Wednesday, July 24, 2024

 Wednesday, July 24, 2024

   OMG!  Elsa's skin looks worse. I didn't know what I was going to do to fix it. Her skin was flawless after I put her on the Royal Canin Ultamino. Then she had a dental procedure where ten teeth were removed, and I ordered the wrong food; her skin was worse than ever.  Today, I remembered I had also been giving her a pill pocket coated in MakesNoClaims (Intrasound) powder.  I stopped everything I had been doing while she recovered from the dental treatment. I had to grind her food into a powder for two weeks. For two weeks, she didn't get an extra pill pocket treat. I got out of the habit. Could it be the MNCs that fixed her skin problem? I started giving her the MNCs coated treat twice a day today. Hopefully, that will solve all problems. If it does, I don't have to get rid of the other food.

   I bathed Elsa today. I have yet to stick to the every-other-day schedule as I was supposed to, but it is several times a week.  I only have to leave the soap on for ten minutes, but it feels like an eternity. If I watch Call the  Midwife, the time flies by faster.

   I've been incorporating laughter yoga into my morning yoga routine. I hold a contraction until I run out of breath while laughing. The founder of laughter yoga has people move their arms while they laugh. He knows the health benefits of moving our arms at and above our hearts. Many orchestra conductors live long lives. This is attributed to their extensive arm movements when conducting, which stimulate the blood flow around the heart.  

    I incorporated a new movement into my morning yoga. While I have been moving my arms more freely, particularly at the height of my heart, today, I started punching while doing my hand exercises in conjunction with my laughter.  I couldn't believe the release I got in my upper chest and back.  The pressure I had been feeling that I associated with sadness lifted. The difference was spectacular.

  I worked with Twin E this morning. Twin A is often asleep when I get on Zoom. I'm not as concerned about her as I am about Twin E.  E continues to have memory and comprehension problems that A has resolved. Twin E is the one who fell out of a second-story window when she had just learned to crawl.  I heard that if a child under two falls from a great height, they'll bounce- as long as they don't land on their head. I don't think anyone saw her fall.

   Today, I discovered Twin E had problems imagining things she hadn't experienced. Oh, boy. We have to engage our imaginations to be good at comprehension.  Today's passage was about people getting fresh milk from a cow driven through the streets and milked at a person's front door.  She couldn't imagine a cow being milked in her driveway. I led her through a series of exercises.  She could imagine a pig or goat running up her street or into her driveway. We have wild pigs and goats who do precisely that. She didn't have to imagine it. I had her substitute a cow for one of them. Then she could picture it.

   After Casey cut them down, five large Bismarck fronds lay in my front yard. I took after them with the chainsaw, stuffed them into the garbage bin, and rolled them down to Darby's. She considered all green gold. She distributes it around her yard to build up the soil. I'm waiting for the day she says, "Enough!"

   I had an appointment with going into-fourth-grade L.  We encountered a c followed by an i.  He didn't remember the rule.  I recited it again, and I tested him on it. Not a clue. I asked him if he had trouble recalling what people, particularly teachers, said. Yes. I went about figuring out where the breakdown came in.  I had him repeat the rule after me, "C followed by an e, i, or y makes an /s/ sound." He repeated it perfectly.  He could recall the exact words after a bit. He had no auditory processing problem, and his working memory was fine.  Was it long-term memory?  Then, I asked if the rule made sense. No. Ah, this is the same problem he had with the reading. He wants everything to be logically consistent.  Good luck if you're dealing with English. If it were logical, the word city would be spelled sity, and you wouldn't have to remember some silly rule on pronouncing the letter c.

  I told him I had a similar problem when I was in school. I was a slow learner because I had to understand everything at a deep level.  In my freshman year of college, I took a required math course. I learned more about math that semester than I had in my twelve previous years of school. The teacher introduced the concept of infinity. We had a test shortly after that. I called my uncle in hysterics. "I'm going to fail my math test. I can't feel infinity."  I couldn't learn what I couldn't understand at a physical level.

  As I sat around a table with friends in grad school, they discussed something. I said, "I understand it here (pointing to my head), but I don't understand it here (pointing to my solar plexus)."  One friend said, "Finally."  I had no idea I was doing something differently from everyone else.  I thought something was wrong with me. For the longest time, I thought I was a mentally retarded overachiever. 

   I didn't tell L all the details of my learning experience, just enough to assure him his insistence on 'understanding' everything he learned didn't make him 'stupid.'