Tuesday, December 27, 2022

 Tuesday, December 27, 2022

   I felt more withdrawn. Was it a good sign or a bad one? It would be good if it was a sign that I felt less afraid. I felt fear all my childhood. Not only was my mother overly critical, constantly critical, and never affirming, but she delivered her criticism explosively, verbally, and emotionally. I demonstrated her behavior in a therapy group. Everyone jumped. I once made the sound she made when a youngster tried to grab my handbag. He ran for his life. I was subjected to those outbursts many times a day. My sister described her as excitable. She didn't respond as I did or as anyone else did. For me, her attacks felt like body shocks. As Mike said, I looked like I had been tortured.

    Second-grade M canceled again this morning. She plays basketball with her age group regularly. Today, she was asked to play with the older group, too. They must have been down a player. I assume they asked her because she was good enough to join them.

    When I met with Mama K's crew, I started with Twin E. I continued working on the automatic recall of familiar words. I continued working with the pre-primer material with Twin A. Progress is slow with both these girls.

    I canceled my noon appointment with the chiropractor. She asked if I was busy. I said yes, but that was not the case. I was overwhelmed with sadness today, flattened by grief. The idea of being roughly handled didn't appeal.

    I got out and spayed my weeds with one gallon of 30% vinegar and one with 5% gallon. I covered the front yard and the strip along the front fence.

    When I met with adolescent D, we worked on embedding the visual information of letters more deeply in his brain. The visual sensations of letters don't make a deep impression on his sensory system. I don't know if this is because of a problem with his perceptual processing system versus his attention system.

  We worked on his handwriting problems. He 'wrote' letters on his desk with his finger, following what I did on the screen. When he did it alone, he rushed through it, barely making contact with the desk. The idea is to use enough energy to make an impression on the nervous system. I have described how he perceives letters and phonemes as a boat skimming the water's surface, sometimes bouncing in the air as it hits a wave.

  When I switched to cursive writing, that was the most effective. D said it felt strange. Often, it is a good indication something unfamiliar is going on in the brain.

      I have noticed fewer stray hairs. For a while there, I saw stray hairs all the time. I was losing hair at an alarming rate. It was probably because of the stress of the hip replacement surgery and the five extracted teeth. I could feel my hair was thinner. Randee, my hairdresser, recommended I take Biotin. I started; the hair loss stopped. I don't know if my lost hair will grow back, but at least I'm not losing more.

   I finally got a good description of a scene from Hatchet from ninth grade K. I learned two things from him. He has difficulty sitting still. He has to move. He gets easily bored and has to be warned when there is a change in topic. This boy is not a deep thinker. While he could describe the scene where Brian retrieved the survival kit from the plane, he couldn't tell me what psychological characteristics Brian needed to survive in that environment. The author mentions patience over and over. This all goes over K's head.

 I started watching Treason on Netflix. That was overly optimistic. I don't like it when the main characters are in danger; it causes me too much stress.