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the eric update – day 1792: kite flying and gardening at organic valley.

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day 1792: kite flying and gardening at organic valley. I.

we headed out to organic valley headquarters to tend to our garden plot ( organic valley offers garden plots to all employees ).

and since it was a windy day, odin thought it would be a great idea to take a kite along. perfect idea!

i tried to convince him to try his extreme behind-the-back kite move, but he kept things pretty traditional.

day 1792: kite flying and gardening at organic valley. II.

i think odin might believe that everyone works for a company that encourages employees to tend a garden plot and get some dirt under your fingernails during the day.

we’ll let him entertain that delusion for as long as we can.

although we have a home garden, we’re using our organic valley plot for "overflow". even though we’re getting a late start, hopefully we’ll harvest lots of squash, watermelons, pumpkins and carrots from the plot.

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the eric update – day 1559: on twinkle, twinkle and honking horns.

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day 1559: on twinkle, twinkle and honking horns.

even though odin says he wants to take piano lessons, we thought it would be a good idea for us to see if he had the necessary patience, temperament, eye/hand coordination and digit dexterity with some homeschooling on his new piano.

i know kids pick stuff up quickly, but i was still surprised that it took about 5 minutes of teaching him how to play twinkle, twinkle little star before he was playing it straight through and chastising me for trying to coach him. and certainly no issues with finger dexterity/eye hand coordination.

we can bounce around on the black keys playing the "honking horn" song endlessly 🙂

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the eric update – day 1534: odin’s new piano!

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day 1534: odin's new piano!

well, sort of new ( to us ). if you follow along on twitter you already know the piano arrived a month ago and then we took the trip to the u.p. and now i’ve gotten myself so far behind in storytelling, i don’t know if i’ll ever catch up 🙂

the piano was given to its previous owners on the condition that they give it away when the time came which happened to coincide with when we were looking for a piano. it’s hard to imagine, but i suppose if we ever decide to become piano-less, we’ll give it away as well.

we’re lucky enough to have a capable piano tuner in the area and he came by and quickly fixed some broken hammers and gave it a initial tuning. after the piano has "rested" for a bit, we’ll get ivory on a few keys replaced and have the final tuning done.

as with everything else, he’s a quick study and has already taken to practicing major third harmonic intervals and little melodies. he says he’s interested in having an occasional 15 or 20 minute lesson and we’ve found a local teacher trained in the suzuki method who has agreed try a few lessons to see if he finds them agreeable.

if so, great and if not, that’s great too – i’ll just have that much more time to practice my family holiday piano sing along songs.

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the eric update – day 1512: odin and freya.

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day 1512: odin and freya.

when we gave odin his nickname we never would have guessed two years later that we’d move to a town where he’d meet and develop a friendship with freya.

in norse mythology, in addition to her role as goddess of love, she and the mythical odin would split the dead lost in battle.

today they just decided to get matching face paintings at a mutual friend’s birthday party 🙂

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the eric update – day 1464: odin and evie fly kites for the very first time! outtake.

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day 1464: odin and evie fly kites for the very first time! outtake.

1/10 of a second before "disaster" strikes.

if you look closely you’ll see the kite strings have become entangled and evelyn’s kite is just about to crash to the ground.

her crashing kite startled odin – who couldn’t see what was going on because he was looking the other day – and he let go his kite.

the 20 m.p.h. wind gusts quickly propelled the kite out off the beach and across the parking lot; one of odin’s cousins took chase and tripped over evie’s kite suffering a very minor injury.

and, of course, both odin and evie were temporarily mortified at the prospect of kite flying being brought to such a sudden end.

poppi, mamma and an aunt were able to use their superhero powers to retrieve the kite, unravel the kite string and get things flying in very short order.

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the eric update – day 1464: the long arm of prematurity reaches out and sucker punches us.

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day 1464: the long arm of prematurity reaches out and sucker punches us.

it was a sunny, beautiful morning and odin came into the bedroom.

"poppi, i see spots. i think i’m getting sick."

and so, that’s how an otherwise normal day started. at first i thought he might be playing a game, but he was pretty specific and consistent with the details about the spots in terms of size and color and number.

i suddenly found myself attempting to not freak out as i recalled that the sudden appearance of floaters could be sign of retina detaching and, of course, most of you know he’s at a higher risk for retinal detachment thanks to his history of retinopathy of prematurity.

so, after debating whether or not we were being alarmist, we scheduled an emergency eye exam and i found myself having a surreal lunch with co-workers about the odds of odin having a detached retina.

a few short hours later and we’re in the doctor’s office and odin is going through the pupil dilation routine and time is slowing down to a halt. dilation drops go in both eyes. and left eye checks out fine. right eye didn’t dilate properly. doc thinks the nurse didn’t put drops in, but i’m sure she did.

something feels wrong.

the doc looks into odin’s right eye after putting more drops in and waiting 10 more minutes, pauses, covers his odin’s left eye and asks him to identify the shape on the wall.

"i can’t see it," odin responded.

time is slowing down more. odin is smiling, happy to be sitting in the cool eye doctor chair as i hear the doc say, "we have a problem," followed by phrases strung together loosely.

"detached retina"

"essentially no vision in the right eye"

"emergency surgery at the mayo clinic".

we won’t know much about prognosis or probable outcomes until he gets evaluated by the experts. we expect that we’ll hear bright and early tomorrow from the mayo about when he’ll go in for evaluation and surgery.

needless to say, coming less than 2 weeks away from his fourth birthday, we’re feeling a little sucker-punched.

it’s been almost 1,400 days since rop surgery and i was really starting to hold out hope that we had finally escaped its grasp.