Thank you, Linette, for bike advice. When we get back from vacation, I will start investigating.
Ummm, good to have a tantrum on the page now and then. Keeps me humble. Embarrassed to be sure, and humble.
After feeling so very sorry for myself for a bit of that day and the next which was yesterday, I picked up and started again. Here is my practice in blinking capital letters. Yesterday, when we were meditating was had a monkey dog. Sometimes it is Julia who moves around during out whole sitting time and when we are finished, I try to explain why we keep still. I call it monkey body. Sometimes it is me who cannot keep my mind clear or on task or listening to the guided meditation. I tell Julia about monkey mind. Yesterday, our very old and infirmed little dog came onto the porch as I rang our bowl and she moved around, made various huffing and whining sounds, stepped on everything that was on the floor, and knocked up against each of us. In the final moments of meditation, she settled herself on the back of Julia’s pillow and promptly went to sleep. And then it was we humans who disturbed her morning nap. It was hard to concentrate but I let us just deal with the disturbance. When the timer went off, I told Julia about monkey dog and I think that the message came across so much better when Julia was the one being disturbed. Today, at the end of a very quiet sitting time, she announced, “no monkey dog.”
I had to go to the craft store to buy some tacky clay to put up some of Julia’s drawings -- the play room is finally cleaned, I am almost finished going through and filing away all of Julia’s papers from the last 6 years of school. I had taken down some old drawings and I’ve been challenged putting some of the new ones up. I had matted (in a very amateurish way) the pictures that Julia made for her Georgia O’Keefe project. Now, I can’t fine a way to get them on the wall without nails. Tacky clay which was my salvation prior to this, keeps matted drawings on the way for a day or two.
Julia’s OT had given Julia a “knitting nellie” (See http://spoolknitter.blogspot.com if you don’t know what this is. Also, this blog has good ideas when Julia’s knitted chain gets very long). I am not a knitter by any means which I generally take to be a personal failure because my mother, aunt and grandmother did all sorts of needle work and tried to teach me again and again. I don’t know why I never got it. Anyway, when someone gave Cheshire a knitting nellie, someone else got it started for her and she did it off and on forever. I am sure there is a mile long chain somewhere in her boxes in the basement.
So, now it is Julia’s turn, and believing that all one needs are really good directions, I took out the nellie, found youtube directions and struggled. I had to start it a few times before I got it to a place where Julia could take over but it was too tight, too small and the wooden needle that came with the nellie broke very quickly. Julia has very good fine motor skills but this small nellie seemed to guarantee frustration and failure. I thought that if we could find something bigger, it could be easy. Julia was clearly disappointed that the one she had wasn’t working.
Enter the sales lady at the craft store. Every so often, I meet a sales person who can listen to an inarticulate description of some need and come up with the perfect solution. I was truly inarticulate . . . bigger . . . easier to manipulate . . . less frustrating . . . and she thought a moment and led me down a jewelry aisle where she picked out a plastic knitting nellie (called something else) that is meant to be used with beads. The prongs were farther apart, the tube is bigger and the whole thing is plastic and clear. I watched the video instructions again and now Julia is knitting.
No comments:
Post a Comment