(no subject)
The past two weeks here have been a mixture of quiet, chaotic, and mundane. We had three Christmas celebrations. Saturday we went out to lunch with my Dad and siblings, then opened gifts at Dad's house. We left there and went immediately home, dropped everything, and proceeded across the yard to our neighbor's retirement party. He's an airline pilot and was celebrating his final flight with the airline and the anticipation of a 3 week trip to Australia and New Zealand.
On Sunday we had Christmas at home with the boys. We were also blessed with the company of Amy and Brandy, two lovely young ladies. We had Papa Murphy Pizzas (Veggie for Amy, Brandy, and me, Meat Supremes for the guys) and opened gifts. It was a lovely relaxed day.
Monday Steve's family showed up at our front door and we had a house full to celebrate Christmas Day. Our menu was traditional.. except for desert. I set up the chocolate fountain and we happily dripped chocolate on fruit, cake, and ourselves. We also had a cheese fondue with french bread and veggies and apples before the meal. The meal as I said was traditional. Honey baked ham, turkey, sage dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy, green bean casserole, a fruited jello mold, and cranberry sauce. We also had hot rolls and my own recipe for Christmas Pudding that involved sweet potatoes, oatmeal and a caramal sauce. I'm pretty sure everyone had plenty to eat. Mat decided to liven up the Christmas gifts with electronic toys this Christmas so he gave his cousin Richard (the cop) a remote control heliocopter, and Richard's 16 year-old son got a set of remote controlled fighting tanks. The fun with the tanks is that when one scores a direct hit on the other the controller of the tank that was hit gives you an electric shock. That was good for some interesting battles. Richard's 4-year-old, the only real youngun', got lots of noisey, fun vehicles from cars to motorcycles and all the guys had fun getting down on the floor and playing with Noah's booty.
Steve decided to liven up the the gatherings with Season appropriate head gear so we were all decked out in various versions of Santa's hats, reindeer antlers, and elf ears. All this finery and no pictures.... *g* From the looks of the destruction, a fine time was had by all.
For New Year's Eve we met up with friends at the movie theater and watched The Pursuit of Happiness with Will Smith and his son. That youngster is amazing. It was a good movie and we proceeded from there to a restaurant for dinner. We were planning to enjoy Blues at the local Bar and Grill but didn't know we needed tickets. They were sold out by the time we got there. So we ended up at home with lots of conversation, wine, eggnog, coffee and eventually a cheese and cracker tray with another round of the Chocolate Fountain. This time with angelfood cake, marshmallows, bananas, pineapple chunks, strawberries, and mandarin oranges. Yumm.... The New Year's celebration was tinged with a bit of sadness as two of our friends will be moving to St. Louis (Carol has already started her new job there) and we won't be able to meet up for movies and dinner out as often as we'd like.
All in all it's been a lovely Holiday season. January will bring lots of peace and quiet. Steve is moving Phill to Chicago this week and installing him in his new living quarters where he will be pursueing his Graphic Arts degree. At the end of the month we will be going to Mexico for a couple of weeks. In the mean time there's always the store and clearing up the Christmas decorations and getting things back to normal. I'm leading the Morning Reading Group discussion the 10th and filling in for the Story Lady with the younguns on the 12th. Fortunately I managed to get the Newsletter out on time so I'm not rushing to get that out of the way this week.
And now..
We've been doing last minute shopping for Phillip. He'll be living in a one bedroom apartment with one roommate and I've been putting together kitchen, bathroom, bedroom necessities. It surely mounts up quickly. I think we've managed the most necessary things without over loading the car for the trip this week. I guess we (you and I) will both be experiencing the change of having the last fledgling leave the nest. I'm so going to miss Phill. Even when I don't see him more than a few minutes a day it's good knowing that he's here. I am so fortunate. I really LIKE my boys as people. They are such unique characters and I love being around them.
Phill and I have been talking about his dyslexia and how he has learned to deal with it. I'm so proud of him. He's learned so much on his own about how to orient his sight and lessen the confusion that comes with disorientation. I'm only now realizing how much of his stomach troubles have been a direct result of the dyslexia. I always thought it was a vision problem but I'm learning now that dyslexics have a highly developed ability to "see" things from all perspectives, particularly physical objects. Their ability to change their point of perspective and see objects from every side while actually remaining in one spot is developed from early age and these children have a highly honed problem solving process based on this ability. Phill says that this ability helps him with his photography because he can look at a prospective "picture," move it around in his head, and then physically move to the spot that will give him the best angle for the picture he wants. He sees flat objects in 3 dimension which causes much of the difficulty with letter and symbol recognition that dyslexics experience trying to learn how to read. (Since writing on a page has only one dimension their brains create a whole different picture of what they see.) The other difficulty is that they visualize each word to form a picture of what the sentence "says." When they encounter words that don't have a visual equivalent their thought process is totally interrupted and they lose "sight" of what is being portrayed. Simple words like and, the, and a, cause the most problems because they are sprinkled into our language and have no visual equivalent. But he has learned to control this perspective so that the letters and symbols stay flat on the page and he has developed his own "short hand" for problem words. I've learned that dyslexics think in images and concepts rather than the way I think in dialogue. Because they do this their brain works between 200 and 1200 percent faster than mine. Savants do this in a highly specialized way. I'm beginning to think that dyslexics are actually a step up in the development of the human brain. Faster, able to see objects in 3D, and to identify things more quickly because of this amazing ability. I've gained a whole new respect for my son. We've grown to consider him learning disabled, but in truth the problem is not his disability, but our inability to communicate at the level that he processes information. I weep for the younger dyslexics that are treated as retarded or slow when actually they are thinking much faster than the rest of us just to understand the backward way that we see things.
Sorry, I didn't mean to go off on a tangent. I just wish that I'd known more about all of this when Phill was struggling with how to cope with his differences. He is a wonderful person and his gift of dyslexia is such an integral part of him. It's too bad that most people (myself include) don't understand a great deal about how this gift works.
Well, as you can see I'm starting the new year off with the exploration of new ways of looking at things. I'm also determined to give up my attempts to control the world and just enjoy it.