Ode to Joy

On the occasion of sending my daughter off to her first day of second grade: a YouTube video of an orchestral flashmob, that Joy and I have listened to together repeatedly this past weekend.



I'm sure that part of why she loves it is that she knows the tune so well from Baby Einstein.

I love it because it's so soaring and beautiful -- and the resonance of the title as Joy starts a new school year.

To Joy, my second-grader!

Product Hits & Misses: Keeping the iPad Audible (and safe)

Can you hear me now?
Can you hear me now?
Can you hear me now?
- Verizon wireless commercial

When we look back at the summer of 2012, I think we may remember it as the summer of the toilet training -- and of the iPad.

I threatened way back when to do a bunch of product reviews around Joy's iPad equipment and apps.  I naively figured that I'd work my way down Joy's list of apps and tell you all about them.  But at the pace I'm blogging versus the pace we're adding apps -- yeah.  It's not going to happen quite like that.  What I decided to do instead was to create a separate page that will represent a running list of her apps, with notes (see the new tab at the top of the blog!)  As well as being a good way to share, I figure it will be a good record for me, too.    I'm also resurrecting my "Product Hits & Misses" category, one I haven't used in quite a while.  The old ones are chock-full of useful information though, even across several years' time.

On to the product reviews!

Back when Joy's speech therapist was evaluating iPad technology with Joy, but before I'd had any chance to explore the iPad myself, she noted a concern about the iPad's volume levels.  She wanted Joy to be able to use the iPad to speak above a noisy classroom if necessary -- and indeed, the iPad's speakers are not among its most highly-praised features.  So she recommended that we look into external speakers.

When we did so, we found that most external speakers connected to the iPad via cords, which absolutely wasn't going to mesh with our active, tough-on-equipment young lady.  There was one product, though, that combined external speakers with a tough-looking case, complete with carrying handle: the iAdapter 2 from AMDi.  It's a pricey product, at $265.  The reviews looked good, though, and for what we were trying to do it was about the only reasonable option. So we pitched it, together with the iPad and ProLoQuo2Go and a couple other apps, for funding via Wisconsin's Medicaid waiver for children's long term support.  And we got the whole shebang.

The iAdpater encases the iPad in a 2-part assembly that fastens together with nine screws.  The speakers sit behind the iPad.  The case has openings for the front and back cameras and the iPad recharging plug, while the the opening for the Home button has a removable sliding cover.  (Joy figured out how to slide it open and get to the Home button pretty quickly.)  The case covers the iPad's volume controls, offering instead a 3-position volume switch, Hi/Lo/Off.  The case offers its own Sleep button that sits atop the iPad's Sleep button; the iPad's rotation-lock / mute switch is not accessible without unscrewing the case.

For the most part, we were pleased with the iAdapter sound quality.  We found that we seldom wanted to turn the iPad's internal volume higher than about three-quarters; Joy generally prefers the iAdapter volume switch set to "Hi."  We did run into at least one situation where an app wouldn't play well with the iAdapter -- in the Whizzit 1-2-3 counting app, some of the spoken instructions were inaudibly soft, while the rest of the directions and sounds were fine.  When the iPad was removed from the iAdapter, the problem disappeared.

Of my two other concerns with the iAdapter, one is an issue that affects all users, and the other is more specific to Joy.

The universal issue has to do with the fact that the iAdapter itself needs charging, separately from the iPad.  It comes with a cord and a wall-plug adapter for the purpose, which is great.  However, there's no indicator to let the user know how far the battery has run down, or how close the iAdapter is to being recharged.  We've never run it all the way out, so I don't know what would happen.  Does the iAdapter just go silent, and would the cause be obvious?   Meanwhile, we learned that we couldn't charge both the iAdapter and the iPad in a single standard 2-socket wall outlet: the wall-plugs are too big to both fit simultaneously.  You'll need either a powerstrip or two wall outlets close together.

The other issue is more Joy-specific though it applies to other kids like her:  girlfriend is tough on equipment. When Joy gets frustrated, stuff goes flying.  The iPad in its iAdapter case has gone flying down the stairs a couple of times, along with various lesser flings, since we got it at the beginning of the year.  Soon we began to hear little rattles within the case.  When I opened it up, I discovered that the inside of the case isn't as tough-looking as the outside.  The iPad is essentially held in place by slender plastic tabs, and several of these tabs had begun cracking off.  After several flinging incidents, the tabs had crumbled enough that the iAdapter case began to rub the wrong way against the volume control, causing the volume to suddenly mute at inopportune moments -- a development that Joy did not appreciate.

The tech support fellow I corresponded with at AMDi was extremely helpful.  He answered e-mail promptly, did a fine job of diagnosing the volume issue, and set things up so that we could send the iAdapter in for free repairs even though technically the flinging damage was not covered by warranty (and if it happens again, we're on our own.)  He also filled me in on the design principle behind the relatively-fragile internal support tabs.  Apparently they function like crumple-zones on a car, designed to absorb impact at their own cost in order to protect the cargo.  Of course you'd rather have your car-body crumple in an accident rather than your own body!  Turns out that both with iAdapters and with cars, the safety/protection features are secondary functions, and the crumple-zone protection is a one-shot affair.

Before I packed up our iAdapter to send in for repairs, we needed something to keep Joy's iPad usable and safe in the interim.  After a bit of surfing around, I settled on the SuperShell from M-Edge ($34.99).

There are several similar products out there, apparently.  The SuperShell is made of the same kind of material as Crocs footwear. It doesn't have any amplification qualities, though it does have a little cut-out for the iPad's speaker.  There are also cut-outs for the cameras and the charger plug.  The volume control and sleep button are accessed via partial cut-outs; the rotation lock/mute button is covered.  To install the SuperShell, just stretch it around the iPad and it springs tight.

What really sold us on the SuperShell (besides the awesome hot-pink color option) was this video, wherein the interviewer flings a SuperShell-clad iPad into walls and the floor of an exhibit hall:

 

The SuperShell really does work just the way it does in the video.  Joy has tested it, repeatedly.  It bounces.

The one criticism we have so far is that the cutout for the charger plug doesn't really let you get the plug in and out, so you have to pull the SuperShell off that side of the iPad to do the plugging in. But that's easy to do.

After the SuperShell arrived and we sent off the iAdapter for repairs, we learned something interesting.  The iPad on its own was actually PLENTY loud.  I'm not sure what the concern was in the first place.  We actually find ourselves repeatedly diving for Joy's iPad to turn the darn volume DOWN (she has become adept at adjusting it loud-where-she-likes-it.)

And the SuperShell is so cute, and we feel confident that the shell itself is not going to break when flung...

We actually never did re-install the iAdapter.  We probably ought to find another good home for it.

Priceless.

The Potty Journey: Guide to Toilet Training Children with Special Needs, Including Autism and Related Disorders, by Judith A. Coucouvanis:
$14.90 at barnesandnoble.com

Bag of Twizzler Bites, for incentives: $1.99

Seven pees out of nine toilet sits at home today (plus another at clinic):

PRICELESS.

Bladder of Iron, Will of Steel

Joy and I started the day with one hour and eight minutes in the bathroom.

One hour and eight minutes, before she finally gave in and let the first morning pee loose on the toilet.

She woke up dry, so she had to be holding something.  In fact, she woke up with dry jammie-pants but without a diaper!  (I thought I might have somehow forgotten to put one on her last night, but turns out she'd taken it off in the bed-tent.  Definitely dry, though.)

As we camped out in the bathroom, she drank three glasses of water, sat and sat, played game after game on her iPad. Occasionally she'd get up and jump around a little bit.  On one of those jump-arounds, at about the 45 minute mark, she peed just a little on the floor.  I quick swooped her onto the pot, and mopped up the little puddle, and expected the rest of the release any second.

That little bit of release was enough to enable her to hold the rest for another 23 minutes.

She gets a much-desired candy reward when the pee goes in the toilet.  I can't have the candy in-view-but-out-of-reach, though.  Tried that, it only makes her mad, and puts Mama at risk of getting swatted in the face.  Which never feels good, and is even dicier when Mama is balancing on the edge of the tub.  There aren't a lot of seats in the bathroom, and Joy gets the prime one...

Other than avoiding the candy fight, it was a relatively peaceable hour-plus as far as Joy's response was concerned.  Mama, though, gets antsy with all that cooped-up time.  After all, I don't get to play with an iPad while I perch on the bathtub edge.  And perch, and perch.

I've decided that I can only try these marathon wait-outs at times when I don't have any deadline at all on the other side.  Otherwise it comes across as "caving" when I call a halt, and I can't have Joy holding out with the expectation that I "cave."   (Pigeons pecking forever at the lever that once provided food, etc.)  So I can't do this on my work-mornings.

We're trying all the tricks.  Running water.  Dipping hands in water -- though she finds it puzzling that I'd let her dip in a basin but not the toilet.  Playing with the Pocket Pond app on the iPad to make splashy-water noises. Squirting water at her privates while on the pot -- apparently some kids respond to warm water, others to cool water.  Joy doesn't respond to either in the desired fashion.

It's quite clear that we've got contest-of-wills on pee-holding here. I'm also pretty sure that she's deliberately using the diapers instead holding in between toilet visits.  Before we started this training push, we used to find dry diapers during the day at least occasionally.  Now, not so much.

At the clinic they've got a higher tolerance for dribble, so they're working with her in underpants and just dealing with the soaked shorts.  At home, we really aren't ready to deal with pee-stink all over everything.  Hence the long bathroom sessions.

I was really hoping that after a couple of successes, Joy would "get it."  She'd understand what we were asking, realize how it felt, start working for the candy.

Alas, this has not yet come to pass.

Think good thoughts for us in our bathroom vigils!  The summer is waning, and I would purely love to be able to send Joy off to second grade with toilet training well underway.

---

Evening update -- All day we had the baseline 3-minute sits, the minimum that I'm requiring on our schedule. Then at a 7pm sitting, she'd filled her diaper both wet & mess, I was just having her go through the sitting motions after getting cleaned up, and lo & behold she PEED after just 1 minute!!! Maybe there's hope after all...

You Can't Judge a Book By Its Cover

The unprepossessing back of a turtle escaping through a mud puddle

The spectacular undercarriage of that same turtle

Rose and I have read two excellent young-adult novels in recent weeks: Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper, and Wonder by R.J. Palacio.  (Some parts she read for herself, but mostly we did them as read-alouds). Both books feature 5th-grade student characters, a girl named Melody in Out of My Mind and a boy named Auggie in Wonder.  Rose will be a 5th-grader herself this fall!  Each 5th-grade protagonist has a strong family with two parents and a sister.  Each is intellectually ahead of the pack when it comes to their school peers.

And each has physical differences that shape how they interact with the world, and how the world reacts to them.

Out of My Mind was recommended to me via Partners in Policymaking.  Melody, who narrates in first person throughout the novel, has cerebral palsy.  She has a photographic memory, she's addicted to words, she can control an electric wheelchair, she can point and tap with her thumbs, but she can't walk or talk or feed herself -- so the world sees only the disability, and only Melody has access to the rich inner life of her own mind.  At least at first... When you put an electronic communication device at the disposal of a girl who knows how to read, you can expect that some amazing things will happen!

Melody's school experience, though, is just ugly.  She's been shunted off to a segregated "special-needs" room since she started school, and only in fifth grade is the school beginning to experiment with "inclusion" classes, where everyone (students and teachers both) completely underestimates Melody and her "special needs" classmates.

One aspect of Out of My Mind that hit me particularly hard was Melody as Cassandra-prophetess, when she sees something that's about to happen or in progress of happening that she needs to warn someone about -- and nobody can understand her or even get that they're supposed to be listening.

The story also brought back strong memories of my experiences on high-school quiz team.  (No further details about the novel forthcoming here; you'll have to read it to find out how this fits.)  My junior year, I was the only girl and the only junior on our high school's state championship Hi-Q team, a high-profile televised experience.  Our come-from-behind win in the last two minutes of the championship round was about the most exciting bit of my entire high school career.  It was fascinating to look back at my own experiences through the lens of Melody's adventures.

Rose was interested in Melody, and made a few tentative connections to Joy and her iPad.  But it was Auggie's story in Wonder that really grabbed her.  August Pullman gets to start prep school in grade 5 after a childhood of homeschooling through facial surgeries and medical fragility.  A stew of genetic irregularities has left him with a face to which people react with disgust and ridicule.  It makes for a challenging 5th grade year.  Fortunately Auggie, like Melody, is clever and has a strong sense of humor.

I think Rose was particularly captivated by Auggie's story for several reasons.  One, the author (a first-time novelist!) really captured the rhythm of middle-school dialog.  It sounded like people Rose knows.  She also appreciated the current pop-culture references (Diary of a Wimpy Kid!  Justin Bieber!)  She also liked that Wonder wasn't solely narrated by Auggie -- you also got to hear parts of the story told by other kids from Auggie's school, plus his big sister and a couple of her friends.  Oh yes, Auggie has a big sister!  So Rose got to hear big-sis Olivia describe the family as a solar-system where her brother is the sun and the rest of the family orbits him and his needs.  (To what extent is that us?)  She got to hear Olivia talk genetics and how she carries a gene for part of Auggie's condition that might affect her own child-bearing decisions... a new idea for Rose, and something we could assure her was not part of her situation.  But there were some genetic-science words introduced that have relevance to our story too, like "mosaicism."

I liked that neither story set up their 5th-grade protagonists as saints.  For the most part, they resisted the temptation to make everything too OK at the end.  And they both did a great job of weaving the end of the story with threads that had been introduced at the beginning.

I had to wonder, though -- I don't think that it's a coincidence that both characters were written to have above-average intelligence and were able to outshine their typical peers.  Melody could demonstrate (given the right technology) that she didn't belong in the "retard room" as her typically-developing classmates cruelly called it.  Auggie's academic performance could withstand the scrutiny of mean-spirited parents who didn't think a kid with a face like his could possibly be worthy of their precious (and deliberately non-inclusion) prep school.

Anyone got any good recommendations for novels with protagonists whose disabilities affect their intellect?

Meanwhile, on the drive home from the annual Memorial Day sojourn in the Upper Peninsula (whence cometh the turtle pics), Rose started to write a story based on herself and Joy, inspired by Wonder and Out of My Mind.  Maybe I'll be recommending her opus to you one of these days.

Joy Rides a Bike

Summer is underway, and so is Joy:

Joy on a two-wheel bike with training wheels

She can go all the way up and down the long flat block you see here, with minimal assistance.  She was SO ready for a training-wheels bike -- and I'm glad, because it turns out that the 20-inch bike that fits her size is as large as the standard-size training wheels go.

Joy fought the helmet at first, and I was afraid we were going to have to spend half the summer doing a long, slow process of getting accustomed to the helmet (first we'll wear it for a count of five, then move on to a count of ten, etc.)  But the very first time we did helmet-practice on the couch with a little reward attached -- "first helmet, then candy" -- she blew past the count and wore it for several minutes with little protest.  So we took our little rewards to the street, and off she went.

Yes, I think summer is off to a pretty good start for Joy.

Vote Barrett for Wisconsin Governor, June 5

I haven't written much about Wisconsin politics here lately.  For one thing, the legislative session is over for the year, so there haven't been any new laws in the pipeline to promote or resist.

But next week is a big one here in Wisconsin.  On Tuesday June 5, voters will head to the polling places to determine whether Scott Walker gets to finish his term as governor, or whether Tom Barrett will step in to finish the term and try to begin to repair some of the damage that the Walker administration has wreaked on this state since January 2011.

Faithful readers may remember my spree of outraged, astonished posts in February 2011, as Governor Walker "dropped the bomb" (his own words) on Wisconsin -- blindsiding the state with an unnecessary "budget repair bill" carrying immense, devastating policy consequences for Wisconsin Medicaid, collective bargaining, and more.  If the protests hadn't happened, and 14 state senators hadn't chosen to work from Illinois for a couple of weeks, that bill would have become law within a single week's time, with most of the public not even knowing what was in it, let alone having the chance to weigh in.  Inaccessibility, autocracy, secrecy and flat-out lies have continued to be hallmarks of the Walker administration.

Here, by contrast, is Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett as he started his campaign a month ago -- reaching out to the "Stand With Walker" counter-protesters who showed up at one of his events:

Communication and listening and reaching out to ALL the people is so basic, and it's been so badly missing this past year and a half in Wisconsin.  But what's at stake goes well beyond that.

Walker's Wisconsin represents a future that the wealthiest of the far-right have been coordinating and working toward in America for decades now.  I didn't understand it until the events of last February opened my eyes.  But it is real, it is dire, and it has been in process of happening for years now in this country.  The end-game is plutocracy -- government by the wealthy, for the wealthy.

That's what the ginned-up anger about taxes is about -- so the wealthiest and their corporations can continue to pay less and less toward the common good.

That's what the privatization movement is about -- private prisons, private schools, private all-sorts-of-things that have traditionally been public enterprises but are in the process of claiming more and more tax dollars to the profiteering benefit of the few.

That's what demonizing unions is about -- the last coordinated voices on behalf of workers, who have already seen wages stagnate over the past few decades, falling further and further behind the rising cost of living, while CEO pay rises into the stratosphere and the wealthiest of the wealthy hoover up the lion's share of the past decades' economic gains.

That's why money has been defined as free-speech -- for the purposes of buying electoral majorities in both the courts and the legislatures, so that the plutocratic policies can pass with unstoppable margins.  (Witness the astonishing flow of big-donor dollars, 70% from out of state, to the Walker coffers.)

By the money-is-speech definition, disability issues tend to be pretty darn silent as well.  I've written before about the ALEC threats to insurance mandates, the devastating and irresponsible cap on Wisconsin's Family Care program (which the federal government subsequently forced the state to lift), the (so-far unsuccessful) attempts to privatize special education in Wisconsin.  The disability lobby is not a wealthy one.  We've got people-power -- but not money-power.

Wisconsin's issues are a microcosm of a nationwide takeover.  I've come to believe that plutocracy is THE central issue of the upcoming national elections this November.

We need to push back whenever and wherever we can.

And in Wisconsin, on Tuesday, we can speak via the ballot box against Wisconsin's Walker big-money juggernaut by voting Tom Barrett for governor on June 5.