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Mar. 6th, 2008 01:18 amWoke up, tandem nursing, diaper, dressing everyone.
Lunch making, Laura arriving, read a chapter to Annie, two short books to Jake, a book to Isaac, nursing.
Phonics, reading comprehension, handwriting and money for A and A.
Zoo all afternoon (water playing, walking walking walking while pushing and carrying).
Grocery store with them all.
Nursing, diaper, changing clothes from accidents, making lasagna.
Daddy home, eating together, catching up with each other, tooth brushing, stories, and bed for them, tandem nursing.
Lost, booty and bed him him, with Jake and Elise both out.
I AM BEAT.
Yeah, we're watching Lost now. For the longest time I thought it was a reality show and had no interest, that's how out of touch I am. Good news for me is that now there are whole seasons ripe for the commercial-free, New Episode Every Night viewing. It inspires a LOT of thinking on my part.
I'm reading that book The Gift of Dyslexia, too. It's really mind-blowing, how much it applies to Ananda but moreso the ways it makes me understand this, in a way I just never would have understood before. I didn't know that dyslexics only think in pictures, which makes it hard or even impossible for them to read and write. I didn't know they "disorient" and letters and words actually flip and move before their eyes. I didn't realize words without a mental image (like "brown" or "horse" would have), such as "the", can make a dyslexic kid totally blank out in the middle of a sentence they're reading - I was talking to Ananda about this and she jumped up yelling - "YES! What the heck does 'the' look like?! Just a t and an h and an e floating around on a black background?! That has NOTHING to do with a brown horse!!" It makes so much sense now that she would have been 22 months old before she said so much as "mama", that she stuttered like crazy from 3-5 years old and that she speaks in halting, seemingly philosophical tones with long pauses. She's constantly trying to transcrible visual imagery into language. Anytime she's really upset she clams up and we can't get her to tell us what the heck is wrong, sometimes for an hour or more. Later on she always tells me she really doesn't know what was bothering her. Well, now I know these symptoms drastically increase during emotional upheaval. My little girl who was painting recognizable stuff before she turned 3 and who builds lego houses that have chests of candles "Since there aren't any outlets for electricity" and rain barrels "since there's no plumbing". All these famous scientists and inventors have been dyslexic, because of the advantages dyslexia gives - like Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein - and also artists, like Leonardo da Vinci and Walt Disney.
With all this in mind, my fellow homeschooling or "in child related fields of work/study" friends...how much would you nitpick her mistakes when she's obviously learning and getting things "right"...for her? For instance she made a card for Grant recently and I was confused that the front was totally blank but she had filled in the middle and drawn on the back, but she said it was done. She's also made him cards where whole sentences, like "I love you Dad, Happy Birthday!" are written mirror image backwards, from right to left, without having any idea. But that's creative stuff she does on her own time, and obviously she's spelling well and her handwriting is perfect aside from being, well...completely backwards. Likewise she'll frequently do a couple of pages of math problems and get every single answer correct, but at least 75% of the numerals are backwards. I praise her like crazy for solving all the problems and getting all the right answers, but there is always this "...but" at the end of my spiel. A huge part of why I wanted to homeschool was to preserve the love of learning and keep it from being a burden or a chore. It's really disheartening to her when there is ALWAYS a "but". But, (haha) I don't want to reinforce the errors and I do want to teach her the right way to do things. The author of the book I'm reading, who is dyslexic himself, thinks spelling skills are really overrated, particularly in this age of computer programs that fix your errors. I mean if she's typing, it will HAVE to be left to right, and then she can run spellcheck. He really thinks that grasping literary concepts and reading comprehension and such should prioritize way higher than they do and we should lay off the spelling words, spelling tests and spelling bees, to some degree, since they are all just memorization for the most part anyway. He makes a big fuss about how little sense our phonics rules make, and how every one of them has a bunch of exceptions, and how English is one of the hardest languages for spelling because we have such a small number of characters to represent so many different sounds, compared to other languages. But I keep wondering if relying on spellcheck is like saying, "Who needs math when we have calculators?" I want her to have that.
One thing I am going to start doing is giving her a "cheat card" that just shows 0123456789 the right way on it, big and far apart, for her to reference as she does her math work. It won't work if she's disorienting, and sees my written numerals every which way, but since math doesn't usually confuse her (which is what causes the disorientation response - confusion) I'm hoping it will help reinforce the CORRECT neural pathways for how the numbers should be seen and how to write them, eventually weakening the ones that do it the wrong way...there is a lot of talk about the wrong neural pathways being strong in dyslexics based on them seeing and doing things backwards, upside down or rearranged, again and again, in the things I've been reading. One little girl being evaluated even told the tester that when she got confused, the letters crawled off the paper and hid in the carpet, leaving a blank space on the paper! And then she would literally "Draw a blank card" when she tried to recall what a word looked like, later.
Anyway. I have yet to get to the "how to methodically go about helping your kid" part of the book.
I am trying, amidst about a billion other things I'm trying to do, to improve my health, diastasis, energy and weight. For the health, I'm forcing myself to get more sleep even when it kills me to not stay up and have my alone time or my cleaning time or whatever. Notice I'm updating at 1:10, not 5:10. I'm also chugging more water. For my diastasis, I'm wearing the muscle splint for at least a little while every day and trying to do the excercises when I think about it throughout the day (they're things you can do while you're sitting and driving, and things like that), as well as improving how I get up and down and lift (though I'm not perfect about those things yet - I do a lot of getting up and down and lifting). For energy, I'm trying to be more active. I've been very sedentary since my last surgery. Since that mall power walking kicked my ass, I've been to the zoo walking around twice, and walked to the store twice, and I plan on doing a lot more walking in general, to start with. Hopefully the sleep and the excercise will jumpstart my metabolism a bit and automatically do a bit of the weight thing. My main weight hurdle is CONSTANT COMPULSIVE EATING. It's sick, how I eat. I've actually been confused about it, thinking something is seriously wrong with me. I called my dad and asked if he lost all his normal cues and just felt ravenous 24/7, after his small bowel resection, thinking, you know, maybe after 10 days of not eating AT ALL, my body was trying to make up for lost time. Or maybe there's a nutrient problem with my shortened intestines. And he had a little of that, but it faded fast and wasn't as bad as mine. In the past few months I can be so full I'm really uncomfortable from it, having just eaten a full meal plus seconds the same size, and still have a constant gnawing compulsion to go eat more. To the point that sometimes I do, and then I'm in pain from being so overfull and think about that "glutton" guy the psycho killed in Seven by making him eat til he died. It's absolutely nuts. Then I recently learned that profound sleep deprivation causes your body to stop producing the hormone that controls appetite and the one that signals fullness, so, you know. Ding ding ding. That makes sense. They were talking about WAY less prolonged and less profound deprivation than I've had, too. So, maybe it will be easier for me to eat like a normal freaking person with some rest under my belt. I've always loved food, but it's never been like this.
Speaking of sleep...
I'm just gonna embed this video before I go. I saw it in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
justamy's lj the other day, and loved it so much I called the kids inside and had them watch it too. They also loved it, for what it's worth. Annie's asked to watch it 3 more times and I've probably listened to the song 100 times now.
( last thoughts - worst fears )
Lunch making, Laura arriving, read a chapter to Annie, two short books to Jake, a book to Isaac, nursing.
Phonics, reading comprehension, handwriting and money for A and A.
Zoo all afternoon (water playing, walking walking walking while pushing and carrying).
Grocery store with them all.
Nursing, diaper, changing clothes from accidents, making lasagna.
Daddy home, eating together, catching up with each other, tooth brushing, stories, and bed for them, tandem nursing.
Lost, booty and bed him him, with Jake and Elise both out.
I AM BEAT.
Yeah, we're watching Lost now. For the longest time I thought it was a reality show and had no interest, that's how out of touch I am. Good news for me is that now there are whole seasons ripe for the commercial-free, New Episode Every Night viewing. It inspires a LOT of thinking on my part.
I'm reading that book The Gift of Dyslexia, too. It's really mind-blowing, how much it applies to Ananda but moreso the ways it makes me understand this, in a way I just never would have understood before. I didn't know that dyslexics only think in pictures, which makes it hard or even impossible for them to read and write. I didn't know they "disorient" and letters and words actually flip and move before their eyes. I didn't realize words without a mental image (like "brown" or "horse" would have), such as "the", can make a dyslexic kid totally blank out in the middle of a sentence they're reading - I was talking to Ananda about this and she jumped up yelling - "YES! What the heck does 'the' look like?! Just a t and an h and an e floating around on a black background?! That has NOTHING to do with a brown horse!!" It makes so much sense now that she would have been 22 months old before she said so much as "mama", that she stuttered like crazy from 3-5 years old and that she speaks in halting, seemingly philosophical tones with long pauses. She's constantly trying to transcrible visual imagery into language. Anytime she's really upset she clams up and we can't get her to tell us what the heck is wrong, sometimes for an hour or more. Later on she always tells me she really doesn't know what was bothering her. Well, now I know these symptoms drastically increase during emotional upheaval. My little girl who was painting recognizable stuff before she turned 3 and who builds lego houses that have chests of candles "Since there aren't any outlets for electricity" and rain barrels "since there's no plumbing". All these famous scientists and inventors have been dyslexic, because of the advantages dyslexia gives - like Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein - and also artists, like Leonardo da Vinci and Walt Disney.
With all this in mind, my fellow homeschooling or "in child related fields of work/study" friends...how much would you nitpick her mistakes when she's obviously learning and getting things "right"...for her? For instance she made a card for Grant recently and I was confused that the front was totally blank but she had filled in the middle and drawn on the back, but she said it was done. She's also made him cards where whole sentences, like "I love you Dad, Happy Birthday!" are written mirror image backwards, from right to left, without having any idea. But that's creative stuff she does on her own time, and obviously she's spelling well and her handwriting is perfect aside from being, well...completely backwards. Likewise she'll frequently do a couple of pages of math problems and get every single answer correct, but at least 75% of the numerals are backwards. I praise her like crazy for solving all the problems and getting all the right answers, but there is always this "...but" at the end of my spiel. A huge part of why I wanted to homeschool was to preserve the love of learning and keep it from being a burden or a chore. It's really disheartening to her when there is ALWAYS a "but". But, (haha) I don't want to reinforce the errors and I do want to teach her the right way to do things. The author of the book I'm reading, who is dyslexic himself, thinks spelling skills are really overrated, particularly in this age of computer programs that fix your errors. I mean if she's typing, it will HAVE to be left to right, and then she can run spellcheck. He really thinks that grasping literary concepts and reading comprehension and such should prioritize way higher than they do and we should lay off the spelling words, spelling tests and spelling bees, to some degree, since they are all just memorization for the most part anyway. He makes a big fuss about how little sense our phonics rules make, and how every one of them has a bunch of exceptions, and how English is one of the hardest languages for spelling because we have such a small number of characters to represent so many different sounds, compared to other languages. But I keep wondering if relying on spellcheck is like saying, "Who needs math when we have calculators?" I want her to have that.
One thing I am going to start doing is giving her a "cheat card" that just shows 0123456789 the right way on it, big and far apart, for her to reference as she does her math work. It won't work if she's disorienting, and sees my written numerals every which way, but since math doesn't usually confuse her (which is what causes the disorientation response - confusion) I'm hoping it will help reinforce the CORRECT neural pathways for how the numbers should be seen and how to write them, eventually weakening the ones that do it the wrong way...there is a lot of talk about the wrong neural pathways being strong in dyslexics based on them seeing and doing things backwards, upside down or rearranged, again and again, in the things I've been reading. One little girl being evaluated even told the tester that when she got confused, the letters crawled off the paper and hid in the carpet, leaving a blank space on the paper! And then she would literally "Draw a blank card" when she tried to recall what a word looked like, later.
Anyway. I have yet to get to the "how to methodically go about helping your kid" part of the book.
I am trying, amidst about a billion other things I'm trying to do, to improve my health, diastasis, energy and weight. For the health, I'm forcing myself to get more sleep even when it kills me to not stay up and have my alone time or my cleaning time or whatever. Notice I'm updating at 1:10, not 5:10. I'm also chugging more water. For my diastasis, I'm wearing the muscle splint for at least a little while every day and trying to do the excercises when I think about it throughout the day (they're things you can do while you're sitting and driving, and things like that), as well as improving how I get up and down and lift (though I'm not perfect about those things yet - I do a lot of getting up and down and lifting). For energy, I'm trying to be more active. I've been very sedentary since my last surgery. Since that mall power walking kicked my ass, I've been to the zoo walking around twice, and walked to the store twice, and I plan on doing a lot more walking in general, to start with. Hopefully the sleep and the excercise will jumpstart my metabolism a bit and automatically do a bit of the weight thing. My main weight hurdle is CONSTANT COMPULSIVE EATING. It's sick, how I eat. I've actually been confused about it, thinking something is seriously wrong with me. I called my dad and asked if he lost all his normal cues and just felt ravenous 24/7, after his small bowel resection, thinking, you know, maybe after 10 days of not eating AT ALL, my body was trying to make up for lost time. Or maybe there's a nutrient problem with my shortened intestines. And he had a little of that, but it faded fast and wasn't as bad as mine. In the past few months I can be so full I'm really uncomfortable from it, having just eaten a full meal plus seconds the same size, and still have a constant gnawing compulsion to go eat more. To the point that sometimes I do, and then I'm in pain from being so overfull and think about that "glutton" guy the psycho killed in Seven by making him eat til he died. It's absolutely nuts. Then I recently learned that profound sleep deprivation causes your body to stop producing the hormone that controls appetite and the one that signals fullness, so, you know. Ding ding ding. That makes sense. They were talking about WAY less prolonged and less profound deprivation than I've had, too. So, maybe it will be easier for me to eat like a normal freaking person with some rest under my belt. I've always loved food, but it's never been like this.
Speaking of sleep...
I'm just gonna embed this video before I go. I saw it in
justamy's lj the other day, and loved it so much I called the kids inside and had them watch it too. They also loved it, for what it's worth. Annie's asked to watch it 3 more times and I've probably listened to the song 100 times now. ( last thoughts - worst fears )
