What the Eye Doctor Said

Today our family went to the eye doctor to evaluate my son's vision.  

Sure enough my son has eye trouble.  He is slightly nearsighted, but not enough to need glasses.  However, there are three issues with his eyes that do require attention.  The first is his eye tracking ability, eye tracking refers to the eye's ability to follow a moving object, and to move easily and smoothly from side to side, as is required to read a line of text. Children usually develop this ability on their own as they play, and by the time they try to learn to read, their eyes can move smoothly across a line of text, or follow a butterfly fluttering about the room.  My son's eyes did not develop this ability.  They move side to side in a halting, jerking, movement.  They also move slightly up and down as they attempt to move side to side. The next issue is his convergence ability, that is the ability of both eyes to focus on the same spot in space.  With concentrated focus and effort, he can make his eyes do this, but he has to work very hard to get them to, and it is not supposed to be hard.  It is supposed to be automatic.  The third problem with his eyes is that when he focuses on something near him, and then tries to focus further away, his eyes take too long to relax and refocus, this is probably the cause of his slight nearsightedness.

The good news is that all of these problems are treatable through vision therapy.  It is possible that our medical insurance will cover it, we are still waiting to find that out.

The doctor suggested that we get him tested for Dyslexia as well, and, as I shared in an earlier post, we have already made an appointment for that.  If he has Dyslexia, the vision therapy won't fix that, but by removing the visual obstacles, so that he only has the obstacle of Dyslexia still in his way, we will make learning much easier for him.

Oooh Nooo!

Yesterday when I woke up the day looked beautiful.  I got ready for work and it was still beautiful.  I arrived at work and it was still beautiful.

Then as I was working I heard some noise, it sounded like a lot of wind.  I looked out the window, and sure enough, the wind was blowing... hard.  Hard enough to bend the tops of the tall pines into shape of a bow.  Around here, that kind of windstorm means one thing... widespread power failure. The people I clean house for have a generator that automatically kicks in when the power goes out, so it didn't effect my ability to finish the job.  I sent my oldest daughter a text, asking if the power was out yet.  She texted back "LOL, Yes."

When I left the client's house, I was a little surprised at the condition of the roads.  The storm was worse than I'd thought.  Tree limbs lay everywhere, I weaved in and out among them all the way home.  In one spot a tree had fallen across the road, fortunately before I got there a guy did who happened to have a chain saw in his truck.  He was just finishing up when I arrived on the spot.  So I was able to continue on home.  The road I live on was no better.  One neighbor's fence was broken down by a fallen tree.  When I got to my driveway, I had to get out and clear some large limbs out of the way before I could continue home.


Once I got home, I saw that the power was still out.  This meant a cold lunch, it was already 3:00 in the afternoon so I was famished and in no mood to search too much for healthy options.   My diet bread was frozen, so I had to use regular, and eat lunch meat and cheese.  After my sandwich I was sill hungry so I ate some of the lunch meat and cheese plain.  Finally I had an apple and a yogurt.  Then I started homeschooling my kids, my oldest works independently, so I focused my attention on the younger two.



We did Phonics, I read them a chapter from their new History book, and then we finished reading a chapter of Little House in the Big Woods.  They had done their Math while I was at work, and they do most of their science at co-op, so I decided to call that enough for the day.  The power was still out.


I decided I'd better go get our generator out of the garage and hook it up before it got too dark to see.  So I walked around behind our house to open the garage door.  Usually we use an automatic garage door opener, so I had to disconnect that in order to open it manually.  Then, to get the generator out, I had to move a bunch of boxes that had been placed in the path.    Finally I got the generator out of the garage and started pulling it up the steep hill to the spot near our door where we usually put it.  It was heavy and difficult to get up the hill.  I could feel the stress on my ab muscles and on all the edges of the hernia patch, but I had to have the generator so I kept pulling.  My son jumped in to help me and started pushing, that made it a lot easier and we got it in place.

Next, I tried to start it.  It has a long complicated starting procedure that involves three levers being in correct positions, and for some reason, the manufacturer didn't find it necessary to put a sticker on it explaining the correct procedure.  So I had to try a multitude of variations, and pull the cord many times before finally getting it started.  Next time I mush remember that the gas switch needs to be in the "Off" position to start, that makes no sense to me, which is why it took so long for me to hit on that variation.


Anyway, we finally had the generator running and the first thing we did was make dinner.  I plugged in the fridge to keep it cold for a while, and plugged the microwave in to heat things in.  I didn't pay as much attention to portions as I should have, which resulted in my calories for the day being higher than they should have been, but I was honestly hungry every time I ate, none of it was just eating for the sake of eating.

After dinner we unhooked the fridge and microwave and tried hooking up both of our convection heaters to the generator.  The heaters were too much of a drain and it triggered the circuit breaker.  We decided to go without heat for a while, wear coats, and just hook up our TV and a lamp and watch LOST.    I also hooked up the Wii so I could do Free Step as I watched.  That was one good decision I made, I didn't skip my exercise.  By the time Lost was over I still needed to do about 40 minutes more on Wii Fit Plus to reach my total calorie burn. So my oldest put the younger kids to bed and I stayed up exercising.  After I was done, my husband arrived home and we hooked up one heater and put it in the hall near all of our bedrooms, and went to bed.


This morning when I woke up the power was still out, the generator had run out of gas, and the house was cold, so I just went back to sleep for a while.  Later I woke up to find it still out.  My husband and I decided we might as well get the generator going again so we could start our day.  Just as he was about to go get the gas can and fill it up, the lights came on.  (Yippee!)


So my calories for the day were 2053, instead of 1600 like they should have been.  I hope that the hard day at work, moving all those boxes, hauling the generator up the hill, pulling the start cord over and over, and then still going on to complete my workout made up for the extra calories!  I won't depend on that though, I was 453 calories over, so for the next few days I'll try to come in under to make up the difference.

Its Been so Long!

Its been so long since I've updated.  It seems that lately I am too busy homeschooling to have much time to blog about it.  My son's dyslexia evaluation is scheduled for next month, which was the earliest they could get him in.  The test is a formality though.  I've already been told based on questions I answered that it is 90% sure that he is dyslexic.

Meanwhile, he is plugging away with his reading.  We are past the halfway mark for Saxon Phonics 2, and I swear this curriculum is exactly what he needs.  I wrote a review about it HERE.   For those who don't know, my screen name on most sites is Thrice Blessed.

On Friday my son is seeing a developmental ophthalmologist  who will thoroughly test his eyes, this is because often visual tracking, and binocular vision difficulties accompany dyslexia, and can make it even harder to overcome.  The vision difficulties are usually reversible, leaving the child to only deal with the brain/processing problem of dyslexia, rather than continuing to struggle with both  processing difficulties and vision difficulties.

On another note, since my son's reading is improving with the Saxon Phonics, I've decided we should now begin to try to catch up in other areas of academics, areas that have been somewhat neglected as we focused so much time and energy trying to get him reading.  

One of those areas is Language Arts, things like writing, grammar, and reading good literature, which have, in my mind, always been important elements of "education".  So to address this we are going to start using Learning Language Arts Through Literature. 

We will be starting with the Yellow Book.  The Yellow Book covers third grade skills, and my son is in fourth grade approaching fifth grade.  I would love to be able to skip this level, and put him in the fourth grade book, but he still needs so many of the skills in the yellow book, we are going to work through the summer, and once we finish Saxon Phonics, we are going to try to do two days worth each day in order to catch up.  In the Yellow Book, my son will learn third grade grammar and punctuation, will practice some spelling patterns, will review some principles of phonics, will read and study some quality children's literature, and will learn cursive handwriting.  My youngest daughter will do it right along with him, I know she is capable.  In fact, I think she could probably handle the fourth grade level, even though she is in second grade.

We are also going to start doing some history, which we have been neglecting this year.  We will go through This Book together.  

I plan to do most, if not all of the reading on this one.  There are review questions at the end of each chapter, which we will discuss.  I won't be testing my kids on them.  Again, my daughter will do this with us.  I hope to finish the History book before summer, so that during summer all we have to do is Language Arts.  Then next year, I would like to do Mystery of History, Volume 1.

For Science, we may or may not start something this year.  The children are both taking science at the co-op, so we don't really need to do it.  However, I am considering THIS for next year.  

I am considering teaching it at the co-op, which is just once a week, and then also using THIS at home.  

I know that is two science programs, but I think we can handle it, and the plus is that we already own both!  The "Considering God's Creation" one will review earth and space science, and since it been almost two years since we covered that, I think the review is good.  It will also add depth to the Biology that we will study once a week at co-op.

Well, I hope to post again soon, for now I have to get to bed, because tomorrow I work and the come home to homeschool the kids.