Wednesday, March 26, 2025

  Wednesday, March 26, 2025

     Today was the 69th anniversary of my father's death. Holy cow! Time flies. 

     I often experienced a surge of feeling in my solar plexus in the morning as I lay in bed about to get up. I  associated it with unpleasant thoughts- stinking thinking.  My solar plexus was quiet today, but I felt something around my heart.  I quelled the sensation and got up.

  Every day, I get to see the horizon over the Pacific Ocean from my lanai. A college roommate and her husband visited me.  She asked, "What's the difference between a porch and a lanai?"  Her husband answered, "A view of the Pacific."  That's not the case, but it was funny. Many houses have lanais without a view.

   The wonder of my view becomes greater with time, not less. You start noticing the differences in light and shade, the shapes and colors of clouds, and how the sun breaks through between the clouds to shine on the water. It took me years before I started noticing how the light and the clouds impacted the view of the mountain. All I saw in the beginning was a dull 8,271-foot lump.  I preferred the gagged peaks of the mountains on Oahu, millions of years older and worn down by time. Mike and I noticed that Hawaii was more beautiful the longer we lived here. Darby has been living here for 40 years. She says her appreciation continues to grow. 

   I had the Twins at 8 this morning. They were off from school today for a Hawaiian holiday, Prince Kuhio Day. We had trouble connecting because Mama K couldn't access her Gmail account, which was blocked because her storage was full. She had pictures from when her now twenty-year-old son was a baby. She knew she had bunches of shots, all with the same view. Pruning them from her account would take time. She paid the storage fee. We connected twenty minutes later.

   I had Twin A first. I needed a title for the story she wrote about the camping trip, which wasn't my idea of a camping trip. They stayed in a house. She didn't know what to call it. I said, "What did you do? We went on a camping trip." I told her to call it that.

   Then, we worked on reading comprehension using IXL 5th-grade reading exercises.  She had to compare two girls.  They both found a math problem really hard. One declared it impossible and fell asleep on the sofa. The other looked up how to do it on the Internet. A understood they both found it difficult. But her comparison stopped there.  She didn't acknowledge the difference in the girls' responses to the challenge. She admitted she would be the one asleep on the sofa. She wasn't interested in figuring it out. She just wanted someone to tell her the answer.  I'm seeing this in her more.  Has her problem been mental laziness all along?  A will not try to figure out a word if it doesn't come to her immediately, without effort.  She has the skills she needs to do it. She just can't be bothered.

   I had nothing else planned till the end of the day.  I listened to the rest of Picoult's Picture Perfect.  It wore me down. I would have flipped to the end if I had a print copy. The end wasn't particularly satisfying. Yes, the main character leaves her physically abusive husband, but she goes off with someone who also has ragged edges to his psyche.  The therapist she and her husband went to warned them if they didn't do the work and split, they would wind up with someone else with the same problem. She hadn't done enough work. 

   I mowed the lawn. As I've said, the grass never grows very high here. The growth is 24 "seed stalks, making the lawn look like a scruffy beard. Besides mowing it, I trimmed the stalks around the edges with the grass blade on the hedge trimmer. The last time I tried that, my back gave out quickly.  Today, I got the area cleared without a problem.  I'm getting stronger every day. I worked on various spots in the yard during the day. It's an acre lot. There's always tons to do.

     I had fifth-grade GV at 3:30. He chose to work on reading comprehension. I went to the fifth-grade section on IXL. After doing three exercises, it was clear that I needed to bump him up. I brought up a sixth-grade selection. Wow! That's some difference between fifth and sixth-grade reading. Everything is harder: word length, vocabulary, and sentence length.  He did a great job reading it. He had to stop several times to decode a longer word. There were only a few incidents where I had to stop him and remind him of the procedure when encountering a word he couldn't readily decode or recognize. His comprehension was also good. 

   At 4:15, I had a brief appointment with the woman who called me to tutor her son. He was the one who asked her to hire me.  He was in GV's class. When he heard GV say how much I helped him, he said he wanted to work with me.  While his mom already had my number from GV's mom, she hadn't called. When her son asked her to, she did it.

   Fifth-grade ZN is way behind. Not only does he have problems decoding, but he can't remember words. He will hold them in short-term memory but not recall them over time. He can't remember the word  "the.  " I've seen that before. 

   ZN had medical problems that impacted his hearing.  His mom said he mumbled before he had the proper treatment at age four. She could understand him, but no one else could.  At two, he started having ear infections. At four, he had his tonsils removed and tubes put in his ears. His tonsils were abnormally large, the size of an adult's.  His mom said the difference in his speech and his response when she spoke to him was immediate. He had been suffering from hearing loss all that time. Levine sees a correlation between ear infections and dyslexia.

   Besides his hearing problems, he missed school during Covid. He lived in an area with poor Internet service.  He had no schooling from the middle of Kindergarten through the beginning of second grade.  I am hopeful I can help him. I'll first address his auditory processing,  then his memory.