Saturday, January 8, 2022

 Saturday, January 8, 2022

   It was cold this morning. I checked the temperature at 7 am as I did my morning walk. It was 62 degrees at the airport. We're always 4 or 5 degrees cooler up here. That gets us down to the high 50s. Remember, we have no heat here. Many people don't have air conditioning either. I wasn't uncomfortable sleeping. I can close off my bedroom area. Between holding in the temperature from the day and the body heat Elsa and I throw off, it's comfortable. I have an extra blanket if I need it, too.

   I came across an unexpectedly large flock of turkeys this morning, 24 in total. The largest flock I've seen so far is 13. I wondered how large the flock has to become before we consider them a nuisance. You know how humans are.

   I had my appointment with the M & W sisters today. First-grade M told me about all the books she's reading. She had one with her and read it to me, The Rabbit's Tale. While she read, I frantically tried to find the reading level. It's considered beginning first grade. That's pretty good for independent reading. I still enjoy reading children's books. However, she continued making mistakes she hadn't made since she started. It was a concern.    

    I had W read the story we had been working on. She read it very well after not having worked on it for a while. She made a few errors on function words but caught the mistakes and self-corrected. Her speed was good. She made only one content-word error, reading run as raced. Raced would have been a better word choice for the story-more interesting. 

    We reviewed the story she started writing the in a previous session. She experimented with two conditions; it was a two-by-two. She had written about three of the situations out of four. It sounded good enough. She asked to write a new story.

       She started dictating rapidly, too fast for me to type. The objective of dictation with W is learning to write what she composes. That requires holding the plot structure and each sentence as she composes them in her head. She admitted she found writing her thoughts difficult because her mind raced ahead of her hand. Dictating the sentence to me gives her a chance to practice slowing down and holding the thoughts in her head. She has to give me the words one at a time, retrieve the rest of the sentence, and then the next word while holding the macrostructure of her writing in mind. That's what we all have to do if we're going to write. 

     She said she was impatient. "Impatience runs in this family. No, my dad is okay. My mom is impatient." I had no contact with dad. My impression of mom lines up with W's. She's not easily satisfied and is easily displeased. I introduced a visualization to quiet the anxiety, which causes impatience. I did the homunculus visualization with her to deal with the fight, flight, freeze response generated by fear. W has the fight response. I said she didn't do that with me because her mother would have her head if she treated me that way and respected me. She said both. However, working with her was a grueling experience. I feel her discomfort.

  I had adolescent D later in the day. He remembered how to spell first in five tries using the Fernald method. Fernald has the student write the word, cover it, and write it again, repeating that pattern five-time. Yesterday, when we tried that, D only could spell first correctly three times before he lost the pattern. This shows some improvement, although I'm not sure in what. 

   Today, I could work on spelling using a word family pattern. We started with the word WAY. He had no idea how to spell the long a sound in this word.   I tried him on other words using that spelling, play, and day. He didn't remember how to spell them. I gave him every meaningful word ending with -ay, using only a single initial consonant, bay, day, fay, gay, hay, jay, kay, lay, may, nay, pay, quay (I gave him the qu), say, and way, and then a few with consonants blends using two letters, bray, clay, dray, gray, play, pray, stay, and tray. After presenting most of the list, he was confused about how to spell -ay in a word. I said, "I am controlling the pattern. I am only giving you words that end in the spelling. You can predict the spelling from the pattern." It is generally a problem with D; he doesn't see patterns.  

    I spoke to his mother today. I asked her the other day what she had seen that indicated he had spatial problems. She said he couldn't play a sport even as a young kid. He would be running around randomly with no idea what was going in. He would try to get the kids to engage with him another way, talking to them.  

  On the other hand, she gave me some spectacularly good news. D watched a foreign film with subtitles with his dad the other night. He would stop the movie to read the subtitles. His dad said he was stunned he could read the words he could. He started crying. This is amazing in so many ways. D made an effort to read it at all. He stopped the video, making accommodations appropriate for his reading needs. He did all this in front of his dad, with whom he was less comfortable than his mom. And finally, he was able to read the subtitles. Wow! Wow! & Wow! I  read mom a passage D read today without error at a reasonable speed. Sorry I didn't record it. 

   My Master Card bill arrived today. I checked my payments; sure enough, there were two recorded payments to Charity Navigator. I have yet to receive an email receipt from them for the first payment. They told me they had sent it but would send it again. Then I still need a receipt for my second session with them. This was a substantial amount of money. They wrote back they had no record of it. I sent more money to another twenty charities. They said they had no record of my payments. I told them I would get back when I got my statement. Here it is. There is no question I made a large -for me- payment to Charity Navigator. I wrote them my payment details, date, and item #. Let's see what happens. If Netflix can keep track of me, I'm sure someone at Charity Navigator can. It isn't a brand-new site. I can't imagine I'm the only person who has this problem with them.

    Judy and I played phone tag during the day and finally made contact. I asked if I could say something about Paulette. I wanted joint silence when I spent time with her on the lanai. Instead, she yakked the entire time. I was concerned about the situation. I couldn't do that again; it added to my sense of deprivation. Fortunately, Judy said, "You're on speakerphone, and Paulette is sitting right here. Don't say anything bad about her." Thank God. I spoke to Paulette directly about my need to sit in silence. I explained to both ladies how I lacked opportunities for parallel play with someone I was connected to. You know. You hang out with a partner; they do what they do, and you do what you do, but you are together. It's not the same as doing that at a bus station because those people feel no connection to you. I am exhausted by the thought of one more conversation. It's not that I don't value the conversations and all the people who care about me. I do. You'd better believe I do. Not having the other is draining my energy. I dreaded the next conversation.

   Therapist throw, or used to throw, out the comment, "You're a human being, not a human doing." That was always a prize-winning meaningless statement for me when it wasn't downright untrue. Ask anyone with nothing to do, no job to go to, nothing to take care of how they feel. We are a species that needs to feel we have something to do in this world. Those who don't have that need are classified as mentally ill. What does it mean to be a human being? To be expected to do nothing? To be in a complete state of rest? To be by ourselves, not making any effort to interact with the other person, and to be enough, to be perfect.

    I bathed Elsa. I was supposed to do this several times a week to help her skin lesions. I was proud I finally got myself on a once-a-week schedule. She hates it. She sits still, but she shakes the whole time. She doesn't shake like that for firecrackers.

    On my public blog site, Germany has gone from several hundred pages to 1. This is confirmation that someone uses my blog for their class assignments. When the class is over, the group disappears. No one stays on to continue reading it.  

  Yvette sent me a Sarah Millican video. She's an Irish comic. She's good. What's weird is she throws out profane words. I remember when Lenny Bruce was arrested for using language like that. This dowdy, overweight housewife mixes it in every other sentence, and everyone laughs. No one is shocked. Millican's humor is good. It's not all profanity; hers is well-timed and fun.