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Happy Feast of St. Therese!

I just love that meme. :)

Here’s my post on why St. Therese is sort of my accidental patron.

And we used to (I hate saying “used to”) have a retreat center in town under her patronage, where I went on retreat at least once a year. We’re getting a new bishop and I hope he makes the effort to re-open it! But I took lots of pictures over the years:

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Patty was 15 months old yesterday!

Likes: her remote controls (that’s the one my dad gave her when they visited in July), waving bye bye with both hands VERY enthusiastically, blowing kisses, going outside, swings, running around the house while talking on the phone, going down the slide, baths.

Dislikes: Her car seat (sometimes), clothes (sometimes, as we see above), Sharing (sometimes), sharing her remote (always), when her mom wants to talk to me and will not give her the phone to talk to me…

I can’t believe how much she’s grown and how fast! She also says “donut” now, but doesn’t repeat words on command, which is funny. She just looks at you like, “what are you doing?”

She’s just a doll who definitely has a mind of her own. (Hmm…..sounds like her godmother!)

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In knitting, I have started my Ursina sweater!

One of the reasons I wanted to knit this particular sweater as because it’s very adjustable—adjustments are written into the pattern. I can adjust sleeve length, which is good because I have short arms, I can adjust the bicep, and I can adjust the bust size by adding bust darts (which are what keep you from tugging down the sweater as it rides up). It’s knit top-down, and if you remember my cardigan, that was knit in pieces and seamed. So fortunately I have a knitting buddy who will be knitting her own sweater with me so we can help each other out!

I’m also being very deliberate on this sweater—moving slowly, and also carefully. Part of this is because I don’t want to frog it (knitting talk for ripping it out—get it? ripping?), and also because it’s nice to not have to speed through something. Normally I’m a pretty fast knitter.

What you see in the photo above are the first 10 rows. Eventually the directions will tell me to knit in the round, which makes me nervous, because I have a bad habit of twisting my stitches!

If you’re on ravelry, you can see my project notes and updates here.

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So, “talking for myself.”

One of the big reasons I wanted to write my book—and what made it different—is that I am speaking for myself. It’s not my parents talking about me. This is really, really common in disability/illness literature. Either the child has died, and the parents are writing about that, or the child is still alive, but they’re writing about their experiences of raising said child so far.

My book is me talking about what it’s like for ME.

It drives me crazy when I see articles about disability written by the parents. Especially when the parents are talking about how the child must feel to hear X or Y.

Magazines! If you want to know, ask us! I can tell you all about how it feels to be told I’m disposable. TV shows! Any media outlet! You can ask us and we’ll tell you!

But instead they don’t.

Please, media outlets, ask us. We can speak for ourselves. CFers aren’t dying when they’re five. There are lots of CF adults. Ask us how we feel!

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In this realm….you know that I am always talking about disability access. I do it because it’s something that needs addressed and I feel like if I keep pointing it out, I can make changes and/or bring the problems to people’s attention!

Today’s accessibility rant: captioned videos.

Folks. If you are going to make videos, please caption them. If you cannot caption them because your software won’t let you or something, please create a downloaded document so that people like me can print it out and follow along.

This is especially necessary if the videos are a big part of your class. If people have to watch a video and then talk about the video, or watch and then fill in a worksheet, not having captions is completely not acceptable.

(Yes, I’m running into this right now with a church bible study.)

It really, really is not OK for this to keep going. Please caption things. Don’t say you don’t have the ability to do it, because there are solutions.

It makes me sad that I have to say this, especially about church-related things.

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It’s flashback time!

I saw on my SM yesterday that Kilauea was erupting I immediately thought of this

If you are too young to have seen this, WATCH IT. It’s awesome!

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We’re taking a trip to Amish Country this fall and I CANNOT WAIT! I’ve always wanted to visit so this trip makes me really happy. I’ll share more about this later, but right now I can just say—chocolate.