Four extra hands

Well, this morning I was at the dentist at 8.15, feeling very pleased that I was the first patient in the waiting room (actually, the only person who was there before me was the cleaning lady). I waited until 8.45, when I was called in, only to be told that they were to be going into theatre shortly, and so wouldn’t have time to do my filling this morning – it is going to be a bleeder, they reckon, and he’s got to put a pin in to hold the filling in place, so I have been scheduled for tomorrow at 2.15. School was pretty awful this morning, and I had to expel Caleb from class during the first session. We had a good talk afterwards though and mended any gaps in our relationship. It’s strange that I’m having these problems with him as he really doesn’t struggle very much with anything in school. The second part was just the reading and read-alouds, so that was all fine. We got to see what the Braille alphabet looks like – quite interesting! The boys helped me make lunch, since they wanted tuna snackwiches (using last night’s left-over tuna; we had steaks). I took the bread out of the freezer and set it out on the counter for them to butter, and went up to the loo. When I came down I nearly laughed at their attempts to butter the bread – Caleb hadn’t done too badly, although he had only done one out of every two slices of bread, and not all the way to the edge, but Aaron was still busy with his. He was simply trying to smear on the marg with the flat of the knife, instead of actually spreading it with the knife at an angle to the bread. I can’t really describe it properly, but I thought it was a very precious attempt. I showed him how to do it properly, but then carried on with the rest of them myself. Then they chopped up the tuna in the Braun, and helped to mix the mayonnaise in. They seem to enjoy being kitchen helpers.

At 1.30 I had an appointment to see Lucy at the Museum to print out the book. We’ve decided to print it on A4, so it is about 20cm square, to make the prototype smaller than the final product will be. I’m thrilled even with this intermediate result. We printed all the pages, and everything looks so real – still very touchable, even though everything is flat! The quality of the scans is excellent, so that even at this smaller size, the text is absolutely legible. I have to go in on Monday again to finalise some more printing, but we managed to sort out the page order, so I am busy with assembling most of it tonight into an actual book format. It’s really exciting to see it looking like this!