Monday, November 1, 2021
My mother would be 118 today. Happy Birthday!! Mom, I always loved you, despite our problems.
My hammer toe looked very good this morning. The swelling of the second metatarsal was down; the toe looked straighter and wasn’t climbing over the first toe. This is a pleasant surprise. The Internet says this situation can only get worse once it starts. My grandmother had hammertoes. My mom said it was from wearing shoes too small for her feet when she was a child. I have been very careful. I think it’s because of my foot formation. I have problems with my metatarsals. I think the sling, the acupuncture pen on my calf, and the exercises and metatarsal insert that Katie gave me helped.
I wanted to refresh the tape Katie had put down to cover the heel lifts she used to create the metatarsal lift. It had melted into the shoe. At some point, it will be worn down, and I will refresh the tape. Katie’s solution was amazing. However, I have to clean the inside of my Crocs regularly. Dirt gets ground into the footbed of the shoe. I went ahead with the tape in there. It would be what it would be. I use soap and a scrubbing pad to get the dirt out. Then I put the shoes in bright sunshine, so they dried quickly. I only have one pair of Crocs right now. My blue pair were worn down, creating an uneven sole.
I called Jean, my hanai sister. She is suffering from sciatica. Her avenue of relief is whatever the doctor has to offer. Mike wound up with two very different wives in this regard. I do everything I can to avoid injections and surgery. I suggested she use the tennis ball trick, pressing it into her spasming muscles to help relieve her pain. She said it was too complicated for her. Medical care is her first line of defense. Her primary care doctor told her to have a doctor in Philly do her back surgery. She didn’t care for the doctors available in Princeton.
As I did one of my short walks, I saw four limes beneath Darby’s mailbox. That’s where she leaves them for me. I have visions of walking with Damon or Cylin when they visit. I imagine them saying I can’t just take those limes without talking to someone. I would have to explain that they are for me. Actually, people leave their extra produce like that for anyone to take. We have fruit trees here. There is no way an owner can consume all the garden produces.
I had one tutor looking for information on teaching reading during my office hour this morning. She was a young Chinese woman, probably a university student. She spoke with a discernible accent but was completely understandable. Her tutee was a third-grader. It took a few minutes to get enough information to nail down the problem. She said her student had good comprehension, could read all single-syllable words but had trouble with multi-syllable ones. It wasn’t clear from her information if this student had excellent sight recall but poor decoding skills in all circumstances or only when attacking the longer words. I showed her The Phonics Discovery System Phase II.
She said the girl also had problems with words starting with the /s/ sound. It took me a minute to figure out a possible cause. The tutor had told me that her student was from a home where only Spanish was spoken. Ah! Of course. No words in Spanish start with the /s/ sound; when an s is present in an intimal syllable, it always has an e in front of it. It’s like the qu relationship we have in English. She also said the student had a problem with the initial /y/ sound. I recommended she sustain the initial sound, almost as a game with the two of them competing to see who can hold the sound the longest before adding on the rest of the word s-s-s-s-s-s-s-at, etc., and y-y-y-y-ear
I had adolescent D in the afternoon. He is moving along steadily. He is identifying more patterns in the words we work on. Today he had a minor setback. I had him read each word if he could. If he couldn’t, I had him identify the vowel letters in order of their appearance and then add on the following consonants, if present, and blend those sounds and then the syllables. Once the word is pronounced, I have him do Phase I on each word. Today, he read them easily. When I asked him the sounds, he started with /t/. He hadn’t made a mistake like that for a long time. He caught himself. I will have to talk to him about this little glitch. It’s all part of the learning process. He is basically doing good work.
I had to warn him that he may experience glitches like that for the rest of his life and not to worry about it. As long as he caught his mistakes, he would be okay. Old habits persist. I gave up smoking after a nineteen-year-two-pack-a-day habit. The first few weeks were tough. At first, I was plagued with constant cravings. Then it became frequent but intermittent. After several months, the cravings became less frequent. That’s when it became dangerous. When the cravings were constant, I was constantly on the alert and ready to deal with them. As they became less frequent, my vigilance flagged. I would be caught unaware. When a craving hit, my response was to reach for a cigarette. Fortunately, I had a substitute behavior. I found someone with a lit cigarette, took it in my hand, and held it differently from when I used to smoke. Then I waved the lit cigarette under my nose, took a whiff, and was fine. The last craving was ten years after the one before that. I remember exactly where it was. I was on the bridge on Harrison St in Princeton. I had knelt down to look at something in the water, and it hit. Old habits die very hard.
Today, we also talked a little about his passivity. He never initiates anything. He works to maintain a low profile. His mom said he was an active kid before starting school and had to face his learning problems. Then he started hiding. He agreed; his behavior was a problem for him. We’ll do some work on it. On a positive note, he rarely says, “I don’t know,” anymore when I ask him what he thinks. This becomes apparent when he does say it occasionally. I have to remind him that no one knows the correct answer except him when I ask him what he thinks. I may disagree about something but can’t argue it is what he thinks.
This was a day devoted to cleaning, polishing, and working on the updates. I was surprised by how little I got done. I only had two half-hour sessions, and. Oh yes, and made sure I got in my 10,000 steps.
No comments:
Post a Comment