Just because you can go doesn't mean you should

When I was about ten, I had a sweatshirt with a teddy bear that said, "Pennsylvania winters are un-bearable".  By age 12 I'd experienced my first blizzard aptly named the Blizzard of '92.  That was supposed to be a 100-year storm (meaning we only got one every hundred years).  The Blizzard of '93 the next winter was some kind of bonus.

I've grown up in a place that doesn't have the worst winters, but they can certainly be challenging.  We're in the midst of challenges right now.  Starting on Friday afternoon snow dumped on us.  It continued until midday on Saturday.  The whole southwestern part of Pennsylvania got about two feet of snow.  There are areas, including where my mother-in-law lives, that still do not have electricity.  After the snow was done the temperature dipped to a low of zero degrees on Sunday morning.


Lots of churches canceled Sunday services.  Ours was not one of them, so we took in the conflicting information we had about the world and made our decision.  The local news was reporting that we were still under a state of emergency and only emergency vehicles should be on the road.  Then they promptly reported that all of the area malls were open.  Tim and I decided to venture out and give it our best effort.

The picture is taken through the windshield of our car after we'd decided to turn around and head back home.  It is of the main road, the thoroughfare that is usually well treated.  Our Sunday morning adventure took us a bit further than this point to Route 8, an even bigger four lane road.  Route 8 was a mess and upon seeing it we decided that church was going to go on without us.

Yesterday I canceled Julia's eye doctor's appointment.  On Tim's drive to work he observed that one of the roads I needed to drive on still looked worse than what we saw on Sunday morning.  He advised that we spend another day at home and reschedule the appointment.

Here's where I get annoyed with my fellow Pennsylvanians.  Clearly, it was possible to drive on Sunday.  The roads were passable and very likely we could have made it to where we were going.  But unless you really need to go somewhere you should stay home.  If you have some urgent medical issue certainly you need to be out.  Otherwise the traffic just doesn't help the plow trucks spread salt and clear the roads.  When you go out nebbing in your pick-up truck during a blizzard, it does not serve the common good.  Getting your car stuck along the road does not make life better for any of us.  Just stay home.

Surely by staying home on Monday I'm part of a very conservative group of people that can alter their schedules to stay home for six months straight if I need to.  I worry about getting tangled up with one of those winter drivers that buzzes around like it's August.  There's not much to see in the snowy world that's worth me having to file an insurance claim on my ride.  I stay home a lot.

Forecasters are predicting another 4-8" of snow this evening.  Living here in this frozen snowy wilderness you need to think carefully before going out.  Just because you could probably make it doesn't mean you should try.  If you need me I'll be right here at home.

Memory hoarder

My sister and I made memory boxes when we were little.  My mom found empty boot boxes.  We got out our markers and decorated the tops.  She started us off with fancy baby dresses that we'd worn.  I put in my soccer jersey from when I was 5 and two soccer trophies. 

I don't remember if I was saving stuff before the memory box or if that somehow spurned a need to hang on to every piece of paper I ever wrote on.  I saved ticket stubs, printed napkins, and greeting cards.  The memory box spilled over to a cedar chest by the time I was in my teens.

Since moving out of my parent's house a mere seven years ago, I haven't had the benefit of my cedar chest.  My housing was always too temporary or we were just lazy.  All of those memories were at my parent's house while I collected the new ones in a cardboard box in the closet.

Now in my forever home, the cedar chest has returned.  On the first night it was here, I took the cardboard box from my closet and lovingly placed the contents in the chest.  I got a box out of storage and threw away about half of the contents.  I'd saved bank statements and every pay stub from the job I had before my daughter was born. 

When I got to the three final boxes in my basement marked "memories" I was really starting to think I have a problem.  I found that I had saved two shoe boxes full of notes.  Notes that I wrote back and forth to friends as far back as middle school when classes were too boring to pay attention.  They're hysterical to read, but really, I can't imagine why I would ever sit down and read that stuff again.  Here's a direct quote:  "Hey Stacy, I'm bored out of my tree!"  Was my intent to bore myself all over again all these years later? 

I threw all of that away keeping only the letters from people I care for.  I threw away a dozen calculus notebooks.  I must have thought I might just bust out some calculus one of these days.  I found a neat little Crayola watch which broke into three pieces within minutes of telling Julia she could have it.  She almost cried, great idea holding on to that one.  Calendars from the 90s, a Kennywood souvenir squirt bottle, the broken carcass of that soccer trophy:  all went in the trash.

The result is that I still have a lot of memories.  I'm not sure it's going to fit in the cedar chest, but that's an issue for another day.  Hopefully, I'll implement a higher standard for what gets saved for the next 30 years of my life.  Perhaps a "memory room" would be a good solution.

Literacy skills in children with hearing loss

Julia and I are one month into our 100 easy lessons that will ultimately teach her to read. As we worked through the tasks in the very well planned lessons, I found a weakness in Julia's understanding of rhyming and wondered if this was in any way attributed to her hearing loss. She is really insistent on matching the beginnings of words rather than the end.

Over the past weeks we've made progress. She now remembers some rhyming words, but I don't think she's really getting it yet. A listing of skills that develop during kindergarten indicates rhyming is an emergent skill for the 5 to 6 year old set.

Even if that is the case, some skills take more time for my daughter to master. She has some difficulty with what I would term her auditory memory. Learning a new word or the name of a playmate she's just met takes a lot of practice and repetition. If she mishears a word and pronounces it improperly there can be a whole extra level added to the process. Last summer, Julia was insistent her new friend was Kayton. The name was Peyton. We ended up writing it on a note card so we could point to it when we tried to say the name. Peyton with a popper sound.

It was because of this concern and the debate over its cause that I picked up an old copy of The Volta Review published in the fall of 2008. I'd been saving it to read sometime and given its title: Emergent Literacy Skills During Early Childhood in Children With Hearing Loss: Strengths and Weaknesses; there's no time like the present.

The study involved 44 children age 4 to 6, all with more hearing loss than my daughter. Some of the children used cochlear implants and some had hearing aids. All had access to sound and had "some speech perception skills".

Various tests were used over the course of one school year to measure different literacy skills. In the rhyming test, the children had to pick the picture of the word that rhymed with the target word. The findings revealed that the hard of hearing kids "progressed on some phonological awareness skills (alliteration, blending, and elision) but not on others (rhyming, syllable segmentation)." This was over the course of the year long study.

The good news is that hard of hearing kids were on par with typically hearing children when it came to recognizing the letters of the alphabet and common written words.

The bad news is that vocabulary developed more slowly. This was attributed to typical children acquiring vocabulary incidentally. Hard of hearing children must have more direct instruction to remember new words.

The hard of hearing children "performed poorly, particularly on recognition of rhyming words." It goes on to say this task was the toughest for their study participants.

Their speculative conclusion as to why this might be so is that "in speech therapy, children are taught that 'sounding the same' refers to minimal pairs that share the same phonemes. This might result in confusion if children are told by adults that two words rhyme because they 'sound the same at the end'." They continued to hypothesis that often teachers (and parents) assume that a child is learning rhyming because nursery rhymes and Dr. Seuss are regularly being read.

The recommendation: more repetition and slower instruction.

This study supported my conclusion that rhyming is tougher for a hard of hearing child. We've been grouping words for years because they start with the bitey sound or the popcorn sound. Now I'm asking her to make this leap to listen to the end of the word. She can see that C-A-T and H-A-T rhyme on paper, but she doesn't yet hear it. Her ears need a bit more training.

The literacy skills presented in this study have renewed my campaign to build Julia's vocabulary. Now that she's saying words correctly we can learn off-the-wall things like "silo" and "turret". Also, our reading lessons are going really well! In just seventy more days, she'll be reading!


Above quotes are from:
Emergent Literacy Skills During Early Childhood in Children With Hearing Loss: Strengths and Weaknesses
Susan R. Easterbrooks; Ed.D.;
Amy R. Lederberg, Ph.D.;
Elizabeth M. Miller, M.Ed.:
Jessica P. Bergeron, M.Ed.;
and Carol McDonald Connor, Ph.D.

More Pittsburgh snowstorm pictures

By noon the snow had stopped and the sun was shining.  The total was about two feet of snow.  Our plans for an igloo were stymied by light fluffy snow that wouldn't hold together.  We had a good time anyway making trails and mountains.  Julia had a tough time walking and had to be frequently rescued.  Tim and Julia made a tunnel that both she and the dog got to use.

We were very fortunate through all of the cold and snow that our whole family was together and safe.  It also helps that our neighbor has a front loader that he plowed our driveway with.  We might actually leave home again before spring! 

Pittsburgh snowstorm

We woke up to 16.5 inches of snow this morning.

It's still snowing.  After breakfast we're going out to build an igloo!

Tips for after you sell a house

It's really just one tip: leave the new owners alone. Here are a number of ways to achieve this:

1. Before selling your house, pay your bills. It does not improve anyone's opinion of you to learn that you haven't paid the garbage company. I'm not going to pay your overdue garbage bill. Though not a direct interaction with you, it reminded me of you dear previous owner.

2. Contact the post office to have your mail forwarded and then check your own mailbox. Two weeks after you moved, I told the postman to stop delivering your mail to my house. I don't personally care if he throws it away. I don't want it here. I don't want you to stop by and pick it up. It's 2010. USPS has a web site. Make it happen.

3. Most importantly, if you've forgotten to dig up your statue of St. Joseph, just call it a loss. When standing face to face, I might have seemed cool with you coming back to dig around the front yard. Truthfully, I need practice being assertive. Get a new St. Joe for your mantel. I am struck by the irony of how you've shown your appreciation for the miraculous sale of your home by letting Jesus' earthly father rot in my yard. But I'm not Catholic and little plastic statues just don't hold much meaning. Nice grass means something.

In summary, unless a friend or family member has purchased your home, it is prudent to move on when you've sold the house. I think it's even normal.

When I was a little girl...

When I was a little girl, I must have been the coolest kid around.  You might not pick up on it from my fourth grade class photo there.  I know it now, 20 years later, because my daughter is utterly fascinated with everything I did, had, ate or thought when I was a little girl.

I needed to get her to lie on the couch for much needed rest while she was sick.  It was simple.  I just told her how my mom used to make me a nice nest out of pillows and blankets when I was a little girl.  "You did this?" she asked.  I nod.  She is elated.  "Nests" are now regular requests.

She wanted to know if I played Spyro the Dragon on PlayStation 3 when I was a little girl.  I tried to explain Atari.  She feels satisfied to know that I played games on the TV.  All is right with the world.

All these years I've had a collection of little girl earrings from my childhood hanging in my closet.  Now they are a fascinating treasure.  I showed her the green Peridot ones that I had my ears pierced with.  I left out how disappointed I was that my only choice was the wishy-washy green of my birth month.  I would have given anything to have diamonds, but I wasn't born in April.  Wouldn't you know she wanted to wear those green Peridot earrings because they were like the ones I'd had my ears pierced with?

This is a real retroactive boost to my self esteem.  I was really something when I was a little girl.