We’re coming up on Ben’s ninth birthday in just two months which means I haven’t had a paying gig in nine years. Well, I’ve got BIG news. I got hired today!
It’s a pseudo therapy kind of a job. One hour a day, every day from 9am to 10am. It’s doing vision stuff with a wiggly little 11 month old named Ashlyn. Pay is pretty low. Like I may grab a tootsie roll every day when I finish, but hypothetically I could go to work in my PJs. You know, if I didn’t already have to get three kids up and out the door to school before I went to work.
So, I’m still not getting paid, but I’ve decided if I want to have any success with Ashlyn and her eye patch and glasses it’s going to have to be a much more focused effort. She hates the patch and I can’t blame her. She claws at it endlessly trying to rip it off and is often successful. It’s frustrating to say the least.
Today I blocked a full hour out of my day and commenced the art of full on, 100% distraction. We walked in circles inside the empty tiny plastic pool for five minutes straight until she tired of it. Then I bounced her energetically up to the third level to retrieve her swim gear and some bath toys. Back down again to the yard where we filled the pool and I played rubber ducky splash games which lasted 30 minutes. When she finally tired of that and wanted out we did some more crawling outside and changed her to warm her up. I put her just inside the door in the wet kitchen and that’s when I lost the focus battle. Our back kitchen sink was leaking and the floor was totally covered in water and it was dripping out the faucet, across the sink, down the side of the wall and across the floor.
So as a normal person would do I tried to stop the flow of water and clean it up so no one would slip on the wet tile floor and keep the paper recycling box from being dumped into the water puddle on the floor and move the boxes to the dry zone and in the midst of all that I lost sight of the goal and after 45 minutes of patching she squealed with delight and showed me the patch she had finally succeeded in pulling off her eye and was clutching delightedly in her sweet, chubby fingers.
Oh well. I accepted her gift to me in her outstretched hand and finished cleaning the mess while she wiggled around the wet floor. Soon it was nap time and pick up Jacob time and lunches and deliver him to the neighbors and protect him from the dog. Time is screaming by at a feverish pace and I know soon she’ll be awake again and we start with the glasses too.
I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be hired for this vision therapy job, but who else is going to do it? Nobody. So we will work on glasses all afternoon, taking may breaks when she rips them off her chubby little cheeks and nonexistent nose. Then tomorrow at 9am we’ll put the patch back on and try my hand at the art of distraction all over again.
At least I know with Maddie Mae her vision went from 20/200 to 20/60 in a single year. That will have to prove my motivating factor for the next long, long time.
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