Yesterday I went in for carpal tunnel release surgery on the right side. It all went smoothly, as expected. I had sedation and local anesthesia and the whole process was about two hours, with the surgery itself less than 10 minutes. They run an efficient process at the outpatient surgery center!
Heading home. Don't worry, Alan is driving!
Mema and Grandpa Tom stayed with the kids. When I got home everyone worked together to make sure I followed doctor’s orders: Rest, ice, and elevate!
Ice and elevate
Bedtime was tricky. 😄 I’m not a back sleeper and it’s hard to get comfortable like this.
Ice and elevate, all night long!
I managed though and had a great night’s sleep! I woke with a full bladder and an achy hand, but at reasonable hour! And not burning pain!
I have this bulky wrap for 48hrs, then I can remove it and just put a bandaid over the incision site. They told me to expect some bruising and soreness on my hand, and the best way to minimize that is, you guessed it, rest, ice, and elevate!
The kids have vacation this week and the weather forecast today is awful, so we have big plans for games all morning then a movie in the afternoon when I’m all gamed out! Everyone has been super sweet and helpful.
Next month we repeat the whole process on the left side!
We have this book called The Valentine Express that we’ve had for years and years. It’s a cute story of bunny siblings that learn about Valentine’s Day in school and decide to make Valentine’s Day gifts for all of their neighbors. We read the story every year and often get inspiration for cards.
The Valentine Express
Today, after a late night at hockey, Eve spent the afternoon in her room making Valentine’s Day treats. She decided to make treats for each neighbor and came down once to have me help her count houses.
Meanwhile her new dog enjoyed a a delicious popcorn snack. :)
She finally finished around 5:3pm and wanted to head right out and deliver them. For some reason she wants to put them in mailboxes, not knock on doors. We’ll see what the neighbors think of that. She signed them all “from Cupid,” but I thought it wiser to have her name on them. :)
Two Valentine “trees” and a very serious face.
A sampling of her creations.
Seeing as it was 5:30pm, dark, and 2° outside, I talked her into waiting until morning to deliver the goods. She agreed, reluctantly.
She then had a mini-meltdown when she realized how messy her room was, hid herself under the coffee table with a book, missed dinner, and went to be in tears. Sweet tired girl. Hopefully an early bedtime will help her make it through the day tomorrow. <3
I worked at the PTO concessions fundraiser again this year and the kids got to take in another Dartmouth hockey game. It was a good game and D won 2-1 in OT! I was ready to go after we closed the booth partway through the 3rd period, but the kids wanted to stay until the end. Good thing too. It got exciting at the end!
Grandpa Tom was with us and picked the best seat, but the kids wanted to be front row so they hung out with a buddy right by the (plexi)glass!
Can you see them down there? They were chanting and cheering and probably bothering everyone around. :)
I wanted a good picture, but they gave me this. Look at that attitude!
I kept snapping until I got this. Those are the smiles I love. :)
Look who made front page of the sports section this morning!! (Look past those hockey players ;) )
Daisy likes to join us when we read downstairs. She was behind my head for awhile, then here behind Eve’s, the after Lex joined us on the couch she curled up on my arm by the pillow. Never sleeping, just being with us. It’s very sweet.
Yesterday was our first day of homeschooling. Our trail attempt to see how it goes.
I hadn’t told the school yet, thinking we could just try it first, and Lex said he didn’t want people at school to know, so the plan was to just keep him home. All went well until his teacher responded to my “Lex won’t be in school today” email with “I’m curious as to why. Yesterday he told [his para] that he was going to be out and that you were going to home school him for Tuesdays. Is there something that happens on Tuesdays he is avoiding?” BUSTED! So I sent her a whole reply about what we are thinking of doing. I said I wanted to chat with her in person, but we were going to try one day and see how it went. I got no reply. Now I don’t know who she has told (other teachers? principal?) or what anyone is thinking. So much for keeping it on the DL!
We started the day as usual, then when Eve left for school, Lex and I headed down to the basement. I thought it would be good to have some separation and I was concerned if we did schooling upstairs we would feel like we spent the entire day at the dining room table. Downstairs we began school with a discussion of how the day would go and a plan for what he wanted to learn.
Our plan for the day. (I really should crop and edit these pictures before posting. I’m getting blog-lazy!)
His first question was “How does a prism split apart light?” Using a prism, the info that came with it, plus two different science books, we did some experiments!
Setting up the classic “light through water” experiment.
Looking for rainbows
We found some! It was hard to take good pictures though.
Lex learned that each color moves at a different wavelength and when it hits a medium such as water or glass the waves refract (bend) at different angles, thereby causing the light colors to separate. Refraction was a new word for him.
Quick break!
We did some other exploring with the prism and the water as well.
This sheet came with the prism. It’s pretty cool to see what patterns emerge when the light is refracted through the prism.
This experiment brought up the concept of focal point. As you look through the water and move the paper backwards, the arrow appears to flip, pointing left instead of right. We talked about why that happens and how it would be affected with different size containers.
We had a snack break in the morning too, with some reading, of course! After lunch we had some outside time (shoveling the driveway!) and then went back downstairs to look at his second question. “Why are the 7 colors of light what they are? (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet)” This question took us to the Internet for some research. We learned that Isaac Newton first discovered that you can use a prism to split white light into a spectrum. He grouped the visible spectrum into seven colors because he thought there was a significance to the number seven and linked it to seven octaves, seven days of the week, and seven bodies in the sky. He thought they must all have some significance and relation. He also named them the names we use today.
That led us to wonder if all colors we can see (pink, teal, tan, beige, etc) appear somewhere in that spectrum or not. Turns out that they do not. The colors in the visible spectrum are colors made with just one wavelength. Shades and variations of colors require multiple wavelengths. We had a long discussion about that. On Wikipedia we found a drawing that Newton did mapping the colors to musical notes. Lex said, “Hey, I can play the rainbow.” So he did.
Playing the rainbow.
I don’t know why the audio has the static noise.
Lex wrote up his notes from the morning and afternoon sessions.
It’s good to have a key for your notes.
Morning session – light refraction
Afternoon session – visible spectrum
While we were doing experiments in the small office he noticed that his voice reverberated off the bass drum every time he spoke. That got him curious about sound vibrations and he suggested we add that to the list for future study. While he was reading about Newton he paused and asked, “I wonder why they call it octaves, when there are just seven notes? Oct usually means eight.” We added that to the list too. In bed last night he remembered that he had been learning Python (a programming language) with Alan, so we thought it would be fun to have Alan take a day off and they could learn about Python all day. Alan doesn’t know about that yet, so we’ll see. :)
The list is growing. Eve would very much like to be homeschooled too, so she started her own list.
Overall I think it was a successful day. He struggled a bit in the evening because one teacher sent work home for him with Eve, plus he was trying to get his Weekly Write done early, plus he remembered (at 7pm!) that he was supposed to read three chapters, answer some questions, write a summary, AND lead the discussion in his reading group today. He went to bed feeling very overwhelmed. We talked about the fact that he will also have to keep up with his regular school work, but we can allow some time during a homeschool day to work on that as well. At bedtime I asked if he thought homeschooling was still a good idea. He said, “YES!”
I’m super annoyed with this whole dog process. Allow me to vent for a bit. Our criteria isn’t much, just mid-sized, and good with cats and kids. And maybe not a puppy. In the past six weeks, that have felt like forever, I have been watching four different humane societies and countless (for my tired brain) rescue organizations. I’ve filled out four different applications, all of them extensive, and participated in home visits and phone interviews, and allowed vet and personal references checks as well. All this for a limited number of dogs that will fit with our family. On our way to up to meet Kane the other day I was telling Alan, I know that rescue is the way to go, but boy I can understand now why people just go to the pet store and buy a puppy. The whole thing could be done, easy peasy, in an hour! Of course, then you have a puppy. ;)
The rescue organizations are all volunteer and I know they try their best, but there really needs to be more corporate management in there! I end up talking to six different people, one for each step of the way. As of Sunday when we visited Kane there were three others we were hoping to see, and in the past two days they have been adopted or mysteriously unavailable. Then two more became available, then not available. The communication is poor in this organizations so one person says the dog is available and the next person says, oh, no, it’s not. This afternoon two remaining dogs fell through and we decided that was a good thing because Kane was a great dog and now we could got forward confidently with that decision.
Eve was in tears. She wanted a different dog, any different dog, for mysterious Eve reasons, and I spent half an hour with her this afternoon talking about Kane, waylaying her concerns (he would be too boring, being one of them) and getting her psyched up. She loved him when we met him, so these were more “I’m not getting my way” tears then true tears of concern. I called a rescue organization that was going to come by this evening for a home visit and canceled. They were being terrible communicators and their dogs, who we were excited to meet, seemed to be in vanishing. So we said Kane is our guy and let’s move on!
I had literally just hung up the phone with them and my phone beeped with a new email alert. “There was an incident with Kane and a student on Monday that made me think twice as to whether he would be a good candidate for a household with children. The student was down on the floor with him playing and getting him riled up and out of excitement he nipped her in the face. She didn’t get hurt, but after discussing it with the head technician, we decided that he would not be a good choice in a house with kids for this reason.” ARGH!! I mean, I’m glad they told me and of course I don’t want a dog who will nip people, but ARGH!!
Back to square one. Every dog we were interested in is either adopted, “not right for us”, or apparently dangerous.
Maybe it just isn’t meant to be at this point. Not like we don’t have other things going on in life. I closed all of my doggie websites that were open, closed the Amazon page with crates on it, closed the “how to introduce your cat to a dog” page, and will walk away for this evening. Deep breath. Fresh eyes tomorrow. It will be what it will be.
Maybe I should find out what my references are saying about me… ;)
