Monday, June 28, 2021

 Monday, June 28, 2021

     The pillow between or under my legs is not the cure-all I hoped it would be. I guess it was the acetaminophen that gave me total relief from my leg discomfort. There are times when my leg doesn't bother me at all. Then there are other times it starts bothering me when I get into bed. 

My foot is also a little worse this morning. It wasn't just the new shoes that caused that problem. However, it still wasn't as bad as it was with the other shoes. I think I made it worse as I changed my walking gate. I hope this problem resolves. I hate to be in a position to choose between a straight spine or a functional right foot.

      I kept thinking my weak metatarsals caused the foot problem. I wanted someone to adjust my foot and pull the metatarsals apart. I looked for some padding to put under my big toe metatarsal or the top of the arch. I must have thrown it all out. I found toe separators, the kind you use when painting your toenails. I used three of them, putting them between my first and second toes, second and third, and third and fourth toes. Hopefully, this will help.

Jean, my hanai sister, called. She's distressed. Her step-son came to visit from his home in Nicaragua. He wasn't able to get vaccinated there. The original plan was to get the jab as soon as possible. Now, he's arguing that he doesn't need the vaccine. He's taking some alternate medication his alternative doctor recommends, which isn't recognized by the CDC. He's staying at his mom's house in a separate apartment. However, they're eating together; they are eating outside.  

Jean is justifiably frightened by any possibility of exposure to the virus. She has multiple medical problems besides being old. The same holds true for her husband. If she's wrong, people won't get to do what they want to do. If she's right, her life and her husband's life could be at stake. The problem is that the consequences of being wrong about how the virus works can cost someone's life.

I'm a mess. Being alone has finally hit me. When I asked someone I depended on a question, she told me she was 'concerned about me if I couldn't remember that she had already answered the question. Wow! I went into a tailspin. My mother used to do this to me. If I perceived, remembered, or thought anything different from her, there was something wrong with me. I lived in a constant state of fear. This incident has thrown me back into that state. It is exhausting. I feel very alone. I suppose people did this to me when Mike was alive, but I had him to come home to. Now, it was just me fighting for my equilibrium. I could have said that I was dealing with it differently on a behavioral level. This is upbeat news. I took another CBD pill yesterday. I'm going to take another one today. 

At 8:30, I had K's crew, her 8-year-old son, K, and her twin daughters. K, who has an attention deficit condition, does a fantastic job concentrating on a visual exercise. I have him see the letters in his name and say them from left to right and then from right to left. Today, when I asked him to visualize the four letters in his last name, he couldn't. I asked him to tell me his last name. When we started, he had trouble with that. Then I asked him for the first letter in the word. The image of the letters popped into his head. I reviewed the sizing of the lower-case i. On Friday, the line of the letter was too tall. When he wrote his first and last names, they were beautifully formed. He still wrote very slowly. At some point, he would have to learn to write more quickly. I would work on having him write, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,' so he learned to form every letter in the alphabet. He will also learn to hold the whole sentence in his head and write it independently. Before I had him write the word the, I reviewed how to form the lower-case h. He made the hump too big, so the letter looks like a badly sized lower-case n.

   Then I had A, one of the twins. A. has had trouble remembering the names of the letters of the alphabet. I had been struggling with getting her to remember the name of the letter n. I went over and over and over it. She couldn't remember the name from one minute to the next. Yikes!

On Friday, I asked her if she had spinning in her head. She did, and she could tell me exactly where it was and how it moved. This morning when I asked her about the spinning, she didn't remember our talk. I became concerned and asked her if she went to the beach yesterday. She remembered that. Ah! I was worried she had a worse memory problem than I initially thought. I asked her to spell her name. She could do that with ease. Her problem shows up when I ask her to name each letter individually. Today, when I asked her if she knew the letter n, she said m. That is great! They're both nasal sounds. It would be close but no cigar with any other students, but with her -it's Wow! I corrected her, showing the difference in my mouth formation between the m and the n. Then when I pointed to the letter n, she named it consistently for the rest of the lesson. I called her mother immediately. It was a miracle.

     Then I worked with Twin E. She did well with all the words in the -at family, including getting the word mat correctly. I prepped her on the sound of /c/ before showing her the word cat for her to read. She struggled, but she got it. But she read pat as map today. She does love the word map. I think she may be strong enough to bring in a new element, but I'm not sure what it might be. 

     I had my new student today, 6th grade D. When I first saw him, I was confused. He had shoulder-length hair and could just as easily be a girl. I learned that he loves to climb trees. I told him how my mother loved doing that and then asked him for more details about his climbing. This is a bright, thoughtful child. I had him read to me from third-grade material. His reading was reasonably accurate, he demonstrated some decoding skills, but it was halting, jerky. He also missed a few function words. I had him name all the letters in sequence. He did reasonably well right away and felt it got easier the more he did. I suggested he slow down the speed of his letter naming, finding a comfortable rhythm. When he did, his performance evened out.  

     I asked him if he had trouble reading from the beginning. He said yes. I asked him if reading made him nervous. Yes. I led him through the exercise, where the prefrontal lobe informs the unconscious mind that no one would kill him if he never learned to read well. It took a while to get him into the exercise. Because it is weird, the kids sometimes feel something is wrong with them. I explain the theory and tell them this applies to all of us. An alarm goes off in all our heads when we are not performing or behaving like those around us. It's a survival signal developed during a period in our human development when our lives were at risk if we couldn't perform as others did. We are not in danger in the same way now. 

I did a little work with him on the sounds. He didn't do enough for me to determine if he had a problem or it was just an unfamiliar exercise for him.

I had a session with adolescent D for the first time in a week. He was at Boy Scout camp. Was he going to be reading better, or will he have lost ground? Losing ground is a big problem when children who have problems reading take a break. He was fine. I had him read the words out of order. He did a fantastic job. I saw an improvement in his ability to blend sounds. 

  I had a session with J. He tested on level X, which is middle sixth grade. From what I had seen of the material, I thought a higher level might be better. I tried level Y at the end of sixth grade. Wow! The language was much more complex. I went back down to level X until I was confident that he understood the meaning of every sentence and its function in the story. 

    I started watching Manifest on Netflix. I was enjoying it. It's a combination of the supernatural and a mystery involving the NYPD. The supernatural stuff was interesting. I was concerned that it played with conspiracy theories. They show the government concerned about a conspiracy, depicting the government torturing anyone they think no one will be looking for experiments. I don't think these are good themes to be playing in the current cultural atmosphere. They're not fun anymore.