health + fitness / life / wellness

moving forward.

• by kerri

Hello, exercise, I am back. Nothing like a lapse to make you really appreciate moving forward.

I would like to mention that this lapse was not a simple I-don’t-want-to-exercise lapse. It was an injury-induced rehabilitation-esque lapse, thanks to some sort of patellar tendon injury, or something of that nature.  Really the lapse started before the injury. I may not rock at nutrition, but I was doing better than, say, last year, prior to the lapse. And the journalling? I derailed on that for over two weeks. This is why Lent is not my thing. Add that this is the last Sunday before Easter and I am choosing to sleep instead of go to church. With the excuse that it is too complicated to figure out rides and it has been a long week and I would rather sleep. Honestly, I can’t seem to stick with anything anymore.

[This is Resistance, people.]

Now that I’ve finished making myself sound like a bad person who doesn’t care about anything, what am I doing about it?

  • The stir-fry thing today was a Good Thing as far as restaurant choices go. Could be worse, yes?
  • I went to the stir-fry place with my friend Jess who I have not seen for a long time. So awesome.
  • I did an hour on the trampoline today, plus ~3K walking. This needs to stick around.
  • I am done tutoring, and have wrapped up the 22-hour-work-week-while-going-to-school. Classes are [mostly] done. Good time to begin the journey again? Yes. Always a good time.
  • Paying closer attention to the Fitbit. 
    • My Fitbit friends Mike, Mike and Ashley are good motivators. [Are you on Fitbit? Add me as a friend!] I have yet to do a full post on the Fitbit, but the best thing about it is that it logs ALL of my physical activity, not just exercise. And everything adds up!
  • I am aware of the journalling issue. And I am changing the pattern.
  • Focusing on the Good Things.

Last night, when I re-opened the journal and realized the lapse I took off. In part:

it is not bad

but i am not balanced

cause i just woke / to eat some chocolate / and go straight back / i’ll go straight back to bed / where’s my head?

[where’s my head?, copeland]

body. heart. mind. spirit.

mind strong / body strong / try to find / equillibrium

[sound of winter, bush]

i.can.do.better.


I can do better.

change stops in your mind, leave the past behind, forget everything you know

make a change, let go. […]

stay on top if they let you. ’cause the change is permanent.

[fear, creed]

So, once again, going in to April, it is time to awaken.

Go.

life

dear snippy medical professionals . . .

• by kerri

Don’t start with me. You may have to put up with people like me every single day, but you are not putting up with me every single day. Which means, whoever pissed you off, or made you lose your personality way back when . . . they weren’t me, so you can re-gain your personality and your sense of humour for the five minutes you are with me because I am obviously making the effort.

This is a catch all. It includes all the testing people at my ophthalmologist’s office. It includes every grumpy receptionurse I’ve had to phone to book an appointment. It includes grumpy ladies at the ophthalmologist’s office who don’t seem to understand that i have a life and I work and go to class and yes, maybe I will have to reschedule my yearly ophthalmology appointment three times so that it doesn’t screw up my day/week/etc.

And now, it includes Eye Testing Dolores from today [I hope she is not reading this. If she is, hello Eye Testing Dolores! I hope you are well. Please turn that frown upside down when we meet again next year. I will draw you a picture of rainbows and cupcakes].

Eye Testing Dolores was not a happy camper today. She did not appreciate my light approach to eye testing. Look, lady, you are not twenty years old, with uncorrectable visual impairment in the left eye and ridiculously corrected in the right eye. You are not here because, by no fault of your own, you were born 10 weeks premature and have retinopathy of prematurity. You are not living with this thing every day, and, you are not here because you got hit in the face with a basketball and now need new glasses. It is your choice to work here, so please, do not make me feel like it is my fault that I can’t complete your tests in the first shot, or the third, but I can still actually SEE everything you want me to see. It is just that your flickery box is very distracting and I forget to look at the square, and I have never in my twenty years done all of these stupid tests.

Also, I am the patient, and I [read: my mom] am the one paying you, so honestly, get off your high horse and please refrain from telling me to put my phone away. Because you are not my mom.

After all the stupid eye tests were done, I briefly waited in the waiting room thinger until New Eye Doctor came out. Stupid eye tests took place after the ridiculously long form about my visual/medical history in which I had to indicate all of my father’s eye issues, put all my medications onto little lines, and check the OTHER: box and indicate retinopathy of prematurity, as well as give them my e-mail address for some unknown reason.

your eyes deserve an optometrist poster

and awesome doctors . . .

FInally New Eye Doctor called me in. I am a fan of this guy. The appointment was nothing spectacular, but it turns out my vision has actually improved, albeit marginally. It has only improved slightly, but I have gone form a -18.25 prescription to a -18. New Eye Doctor basically said I am so far gone that this will not make a huge difference (not in those exact words), but kind of cool none-the-less. I’m chalking it up to testing variance, but hey, sweet.  Plus, he had a sense of humour and laughed on multiple occasions.

DOCTOR: Do you have any questions?

ME: Yeah, why do I get to look at the fancy Apple display and you have to work on a crappy Windows laptop?

This was completely true, and it made him laugh. Apparently his colleagues wanted to go Windows and he wanted to go Mac, so they compromised-ish. I think he lost the deal, poor guy.

Now the hard part began, picking glasses. In contrast to Glasses Lady Who Only Wants To Talk To The Person Who Can See [aka my mom] on Tuesday, who really pissed me off. As soon as she took my glasses from me and I couldn’t see, she started talking to my mom instead of me. Woman, just because I can’t see, doesn’t mean I can’t hear. Thank God I couldn’t see her enough to be able to remember her.  Awesome Glasses Lady is ordering some frames in for me to try out [because apparently my face is too small for a bunch of the ones in store, and I can basically only fit some of the children’s glasses. Honestly.]  So once those are in, I get to go back adventuring in Glasses Land, the one specifically for people who need glasses stronger than the normal glasses stores can make–I kid you not.

And maybe I should take Eye Testing Dolores a happy picture just in case I run into her when I go to buy glasses.

life / work

well, it only took me twenty years to break a pair of glasses

• by kerri

So this morning at work, I got hit in the face with a basketball.  I mean, really, that is actually [kind of] awesome, because how many other jobs can you legit get hit in the face with a basketball and be like “Yeah, I was working”.

Really, this is to be expected.  Free play with 43 kids in the gym is absolute chaos, and of course, I threw myself in the middle of it.  I have grown  more adept in a lot of fundamental movement skills myself this year in Movement Ed class, and as always, I like to play. So I was playing catch with a kid and a basketball.

The issue being is that in all this chaos and basketball torpedoing . . . I have a pretty expensive necessity that I barely think about on my face at all times.  Glasses are important, people.  So as the kid took a spin shot of some sort throwing the ball to meI managed to catch the ball . . . with my hands and my face.

It only took me twenty-plus years to kill a pair of glasses. I often wonder how it didn’t happen sooner, because honestly, I have worn glasses since I was eight months old. But today the pair I’ve had for about two years got creamed so bad that they are in a state of temporary repair . . . but are basically on death’s door.

As soon as the ball hit the face, I knew the glasses had an issue. I was at first hoping simply that the impact of the ball on the glasses on the face had just, you know, injured my face. People, when you have the equivalent of what I have learned to be $900 [with no street value] attached to your face, you hope for injuries. The kid apologized. “Did I break your glasses?”
“No worries, bud. I caught it with my face, but give me a minute to see what’s going on.”

Wandered across the gym to my coworker with the glasses still on my face feeling funny. Got her to inspect the glasses because I am pretty dysfunctional visually without the glasses going on. She and I both think it’s probably just the nose pads have bent, which is like, no big deal.

I get off work about a half hour later, and tweet my mom [and the rest of the world].

Get to school and go to my mom’s office, who hasn’t even read my tweet. “So i got hit in the face with a basketball at work this morning, and my glasses are broken and need to be dealt with.”

It’s convenient having your mom working at your school. No sooner do I say it than are we heading out of the office to go to the special glasses store. I have special glasses. They are -18s which means, essentially, i have bad eyes. We get to the special glasses store and they take my glasses and leave me unable to do much except attempt to send coherent tweets from my phone with the screen four centimetres away from my face and play with the mirror.

Apparently it is not just a bent nose-pad. It is a broken frame.  It’s taken me twenty years to break a pair of glasses, and apparently when I made it happen, it happened hardcore. The glasses are now soldered together as a temporary measure but it won’t hold forever. Plus it doesn’t look totally fabulous, but it’s not bad enough to be super noticeable unless you look hard or I tell you. So you all know, so now when you see me you can be like “HEY LOOK ITS THE SILVERY SPOTS ON YOUR BROWN GLASSES.”  I go Thursday for a vision test and to pick out new glasses. This is the issue with having to go to the special glasses store, is that it is literally the only place in the city I can buy glasses, so my choice is expensive and limited. No two-for-one deals for me.

So anyway, the temp solder deal? No fun gym stuff until the new glasses happen. The glasses lady told me basically if I get hit in the face again, the glasses are done-for. And I don’t have a backup at $900 a pop [to reiterate: no two for one deals], and therefore, I cannot afford for these things to be done-for or I literally cannot function.  So I had to go back to school and not be able to participate in Movement Ed. And if we do free play in the gym on Thursday at work, I can’t play in there either.

Honestly, this is a bad thing when your whole life literally revolves around playing in the gym.

[it is a tough life, I tell you]
life

wake up

• by kerri

My friend Mike posts Mirror Mantras to help him get through the week, and I’ve decided to join the positivity.

The coming week is going to be chaos: Spring Break at work so I am throwing back 22 hours, plus my last week of school, plus I am tutoring… and so on. So chaos but also goodness.

Here’s my mantra for the week:

advocacy / kids with disabilities

school is about ability – lakay roberts

• by kerri

If you believe that school is about fostering ability, stick around.

A five-year-old girl with Cerebral Palsy and her mother are in a battle with the New Caney Independent School District in Texas to allow LaKay to use her walker in school instead of her wheelchair.

Read a full article here, and then make your way back here.

I have sent the following e-mail to both Kenn Franklin and Angie Lee of the New Caney ISD regarding LaKay’s battle to be allowed to use her walker while at school.

Good morning, Mr. Franklin

At this point, I believe the e-mails should be about pouring in in response to the discrimination towards five-year-old LaKay Roberts whose walker is being deemed “dangerous” to her safety.  Here is another to add to the folder.

My name is Kerri. I am a Kinesiology and Applied Health student from Canada.  A great deal of what I learn in school is about making school and ALL components of education accessible to ALL children, regardless of ability level. To make all components of education accessible to all children, modifications have to be made. And play is pivotal to the learning process and the socialization process. Please reference Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on the subject if you are not familiar with the view that formal education kills creativity. As an educator, I am sure you can agree that creativity is crucial to the experiential learning process that is so important, especially for young children.

By forcing LaKay to use her wheelchair at all times during school, you are binding her creativity into tighter spaces. You are not allowing her to interact with her world in the most fundamental way possible: through movement and play.

Mr. Franklin, the young woman writing to you right now has spent time in a wheelchair herself. I am now in school learning how to make recreation and play accessible to ALL individuals regardless of their skill level, functional ability, or motor skills. Because the time I spent in a wheelchair and using a walker was enough. It was enough to make me realize that it is easier to be able to move around with a walker even if my movements were awkward or clumsy, than it was to make my wheelchair flow gracefully into small spaces. It was easier to pick objects up from the ground when using my walker than it was to even try to reach the floor when using my wheelchair.  It was considerably easier to explore my environment using the walker, but the wheelchair was available for when distances were too long or when I got too tired . . . as is LaKay’s option.

To force LaKay to use her wheelchair at all times is depriving her of that choice. To children, we both know how important it is in giving them choice in dealing with all life situations. This may be an inconvenience to you as an educator for the years LaKay spends in your school or school district, but LaKay is in this for life. LaKay will recollect this experience for years to come, even though she is only five years old, just as I remember all of the kids asking me why I was wearing “two different shoes”.  Furthermore, LaKay is in a crucial learning period for development of fundamental movement skills. And for her, learning how to most effectively walk, run, jump and hop while using mobility aides like her walker is crucial to her desire and interest in living an active healthy life and being integrated as fully as possible into physical education classes further down the road.  Exploration of movement, such as recess time, is crucial to this skill development. And as an educator, you cannot deprive a child of a chance to learn.

Mr. Franklin, it’s your call. Restrict a child’s access to her mobility aide that she is competent in using with minimal assistance and leave her “safer”, but more dependent. Or, allow the child and her parent to make the choice–who better to know their child’s abilities and limitations, and care more for his or her child than her parent?–and grow, flourish, and thrive.  All children get scrapes and bruises.  All children fall. And all children make choices.  Let LaKay and Kristi make this one.

With respect,

Kerri [last name withheld]

Riled up yet? Please send your own letter to the hotshots at the NC ISD who believe that they are NOT restricting LaKay’s development with their choices to decrease her ability to move while she’s at school. Join the fight to allow LaKay and her mother Kristi make the choice to allow LaKay to experience her equivalent of increased freedom in mobility as the other children in her community.