Cammie and Ben advanced to yellow belts in Karate....and there was much rejoicing! It was a one-hour test for the younger students (the adults--meaning ages 14 and up--have their test at a larger class space about 10 miles away and the tests start at 2 hours in length and get longer when you advance to the blue belt (4th level) and up. I'm hoping that Emma will be ready to get her purple belt soon--she has to work on one of her forms now to improve the flow and transitions; it's still a little choppy, but she's learned a lot already! Ben has been working on maintaining focus and building endurance, and with the night feeds he's gained 4 lbs. already (10% of his body weight) and has a lot more energy.
Ben celebrated his 8th birthday...and there was more rejoicing! We didn't do a whole lot to celebrate--got some presents and cake and the dinner of his choice at home. It was, I admit, the ugliest cake ever...it was a Betty Crocker mix but the cake just fell apart as I tried to frost it. Not sure where I went wrong, but I had this happen once before with a chocolate cake mix, too. Maybe I need to use the smaller 8" pans instead of the 9"...no idea. Anyone ever had this happen to them before? Curious.
I also got my first pair of reading glasses--this seems fine for doing work on the computer but is utterly useless for trying to read the clock from across the room, which I couldn't very well do without glasses, either. The digital screens on the oven and microwave are too small for me to read from the dining room table, and the only other clock I can see from there is the very small mantle clock in the TV room. I can usually tell what time it is with that one, even though the face and hands are quite small--it's the contrast. As some of you know, I have an eye condition known as amblyopia, also known as "lazy eye". This is often characterized by crossed eyes, or one crossed eye (which I can do on command, but only at parties), but with early intervention can be corrected to a point, and mean that one eye is just weaker than the other. It's not the shape of the eye that causes the problem, but the nerves that connect the eye to the brain that sends confused signals. I can't easily explain what it is that I see compared to what normal eyes see, since my eyes have never been normal. The best I can do to explain it is say that my right eye (the lazy one) has a series of blind spots--just little dots, mostly around the focal point--where information just disappears, like a black hole (although it sometimes appears grey to me). The edges of the letters are crisp, not blurry, but things are hiding behind some obstructions. If I'm reading a standard type book or newspaper and close my "good" eye, an entire letter can disappear right at the focal point. Looking at my screen now, the word "focal" has a grey area over the middle three letters, so all I clearly see is f and l and some vaguely round letters in the middle. Could be "fecal"...could be "focal". That can really change the direction of a conversation.... My eye has to shift left and right to see it, which makes reading rather slow.
One thing I did discover is that in Washington state, they give each driver an eye test when they renew their license. When you look through the little viewfinder, there are three sets of three letters. The first three test your left eye, middle three test both eyes, and the last three test your right eye. For most people, they don't even notice. For me, the test gets exponentially more difficult--
A X K R G H uh... I? (eyes darting furiously back and forth) M...I think... geesh. Q? Could be Q...
I also can't see 3-D; I've been to the movies and the glasses do very little to make the action "pop" out at me. Mostly I just get tired of watching a blurry movie and toss the glasses aside. I tried one of the new 3-D TV sets at the local electronics store and I couldn't see any difference with or without the glasses. I don't know what all the hype is about...I guess it's like trying to get a deaf person to appreciate the subtle nuances of a classical musical piece. Eh. Whatever.
The school year is winding down--Emma has 4 more weeks as an 8th grader and then she's done! The other two kids have another week of school while she gets to sleep in and spend a lot of time chatting with her bestie on her instant messenger thing that she closes every time I walk up behind her. Little does she know that we're on a network and we can look up all kinds of activity....she's a good kid, though. :)
Kelly's birthday was in the middle of the week, so we celebrated on Cinco de Mayo with good seats at the Sounders game. It's really fun to have good seats right behind the players' bench--here they are in the pre-game huddle. What's really spectacular is the energy from all the fans. This game had 38,600 people in attendance and I'm not sure if it was our seats, the weather, or the ECS in full voice, but the chanting and singing was spectacular from the Brougham End. Later we got to see it on TV and got to listen to Arlo White, the former Voice of the Sounders, who now broadcasts on NBC.
And wouldn't you know it, we ran into friends...Tom wrote to Kelly and said he was planning on coming to the game. What we didn't know was that he had seats almost right in front of us! What are the odds?? Tom was at our wedding a million years ago...although his hair was much longer then.
Monday I went with Cammie's class up to Pioneer Park for a field trip, which was great fun, and today after taking Emma down for her PFTs, I ran a Girl Scout meeting where they sewed some quilt blocks, just like they did at the Pioneer Park trip. It went fairly well, although many of them would have preferred using a sewing machine rather than hand sewing.
Tomorrow I'm hoping to spend a little time sewing the rest of the quilt blocks together for the Road to the White House swap we're doing with the online group. I have one set finished and three more to go--two of those sets are partially sewn but it'll take a day or two to finish, I think, especially with frequent interruptions of shuttling kids, laundering clothes, and cooking meals. Could be worse.
Happy late birthday to both of your boys. Congratulations on the new belt colors. Autumn has amblyopia too and I'm getting lots more black spots from my MS. She can see the 3d movies, but I really have to squint, go cross-eyed (partially) and cock my head to a hard angle to even remotely see anything popping out of the screen. It's an over-rated trend. Cheers!
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