New vision

Jordan has his new glasses, and when he put them on, I suddenly remembered what it's like. Those of you who have gotten a major new prescription ever, do you remember how the walls curve, how the floor hills up in front of you, how peripheral objects move around with you a bit as you move your head? It's a few days before your brain straightens everything out. Jordan put his glasses on and laughed out loud. "It's all bouncy!" he said, joggling his head around for fun; walking on tiptoe around the office, he said, "The floor looks really deep." And then he took the glasses off and set them carefully on the table with the temples folded and lenses up, as he had been instructed. Uh... hon? You leave them on. The optician said to me on the side that this is very normal, that it's hard work for him to wear them at first, and that we should not force it but should just consistently encourage him to wear them a little here and a little there. Slow and steady wins the race. "And this race will be won," she stated definitively. He will want to see well.

This morning I suggested that he wear them while he was doing some letter mazes in a book. Two different camera poses:

Then on our way out the door, he said he wanted to wear them to school - not just on the way there, but all day. So much for slow and steady! I became very nervous. Could he possibly wear them all day and not lose them? They're $300 and I can't even put his name on them. But even with discussion about how it's okay if he's not ready, that they're the important thing he carries with him (much more important than his field trip permission form), that it was essential to bring them home either wearing them or if he couldn't wear them in their case, etc, he still wanted to wear them. How could I say no?

At school, I found his buddy Benjamin who wears glasses, explained that it was Jordan's first day, and asked him to help Jordan out. Benjamin seemed interested in this task. I also checked in with his teacher about it. Fingers crossed.

Pride

It is possible that only fellow parents (and maybe toddlers?) can appreciate the joy of the moment pictured below.

Even more excitingly, there was further activity after this! You may be grateful I did not photograph that.

Sukkah building, phase II

Regarding Yom Kippur: The combination of fasting with parenting presents a new level of challenge. But we were glad to be able to participate.

In the evening we began phase II of sukkah building, which is to cut the boards to size (note: it might have been better to ask the lumberyard to do the cutting for us) and attach the brackets to the roof beams and corner posts. This is all work we won't have to do again next year. The kids thought this was pretty exciting and enjoyed helping out with the measuring tape, pencil, and bracket placement. They longed to wield the ball peen hammer but we drew the line.

The Sukkah Project instructions are clear and helpful. Still, one part of the assembly we did last night required concentration and attention to detail in order to get multiple brackets oriented correctly, and for those qualities of mind, the night following Yom Kippur is not the best. Not their fault.

Sukkah building, phase I

We decided to celebrate our wonderful home and especially our wonderful backyard by doing something we've never done before: building a sukkah for Sukkot. For those of you not in the know, Sukkot is a fun harvest-themed holiday that comes shortly after the rather serious, introspective (and indoor) High Holidays. You build a simple shelter in your yard and hang out in it as much as you like for one week, ideally picnicking in it at mealtimes and bringing guests. It's very casual. The shelter has to have some kind of walls, but it doesn't have a solid roof; instead, just natural materials like pine boughs or whatever's handy. It should be shady inside, but you should be able to see the stars through the roof. It's supposed to recall the huts that harvest workers threw together so that they could sleep out in the fields, the minimal shelters used by the Israelites during their forty years in the desert, and on a symbolic level, the fragility of all human dwellings. To me a sukkah seems like it would have all the magic of a Christmas tree combined with the thrill of a blanket fort, but even better because it's outside and you eat food in it. What could be better than that? (Note: One is officially excused from the obligation to eat in the sukkah if it's raining, an important rule for Seattle. Even the quantity of rain is specified: if the precipitation is such that it drips in your soup, you may go in.)

There is the matter of actually building this thing. Jewish law invites you to throw together whatever kind of structure you want, as long as you build it yourself and it has that insubstantial roof. My web research turned up various misadventures of city Jews who tried to design their own. At the other end of the spectrum, you can buy a prefab sukkah with faux wood-grain vinyl panel walls for something like $800, which is not our style. We opted instead for a sukkah kit from the Sukkah Project, which sends you the hardware (brackets and screws), a green polypropylene mesh screen for the walls, a lumber shopping list, and supposedly klutz-proof instructions. The testimonials promise that it takes only a couple hours to put together the first time, and half an hour to take apart; the next year, it's much quicker to assemble because you leave many of the brackets on.

While the kids were off with Grandma, we went lumber shopping. First, though, we had to have a way to carry the lumber, because some of the required 2x4s are twelve feet long. (The sukkah will be 8x12 feet.) That meant a trip to REI for a rack for the Camry, which we had sort of been looking for an excuse to buy anyway... there's a canoe in the family, after all. It seems possible to me that building the sukkah will be more straightforward than assembling the car rack. We did manage it, though, and then took ourselves to Dunn Lumber for the boards.

The Sukkah Project instructions do seem very friendly and accessible. However, there were still decisions to make at the lumberyard. SPF lumber, white wood, spruce, cedar? It appears that the first three of those are roughly equivalent choices, all economical and reasonable for our purpose. Then there's the whole straight-boards thing, which a carpentryless girl like me just didn't realize was an issue. We needed seven 2x2s, and spent a while laying them on the floor to find ones that were less warped or twisted. The salesperson helping us was friendly and pleasant, and it's not his fault that 2x4s don't come in 93" lengths on the west coast; you can cut a 96" board to size if it has to be just right, or would 92-5/8" be good enough? Yeesh. We frowned at the design sketches in our instruction book and decided that yes, if they're all 92-5/8", it just means our sukkah will be half an inch less tall, and that's fine. We drove across the street from the store to the main yard, where someone loaded our very long boards onto the car for us. We tied them on with rope we had brought and drove home gingerly. No incidents.

The lumber is in the carport, waiting for Phase 2. (There's a more out-of-the-way place to store it after the holiday.)

Sleepover chez Grandma

Sue called us a few days ago and asked if she could pretty please have the boys sleep over at her house on Friday night, and take them to a picnic with her on Saturday. Anyone want to place bets on how many nanoseconds we needed to make that decision? :)

That was last night. We were curious how it would go - the boys adore Grandma, but Jordan hasn't spent the night away from us since one time he slept over at Eli's in Maryland, and Aaron never has. As it turned out there was no problem at all. They had a lovely time together. They got a little less sleep than usual, but that's a sleepover for you. Jordan was mildly disappointed that he had to return home after only one night. Grandma is very popular! It doesn't hurt that she is a Montessori teacher and lives on the school premises... it's a cornucopia of wonderful entertainments over there, everything from play-doh and paints to their own private playground.

Meanwhile, Dale and I had a nice dinner out, and enjoyed an actual unrushed Saturday morning in which we ate our breakfasts and read the newspaper with no one making any demands. Wow. So peaceful! Then we got started on a household project that was much easier with no kids in tow (see next post). It was such a novelty, and such a great break.

Sue asked if we could do this once a month. Yippee!

Glasses preview

I snagged this pic when we went to choose the size of frames yesterday. Pretty good! His real glasses will be ready next week. Another kid from Jordan's class was at the optician at the same time, and his dad explained that Benjamin really appreciates his glasses. "That's the first thing he does when he wakes up is put them on," he said to Jordan. Pretty cool.

At home the other day, Jordan said, "Thinking about my new glasses makes my eyes seem more blurry." I think now that he knows his vision is poor in one eye, he notices it more.

Weekly

Amblyopia Q&A

Jordan and Dale and I went to the optician this morning and tried out some frames. He looked great in them! Sorry, no pictures yet, but soon. When the optician saw Jordan's prescription, she gave a little gasp at how strong it is (not in his presence, thank goodness). "This is going to make such a difference for him," she said. That's nice to hear.

In other eye news, I called Jordan's ophthalmologist with questions, and got answers. (Note: A perk of this whole experience is that now I know for sure how to spell ophthalmologist.)

Q. Are there especially stereoscopic activities that it would be helpful for Jordan to participate in while his right eye is getting up to speed with the new glasses? Maybe catching a ball?

A. There's no need to devise especially challenging activities. "He'll be getting that challenge every time he opens his eyes," she said. Sheesh.

Q. How is amblyopia detected? When he comes back for more testing in three months, how will we know if his right eye is in good shape, or if we need to patch him?

A. I thought this would be a straightforward question, but she kept answering me with these odd non-answers, such as "Amblyopia is decreased vision." Do you mean blurry? "Not necessarily blurry, no." Well, what then? Dim? "Whatever the patient reports." Huh? "People describe it in different ways." Doctors sometimes treat people like idiots, and I was frustrated with the conversation, but I did manage to establish that if Jordan could see well with that eye with the corrective lens, he wouldn't need patching. I thought, how would he not see well through the corrective lens? That's what it's FOR.

I learned more from an adult friend who has amblyopia. He said that through one eye, glasses or no glasses, he doesn't see well. I asked what exactly he meant by that and he said, "It's very hard to describe. It's like if something is in that visual area, I can't attend to it." Is it blurry? No. Dark? No. Just kind of ... nothing. Eventually he expressed that it was sort of like peripheral vision, in which things are visually present, but are neither in focus nor consciously attended to. Except, he says, his peripheral vision is better than his central vision in that eye, so he consciously interpolates. Doing this is very tiring.

Q. What about Aaron?

A. Testing Aaron is optional. They test babies as young as six months. If we suspect something, we should go ahead. We don't, but we didn't with Jordan, either. We haven't decided what to do yet.

Aaron's weekly

Only Aaron gets these cute weekly reports now. I'll post them from time to time.

Fairly bad

We attempted to "Do the Puyallup" today, that being the big annual agricultural fair for this region. (Puyallup, for those of you not in the know, is pronounced "Pyoo All Up.") We knew it was a little crazy to do it on the same day as a kid birthday party but thought what the heck. We figured it's an hour drive, Aaron will nap on the way, it'll be fun.

We did have some fun. We saw a draft horse show, observed lots of cows-llamas-goats, cooed at cute baby pigs and petted big pigs, rode in a gondola, and ate bad food. All for a mere $60! But there were a lot of long lines ... half an hour for the gondola, etc. And that was after driving an hour to get there, and then hitting traffic and inching our way to the mysterious shuttle parking lot and catching a bus to the fairgrounds and waiting in line for the ticket, so that the whole trip from door to gate was 2.5 hours. And Aaron did not nap on the way down as planned, so by the time we left at 6:30 he was a complete nutcase. It only took us 1.5 hours to get home, yahoo.

That's about as much Puyallup Fair as we need for ... let's say ... the next decade. Ask us again in 2020. There is a smaller, closer fair we might try out next summer, the Evergreen State Fair. Fortunately that's already over this year.

Ophthalmologist

Back in July, at Jordan's regular yearly checkup, he had iffy results on his eye test. Those tests are not especially reliable with a five-year-old; he doesn't know his letters all that well, the game with which way the "E" is pointing is new to him, and the whole routine with standing on the line, covering one eye with a wand thingy, not peeking, not squashing the covered eye, etc, is a lot of new material to manage all at once. But I was there, and it seemed to me, too, that his right eye was worse. So I agreed with the doctor that Jordan would see a pediatric ophthalmologist for more careful testing.

That was Friday. The office was great - the outpatient clinic of Children's Hospital, in Bellevue. It's a heck of an exam, two hours of testing with all kinds of interesting equipment and procedures (which Jordan found fascinating and participated in energetically). For the distance vision exam, instead of letters on a chart, they have little graphic-logo-looking pictures on a computer screen. And the little pictures told the story: Jordan's right eye is way off, mostly due to astigmatism. We had no idea. When do you make a kid cover one eye? But since he was doing a lot of that during the exam, I just asked him, "Do things look different with this eye than that one?" and he said "Yeah, this one is all blurry, I can't see very well." Doesn't get much more straightforward than that. "But I can see fine with my two eyes together," he added, and I'm sure that's true. His left eye is 20/20.

Which brings up another issue: with his right eye so much weaker than the left, he may not be using the right eye much, and amblyopia is a concern. That's when the weaker eye is disregarded by the brain to such an extent that half the visual system doesn't develop properly, potentially putting one eye offline permanently. In Jordan's case, the eye doctor's corrective lenses brought his vision all the way to 20/40, which is awesome; that means that glasses alone may be enough to bring that eye back into functional connection with the brain. However, we need to keep an eye on it (so to speak). Depending on how things look (ha) after a few months with glasses, he may need to wear an eye patch for a few hours every day. The visual system stabilizes at age 7 or 8.

Meanwhile... glasses! I think he'll be cute in glasses; we'll try and get really good ones, ones that will be really comfortable for him and can't break. But I don't know how to get ones he can't lose, and even if he only gets new glasses every couple of years it's expensive. Sigh.

Educational note: Jordan was absolutely clear that these eye exams were tests, in the sense that you are supposed to get the right answers and it's bad if you don't. How to explain to him that it's really okay not to be able to see the picture, that it's not a bad performance on his part; and yet it's undesirable to have bad vision?

Five teachers in five days

In the second week of kindergarten, Jordan had a different teacher every day of the week. Mrs. Murphy is unfortunately very ill and is likely to be out for some time. We are really sorry to hear that, because both Jordan and we like her very much. The substitutes, in addition to being unpleasantly numerous, are not getting good reports. Of Thursday's teacher, Jordan said, "She taught us about rocks, but we already know a lot about rocks. And she tried to do the page with the B's, but we did that yesterday." Bummer. This is not how kindergarten is supposed to start.

The long line

Here's Mrs. Murphy leading the new kindergarteners down the stairs. Sam is having trouble saying goodbye, as you can hear from his dad. Look at them all filing along... there are twenty-seven kids in Jordan's class. Can you imagine?

First day of kindergarten

Jordan leading the way. The backpack is as big as his torso.



This is his power pose - he does this especially for pictures.



After a little playground time, a whistle shrieks and they line up by class. That's Mrs. Murphy exclaiming at their lovely manners. Jordan is third in line.



Jordan and Ashley bonded over their cool new lunchboxes, but Ashley did not seem very impressed by Jordan's animal sounds. I was amazed that they talked at all; the girls and the boys seem almost invisible to each other at this age.



Jordan does much better with his buddy Sam, who he met at a pre-K playdate. They sit at the same table and seem to get along great. We like Sam's parents, too.



I got inside the classroom for an open-house night after the second day. The children collaboratively agree on their own class rules. Jordan's contribution is at the bottom of the list: "You should pay attention when someone is talking."

Circles

Jordan gets homework now. Every Monday he gets a packet of worksheets, which is due on Friday. We parents are to help him work on the packet throughout the week. Worksheets! Kindergarten! Yowza! Well, we gave it a go this morning and Jordan thought it was just smashing. Tracing and writing capital and lowercase B’s was work, but the color-by-number page? He knocked that out in five minutes, while I was in the shower. He had never done a connect-the-dots before, and was tickled: “Hey! It’s a flowerpot!”

On another page, he was supposed to color in the pictures of things shaped like a circle. There was a drawing of a quarter, a soccer ball, and a teddy bear. He looked at all three, and the first thing he said was, “The teddy bear’s tummy is a circle.” He was completely right about this - the way the cartoon was drawn, there was a circle within the teddy bear. “And the ears too,” he noted, and again he was right, although they were not complete circles. I was not going to correct him. He colored those in, and only once that was complete did he go on to intricately color the panels on the soccer ball and the details of the quarter, with no comment about their shape. I think those were so obvious they weren’t even worth remarking on.

Doing school

At dinner on Friday night, we had Theo and family with us, and we were all talking about kindergarten since Theo also just started (but at a different school). Dale said Jordan had been telling him a lot of things about water earlier that day and asked Jordan to remind him what he had been saying. Jordan sat up straight with his eyebrows raised, looked around the table attentively, and said, “Does anyone have a suggestion about where there is water? If you have an idea about the different places that we find water, please raise your hand.” Dale raised his hand. Jordan said, “I am waiting for someone else to raise their hand, and then I will choose who should talk.” Others raised their hands.

Jordan: “Mommy?”

Rachel: “In a lake!”

Jordan: “Very good. Daddy?”

Dale: “In a cloud!”

Jordan: “Yes! Nicole?”

Nicole: “In your body!”

Jordan: “Hmm, that’s not what I was thinking of. Does anyone have another idea?”

That last was said in such a teacherly voice that Andy (Theo’s dad) and I gaped at each other in amazement. The whole thing really knocked me out. Never mind what he does or does not know about water: this was the third day of kindergarten, and he had the teacher-student routine completely down. It made me think about how much of mastering school is really about mastering these forms of discourse. We judge children so strongly by whether they know how to “do school” – what kinds of answers are being prompted, what the possible evaluations of those answers are, what it means when the teacher says, “That’s not what I was thinking of.” (!!) Dale and I were both very good at that game as children, and it looks like Jordan will be too, and there are definitely many advantages to that. But it’s also kind of spooky. Part of my unease is that I think in many cases we mistake the discourse mastery for subject-matter knowledge – Jordan showed so much expertise in this dinner-table conversation, but you’d be mistaken if you thought it was all about water. Another part of my feeling troubled is that it’s such a constrained form of interaction... once they learn those rules for talking, do you ever again get to hear what they really think?

“Kindergarten is kind of boring, but you learn a lot.”

This is Jordan’s assessment of public school so far. Things seem to be going very well; he’s enthusiastic at dropoffs, learning the new routines, trying out new friends, and generally seeming very functional. Every morning he and I walk the one block to school together; he carries his own backpack and lunchbox, puts them on a very faded blue star on the asphalt to mark his place in the line for Room 2, and runs off to play on the playground for a few minutes. At 9:15, the whistle blows, and all the children stampede over to line up. Their teacher leads them to their classroom. Jordan waves cheerfully at me and seems into it. When school gets out, Coach Terra from the JCC meets him at the totem pole with three other kids and they walk down the hill for Kidstown. The other Kidstown kids are a nice small group of his closest school buddies from last year. I think it must be quite a relief at the end of the day to have these familiar faces, and to be one of the big Kidstown kids, whom he has always admired.

I have no idea what happens in his classroom all day. It’s his world. We get some entertaining little windows into events and routines, which I’ll try to post about.

The overt signs are all positive, but there are some indirect indicators that Jordan is anxious, like not eating his lunch. That lunchroom is huge and loud and strangely lit and they eat at long tables; it seems pretty overwhelming even to me, and possibly unappetizing, too. When I asked him what lunch is like at his new school he said, “It’s kind of like when you have to go down to the office,” referring to a disciplinary procedure at his old school, “because you have to be completely quiet. There is music playing and when the music is on you don’t use your voice.” I assume this is for the walk down the hall, because the school has staggered lunch periods. Jordan talked me through the routine of finding somewhere to sit, opening up your lunchbox, etc. Then he looked a little intense and said, “It’s a little bit strange for me, because there are a lot of people that I don’t know and only a few people that I do know.” Ah… yes. This is the case. We reminisced about his old school, how at first he had not known anyone there, either, and now those were his good friends. Hopefully that will help him be patient.

Fall of a sudden

How did that happen? We came back from a fun week in SF and it was raining and dark by 8pm. We haven't even lost daylight saving time yet. You know what, though? I'm okay with it. Yes, the winter is long and dark and rainy and we will have to find different ways to entertain ourselves. But fall is for roasting vegetables and wearing sweaters and staying home and being cozy, and those things have their charm.

School is upon us. Aaron had his first day in his new classroom, and he did well. He was confused and sad at first about Jordan not being there with him, but he pulled it together and enjoyed his buddies and his new teachers. This year, he gets his own lunch out of his cubby instead of having it served to him, and he drinks water from a plastic glass instead of a sippy cup.

Kindergarten doesn't start until tomorrow but we're all fired up. There was a BBQ at the elementary school this evening and the yard was full of families that seemed just great. We visited Jordan's classroom and it looks excellent, teeming with fish and crayfish and carnivorous plants and a cactus garden, and the teacher, Mrs. Murphy, seems as delightedly serious as you would hope a kindergarten teacher would be on the eve of the first day. After locating his desk, Jordan led us back outside, where he hooked up with a new friend named Will and was basically not seen again for the next hour. (Okay, we were watching him, but he had no need for us.) Will is not in Jordan's class, and neither is Jordan's JCC friend Itamar; but another new buddy named Sam is at his very table. He's off to a good start.

Here, Jordan is inspecting the blank "tooth chart." The wall has the daily schedule on it.

Jordan found his own desk.

Here's the view from Jordan's desk.

His teacher, Mrs. Murphy, is in the middle.

Yes, for those of you keeping track, Wedgwood Elementary was not our first choice. But in the time since that post, we've learned that people move into our neighborhood from all over Seattle, abandoning perfectly good homes to get into our schools, and that Wedgwood Elementary in particular is cherished for its terrific parent community and good teachers. Surely it's good enough for us? The acknowledged downsides are the dumpy building and the brand new (thus untested) principal. I still worry about that geography teacher I saw when we visited... but for now, we're reconciled to our placement, and actually looking forward to it.