you what you need.  

Please keep us in your prayers.  Not only for the blessings we need financially, but also this is the week Calliandra goes from her beloved Bethel back to her orphanage in Hefei, Anhui.  She'll be traveling Thursday in the company of one of her teachers from Bethel.  I am so glad she'll have someone who loves her accompanying her.  It's scary enough as it is, but if she'd have to do it without her teacher it would be much worse.  So prayers for travel mercies for her, and peace during the journey for her.

Tickets are purchased!!

Yes, we are indeed a traveling to China.  We have our consulate appointment, we have our tickets and we're ready to go!  We'll be traveling from 5/1 thru 5/18.  We're doing our trip in reverse this time, ending in Beijing instead of starting there.  We're there a little longer than we expected because the connecting flights between Beijing and the province of Anhui.

Please keep our fundraising in your prayers, because of these extra days, costs are going up that mush more.  If you could spare a Starbucks or two, we've raised thousands on small donations just like that  (over $3000 that way).  Times are tough I know and prayers are just as valuable as money.  Please add us to your church or prayer groups lists, the more prayers the better!

Why we let Acer run into things....

We're not being mean, we're teaching him to use his cane and his hands.  We've provided him with glasses to protect his totally non functioning eyes, but it comes down to.... independence.

 Here is a list from The Nat'l Fed. for the Blind (NFB) with suggestions for educators and aides which we adapted for ourselves.

A poster available upon request from the American Foundation for the Blind
National Literacy Center
100 Peachtree Street, Suite 620, Atlanta, GA 30303
(800) 232-5463 or e-mail Frances Mary D'Andrea at _literacy@..._
(mailto:literacy@...)

It often feels right to give help to students with visual impairments, but this may not be in their best interest. Use this list to help yourself to
step back:

1. You're stepping back so your students can step forward and become independent. Keep this in mind.
2. Clock how long it actually takes for students to start zippers, pick up dropped papers, or find page numbers. What's a few more seconds in the grander scheme?
3. Sit on your hands for a whole task while you practice giving verbal instead of touch cues. Hands off the hands!
4. If you need touch cues, try hand-under-hand instead of
hand-over-hand. This gives students much more choice.
5. Let your students make mistakes and get into trouble. It's part of the human experience!
6. Acknowledge your own needs. There's a reason you chose the helping profession.
7. Sit further away. If you've been within arm's reach, sit just
within earshot. If you've been sitting just within earshot, sit across the room.
8. Pat yourself on the back every time you help with seeing, not thinking. Your job is to give information.
9. Even though helping can feel right, be aware that too much
assistance is short-sighted. Sometimes less is more, less is better.
10. Catch yourself before you correct your students' work. Don't cover for them. This is about their skills, not yours.
11. Commit to no intervention for a whole activity. Take data instead. Things might not fall apart as much as you had expected.
12. "What page are we on?" "What's for lunch?" Have students ask their classmates instead of you, both during school and on the telephone.
13. Assign student learning partners and sighted guides.
14. Teach students to decline assistance, "Thanks, but please let me try it by myself."
15. Whenever you add prompts, include a plan to phase them out.
16. Let the boss know that you need to step back so that your students can be more independent. You're not shirking your responsibilities.
17. Collaborate with other adults to break your habits of helping too much. Agree to remind each other to step back.
18. Try helping only when classroom teachers give you a signal. They may prefer to respond directly or to give students longer to work it out alone.
19. Post a sign, "Are there any other ways I could step back?"
- Adapted from Classroom Collaboration by Laurel J. Hudson, Ph.D.,
Perkins School for the Blind

More news about Kindle

Here's the National federation for the blind's take on the Kindle issue

Disturbing news on the Kindle front.

When Amazon released the Kindle 2 electronic book reader on February 9, 2009, the company announced that the device would read e-books aloud using text-to-speech technology.  Under pressure from the Authors Guild, Amazon has announced that it will give authors and publishers the ability to disable the text-to-speech function on any or all of their e-books available for the Kindle 2. 

The Reading Rights Coalition, which represents people who cannot read print,will protest the threatened removal of the text-to-speech function from e-books for the Amazon Kindle 2 outside the Authors Guild headquarters in New York City at 31 East 32nd Street on April 7, 2009, from noon to 2:00 p.m.  The coalition includes the organizations that represent the blind, people with dyslexia, people with learning or processing issues, seniors losing vision, people with spinal cord injuries, people recovering from strokes, and many others for whom the addition of text-to-speech on the Kindle 2 promised for the first time easy, mainstream access to over 245,000 books.

This was the disturbing news I learned today.  To take something that would be so helpful to so many people , including my two VI children, and then say that it's going to have fewer choices.  errgh.  Please click on the title to sign the petition

Also, please visit Charlotte's Angels (link on sidebar). She's working on adoption #4, (child #5) and she's part of a TV station car giveaway.  The trunk on her car is strapped down, it's in pretty bad shape and she could really use your vote.

Travel Approval arrived today!

We (okay, really our agency has) received our Travel Approval today.  There is a holiday this weekend, and the offices in China will re-open on April 7, so our Consulate Appointment should be confirmed 4/8.

Once again, please keep us in your prayers for finances and for wisdom.  We are still trying to decide whether to bring Acer with us or not, and we are trusting in the Lord for our funding.  We have been given Manna, what we need, when we need it, no more no less, all through out this process.  It's been tough for me, a like to have it in the bank woman!

Blessings to you my friends as you have blessed me with your friendship.

H

Travel Approval being mailed today!

We just got word that our Travel approval is being mailed from China to our agency today.  They should receive it and then they will book our Counsulate Appointment. Tentatively we are now scheduled to travel 5/3-5/17.  This could change, depending on when our actual travel date is.

H

Action Video games improve vision

Robert Roy Britt
Editorial Director
LiveScience.com – Sun Mar 29, 1:08 pm ET

Video games with lots of action, such as the shoot-'em-up variety, can improve your vision, a new study finds.

Players became up to 58 percent better at perceiving fine contrast differences in the tests.

"If you are driving at dusk with light fog it could make the difference between seeing the car in front of you or not seeing it," study leader Daphne Bavelier told LiveScience.

The ability to discern slight differences in shades of gray, or contrast sensitivity, is the primary limiting factor in how well one sees, said Bavelier, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester.

"Normally, improving contrast sensitivity means getting glasses or eye surgery-somehow changing the optics of the eye," she said. "But we've found that action video games train the brain to process the existing visual information more efficiently, and the improvements last for months after game play stopped."

The new finding suggests action video game used as training devices may be a useful complement to eye-correction techniques, Bavelier said, since it may teach the brain's visual cortex to make better use of the information it receives.

In 2007, Bavelier found that action video games substantially increase a player's ability to accurately see objects in a cluttered space. A study at the University of Oregon found that some video games improve the ability of children age 4 to 6 to focus their attention, also by training the brain.

In the new study, her team tested the contrast sensitivity function of 22 students, then divided them into two groups: One group played the action video games "Unreal Tournament 2004" and "Call of Duty 2." The other played "The Sims 2," which is richly visual, but does not require as much visual-motor coordination.

The volunteers each played 50 hours during the 9-week test. Then their vision was tested again.

Those who played the action games showed an average 43 percent improvement in their ability to discern close shades of gray - close to the difference Bavelier had previously observed between game players and non-game players - whereas the Sims players showed no improvement.

When comparing people who played action video games routinely for more than six months to those who do not play them, the increase was 58 percent, Bavelier said.

"To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that contrast sensitivity can be improved by simple training," says Bavelier. "When people play action games, they're changing the brain's pathway responsible for visual processing. These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it, and we've seen the positive effect remains even two years after the training was over."

So despite concerns that time spent playing action video games could be bad for people, that time may not necessarily be harmful, at least for vision, she said.

The research, funded by the National Eye Institute and the Office of Naval Research, is detailed today in thejournal Nature Neuroscience.

Put us on the List!

The Prayer list that is, at church, in your prayer groups, with your prayer partner, wherever.  We need prayers for wisdom and for finances.  We've discovered that it will be more money for us to re-adopt Calliandra here in MI than it would be for Bill to fly over there. So now we need prayers for these specific things.

1) We have the wisdom to decide who goes and how long they stay.

2) We have the money we need to fulfill these decisions.

We continue to walk on faith on these points as we have on the entire adoption, and we ask that you spread the word so we have more praying for us.

H

Why I push for Acer and Calliandra to learn Braille

Fewer than 10% of blind Americans read braille...

By BEN NUCKOLS, Associated Press Writer Ben Nuckols, Associated Press Writer – 2 hrs 36 mins ago

BALTIMORE – Jordan Gilmer has a degenerative condition that eventually will leave him completely blind. But as a child, his teachers did not emphasize Braille, the system of reading in which a series of raised dots signify letters of the alphabet.

Instead, they insisted he use what little vision he had to read print. By the third grade, he was falling behind in his schoolwork.

"They gave him Braille instruction, but they didn't tell us how to get Braille books, and they didn't want him using it during the day," said Jordan's mother, Carrie Gilmer of Minneapolis. Teachers said Braille would be "a thing he uses way off in the far distant future, and don't worry about it."

That experience is common: Fewer than 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind people in the United States read Braille, and just 10 percent of blind children are learning it, according to a report to be released Thursday by the National Federation of the Blind.

By comparison, at the height of its use in the 1950s, more than half the nation's blind children were learning Braille. Today Braille is considered by many to be too difficult, too outdated, a last resort.

Instead, teachers ask students to rely on audio texts, voice-recognition software or other technology. And teachers who know Braille often must shuttle between schools, resulting in haphazard instruction, the report says.

"You can find good teachers of the blind in America, but you can't find good programs," said Marc Maurer, the group's president. "There is not a commitment to this population that is at all significant almost anywhere."

Using technology as a substitute for Braille leaves blind people illiterate, the federation said, citing studies that show blind people who know Braille are more likely to earn advanced degrees, find good jobs and live independently.

"It's really sad that so many kids are being shortchanged," said Debby Brackett of Stuart, Fla., who pressured schools to provide capable Braille teachers for her 12-year-old daughter, Winona.

One study found that 44 percent of participants who grew up reading Braille were unemployed, compared with 77 percent for those who relied on print. Overall, blind adults face 70 percent unemployment.

The federation's report pulled together existing research on Braille literacy, and its authors acknowledge that not enough research has been done. The 10 percent figure comes from federal statistics gathered by the American Printing House for the Blind, a company that develops products for the visually impaired.

The federation also did some original research, including a survey of 500 people that found the ability to read Braille correlated with higher levels of education, a higher likelihood of employment and higher income.

The report coincides with the 200th birthday of Louis Braille, the Frenchman who invented the Braille code as a teenager. Resistance to his system was immediate; at one point, the director of Braille's school burned the books he and his classmates had transcribed. The school did not want its blind students becoming too independent; it made money by selling crafts they produced.

The system caught on, but began declining in the 1960s along with the widespread integration of blind children into public schools. It has continued with the advent of technology that some believe makes Braille obsolete.

"Back in about 1970 or so, I was heading to college, and somebody said to me, 'Now that you've got the tape recorder, everything will be all right. In the early 1980s, somebody else said, 'Now that you've got a talking computer, everything will be all right,'" said Marc Maurer, president of the federation.

"They were both wrong. And the current technology isn't going to make everything all right unless I know how to put my hands on a page that has words on it and read them."

Audio books are no substitute, said Carlton Walker, an attorney and the mother of a legally blind girl from McConnellsburg, Pa. Walker once met a blind teenager who had only listened to audio books; the teen was shocked to discover that "Once upon a time" was four separate words.

Walker also had to lobby teachers to provide Braille for her 8-year-old daughter, Anna, instead of just large-print books.

"At 3 years old, Anna could compete with very large letters. When you get older, you can't compete," Walker said. She once asked a teacher, "'What are you going to do when she's reading Dickens?' She said, 'Well, we'll just go to audio then.'

"If that were good enough for everybody, why do we spend millions of dollars teaching people to read?"

Gilmer, now an 18-year-old aspiring lawyer, worked on his Braille in a summer program when he was in middle school and can now read 125 words a minute, up from his previously rate, an excruciatingly slow 20 words a minute.

"Just try it," Carrie Gilmer said. "Go get a paragraph, get a stopwatch and try to read 20 words a minute. Try and read that slow and see how frustrating it is."

Fluent Braille readers can read 200 words a minute or more, the federation says.

Carrie Gilmer is president of a parents' group within the federation for the blind. She believes poor or haphazard instruction is largely responsible for the decline in Braille literacy, but she says sometimes teachers push Braille only to meet resistance from parents.

"They're afraid of their child looking blind, not fitting in," Gilmer said.

The report outlines ambitious goals for reversing the trend, including lobbying all 50 states to require teachers of blind children to be certified in Braille instruction by 2015. But its immediate goal is to simply make people aware that there's no substitute for Braille. It's not just a tool to help people function — it can bring joy, Maurer said.

"The concept of reading Braille for fun is a thing that lots of people don't know," Maurer said. "And yet I do this every day. I love the beautiful, orderly lines of words that convey a different idea that can stimulate me or make me excited or sad. ... This is what we're trying to convey."

Why Toddlers don't do as their told

Scientists think they have the answer to this question that has been plaguing parents for generations.

LiveScience.com livescience Staff

livescience.com – Tue Mar 24, 10:45 pm ET

Are you listening to me? Didn't I just tell you to get your coat? Helloooo! It's cold out there...

So goes many a conversation between parent and toddler. It seems everything you tell them either falls on deaf ears or goes in one ear and out the other. But that's not how it works.

Toddlers listen, they just store the information for later use, a new study finds.

"I went into this study expecting a completely different set of findings," said psychology professor Yuko Munakata at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "There is a lot of work in the field of cognitive development that focuses on how kids are basically little versions of adults trying to do the same things adults do, but they're just not as good at it yet. What we show here is they are doing something completely different."

Munakata and colleagues used a computer game and a setup that measures the diameter of the pupil of the eye to determine the mental effort of the child to study the cognitive abilities of 3-and-a-half-year-olds and 8-year-olds.

The game involved teaching children simple rules about two cartoon characters - Blue from Blue's Clues and SpongeBob SquarePants - and their preferences for different objects. The children were told that Blue likes watermelon, so they were to press the happy face on the computer screen only when they saw Blue followed by a watermelon. When SpongeBob appeared, they were to press the sad face on the screen.

"The older kids found this sequence easy, because they can anticipate the answer before the object appears," said doctoral student Christopher Chatham, who participated in the study. "But preschoolers fail to anticipate in this way. Instead, they slow down and exert mental effort after being presented with the watermelon, as if they're thinking back to the character they had seen only after the fact."

The pupil measurements showed that 3-year-olds neither plan for the future nor live completely in the present. Instead, they call up the past as they need it.

"For example, let's say it's cold outside and you tell your 3-year-old to go get his jacket out of his bedroom and get ready to go outside," Chatham explained. "You might expect the child to plan for the future, think 'OK it's cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm.' But what we suggest is that this isn't what goes on in a 3-year-old's brain. Rather, they run outside, discover that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and then they go get it."

The findings are detailed this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Munakata figures the results might help with real situations.

"If you just repeat something again and again that requires your young child to prepare for something in advance, that is not likely to be effective," Munakata said. "What would be more effective would be to somehow try to trigger this reactive function. So don't do something that requires them to plan ahead in their mind, but rather try to highlight the conflict that they are going to face. Perhaps you could say something like 'I know you don't want to take your coat now, but when you're standing in the yard shivering later, remember that you can get your coat from your bedroom."

New blog look again

The last look was a bit to bright pink for Bill's comfort, so I changed it to this.  Not quite as fun, but it still has the, important to Calliandra, Pink and White.  Enjoy!

Visitation

We went to the visitation today.  Acer behaved reasonably well for a bored 4 year old. especially since BaBa kept walking him outside the room.

Mrs Clark's family was happy to see him as they'd heard the tales of him this year.  He was able to the answer the following questions to show that the words, if not their meanings had sunk in.

Did you love Mrs Clark?

Yes

Did Mrs Clark love you?

Yes

Where is Mrs Clark now?

Heaven

and you'll see her again when you go there.

Yes.

We met another set of parents  and Acer's classmate Julia, whom I told it was okay to tell Acer that taking her toys was rude.  She looked relieved in her 7 year old way.

There were a lot of her family there and many teachers from the school.  Acer's Orientation and Mobility (O&M) and his Teacher of Visually Impaired (TVI) were both devastated because they known her for 10 and 7 years.  I can just imagine as I was pretty torn up and I'd just met her a handful of times.

What a day.

A Sad Day

Today we had very shocking news from Acer's school.  Acer's classroom Para-pro, Mrs Clark, was taken to the hospital tuesday night with a severe headache and died the next day of a brain aneurysm.  

She was a delightful gray haired older woman, probably doing this as a second career.  She taught the little kids, which for most of the year meant she was almost exclusively Acer's teacher as there were really no other little ones.

It's very hard to explain this to Acer.  He has no frame of reference.  The only time he's even heard the word 'Die' is in his 'Now I lay me' prayers at night.  I told him she was dead, that she was the part of 'Die before I wake part of  his prayers'. I didn't know what else to say.  I told him that Mrs Clark wasn't going to come back to school and he told me that she was home sick with the 'flu.  I know he doesn't understand, but I don't know how long it's going to take before he does understand.  We're going to the visitation tomorrow night to let her family know how much she meant to Acer.

I also don't know how he's going to deal with the change in people, he didn't like it when garret joined that class and he had to share  Mrs Clark with him.

Prayers please.

Day 5 Waiting for TA

What a busy busy day.

We started out the morning with Bill and Acer heading off to Band Practice.  I stayed home as I just couldn't seem to stay awake.

Bill and Acer hit the stores afterwards and then we went straight from there to meet my friend Pete, from St Louis,  to do some shopping and some hanging out.

We started at Nordstrom Rack, went to my work, and then to a flame broiled chicken restaurant.

We went from there to Beq & Carl's where we dropped Bill off to help Beq wih a computer issue. Back to the Nordstrom's parking lot to drop Pete off, and around back to pick Bill up.

We got back home just in time to make sure Acer and Unca James were set up for the evening.  Bill and I headed off to Fireproof Your Marriage.   It was a good study, discussion despite having half the couples missing as they were all at a play.  There were more than a few good points made and I came home with a couple things to mull over and store in my heart.

We had to stop for gas on the way back because of all the running around we had done!

There was peace in the house when we got home, evidently a good time was had by all and Acer was sound asleep.  I guess being on the run all day with little rest will tire a generally tireless Little Man out.

Day 4 waiting for TA

What an odd day.  Acer was very well behaved throughout most of it, it just ended up being very draining and I'm still not quite sure what to make of it.

Acer's yearly eye check up was today.  Because of his Peter's anomaly, we need to watch the pressure because glaucoma is a threat.  Dr R. came in, looked at Acer's chart and asked us if we'd seen Dr X., a cornea specialist.  Well, no, he'd never told me I should see Dr X, this was the first time I'd ever heard Dr X's name.  I suggested that maybe he'd consulted with Dr X during Acer's last bout of testing.

That past we moved on to trying to get Acer to open his eyes.  This is a concept Acer just doesn't understand.  Totally doesn't understand.  The last time Bill and I had asked him to do it, he put his fingers on his eyebrows and pushed up.  Amusing to watch but ineffectual.  I tried to explain, opening my eyes against his palm, but there was just nothing connecting to turn the little idea light bulb on in his head. 

So, here Acer is in the Dr's office, and he's a little nervous and a little afraid because 9 times out of 10 he goes to the Dr's office, he gets shots and the Dr tells him to open his eyes. Well, he may not know how to open them on command but he sure can squeeze them shut in a hurry. A minor wrestling match ensued and the score, Acer 1/Dr R. 0.  

The Dr then decides that he needs to do another Exam Under Anes. to knock him out and take another look and get his pressure.  At this point I am still unsure if this new Dr will be involved or if I'm supposed to make contact on my own.  Guess I'll call and leave a message on Mon. to clarify things.

So I went to check out and mentioned to the ladies that they had no toys which made noise in the new office.  They smiled and said yes, isn't it nice and I had to tell them, no it was not good, not all kids can see these toys.  I mean really, bead mazes galore, an abacus (more beads), some peg gear boards which were all disassembled and all over the floor and a play house.  Acer was extremely bored.  The only thing that made him even slightly happy was the thought of going to the drum store afterwards.  We waited in the waiting room for 45 minutes and he was really pretty good despite being so bored.  The only reason he likes to go to the Dr's is to check out what toys they have to play with and here he didn't even have that option.

So, off to the drum store we went.  This time Acer got to listen to three drummers trying out drums, unfortunately two were playing at the same time.  He liked that and was happy enough to leave when I said it was time. The deuling banging got to me tho', more than a little loud.

Bill took Acer out grocery shopping that evening, Acer was desperate for some batteries for a piano toy and we needed a few things.  I happily tubbed and read and tried to wrap my brain around the day. Still not sure why it was so exhausting, but I sure was tired.

Day 3 waiting for TA

This was a stay at home day for us.  Acer has been out and about  (or oot and aboot for my Canadian cousins) all week and we needed some down time.

We did make spaghetti, one of Acer's favorites and Bill will upload pix from that later. We'll just say that there's a firm reason behind my getting kids into their skivvies to eat it.

We also got good news, one of Calliandra's friends will be moving to IN, just about a three hour drive from us.  Check out ChunYan's new family at Moving Mtns on my sidebar.

We were also able to have a good talk with Calliandra and tell her our approval had come. I don't think she quite gets how many approvals we need to go through, but it was good to be able to tell her.

She also reiterated that she likes Pink and White, and that she REALLY doesn't like purple.  Good thing I have NO purple accessories for her room, I'm not sure what I'd do with them, but they would need to go.