American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults
Future Reflections Special Issue: COVID and Beyond LEARNING AT HOME
How Does Your Garden Grow?
by Terri Rupp
From the Editor: Terri Rupp serves as president of the NFB of Nevada, and she is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Federation of the Blind. She recounts the ups and downs of her life in her blog, "Blind Mom in the Burbs," which you can visit at https://blindmomintheburbs.com.
Terri Terri quite contrary
How does your garden grow?
With proactive thoughts
And mindful plots
So vibrant and loved it glows.
Hello, my name is Terri Rupp. I'm known to some as Blind Mom in the Burbs, as president of the National Federation of the Blind of Nevada, or as that crazy lady who runs for hours around the neighborhood. Most importantly, I'm known as Marley and Jackson's mom.
From the outside we probably look like the typical family in the suburbs. However, we are so far from that family as seen on TV or your current Netflix binge, so far that we don't even have a Netflix account of our own. While most families spent the past year struggling to navigate the so-called "new normal" of life during the pandemic, our family made it our mission to continue living actively and loving proactively.
Let me give you a little bit more background about our family. Dad works as a paramedic for the county's fire department. Mom decided that she did not want to pursue a professional career so that she could stay home and raise the kids. Marley is blind just like her mom, and her brother, Jackson, has completely embraced the role of obnoxious little brother, from armpit farts to wet willies.
A few years ago we moved from our dream home in the suburbs to an even more perfect home in the same gated community. We had expanded to become a multigenerational family, and we needed another bedroom and bathroom to accommodate Grandma.
Between 2018 and 2020 I found myself traveling more often on public speaking engagements as part of my work for the National Federation of the Blind. Having my mother-in-law living with us and my parents close by made it possible for me to travel without worrying about the kids. Travel had its perks, and my motivational speaking career was taking off organically. However, the long flights alone soon grew tiring, and the hotel coffee was not so tasty when I woke up and couldn't remember which time zone I was in.
When the world shut down last spring, most people were wishing to get out and get back to normal. I've never been more grateful to be grounded!
We spent the first few, uncertain weeks of the COVID lockdown snuggling on the couch watching movies, strolling the neighborhood, and trying our hands at some experimental baking.
Oh, the baking! The cookies, the cakes, the pies, oh my!
Just as we deal with all the things that come along our path due to my blindness and our daughter's blindness, now we found ourselves dealing with the possibility that my husband would bring home the virus with his job as a first responder. Our family remained true to our values of not living in fear. We continued living the lives we want, but with a few modifications.
With all due respect, I was somewhat hesitant to write this article. I didn't want readers to presume that our lifestyle is careless or that we're not doing our part to flatten the curve. So before you read further, here is my disclaimer: although we continued living actively and loving proactively, we did it respectfully, and we followed whatever guidelines were in place through all of our adventures.
How did we continue living actively and loving proactively?
With proactive thoughts, and mindful plots, so vibrant and loved it glows.
We had tilled the soil and planted the seeds of adventure long before anyone knew what storms awaited us in 2020. Through our efforts in advocacy for Braille and accessible technology for our daughter, we had finally reached a place where she could navigate her last year of elementary school independently. Don't get me wrong—there were still plenty of frustrating obstacles in the soil in the distance learning garden box. Who didn't run into frustrating times with technology? Instead of focusing on the ugly and upsetting trials that tested us, I'd rather highlight the tremendous hard work of the entire educational team. The loss of this team with the transition into middle school gets me all teary-eyed today. A key member of our team is Marley's classroom teacher, who is always asking us what else she can do to make sure Marley has access to everything the other students are doing. Her Braille teacher and her access technology support person drop off materials and make house calls when we can't connect her devices to Dropbox and Bookshare. Her principal and other school administrators go above and beyond, even bringing by a fifty-foot ethernet cord when our wifi wasn't strong enough. Her paraprofessional takes those pesky inaccessible slides and documents and turns them into readable BRL files. All of these wonderful, dedicated folks, and the text thread titled, "TEAM Marley Jane," have made this a truly remarkable year.
All of this schoolwork, though, did not keep us tethered to our home. Just as California and Nevada COVID restrictions were telling everyone to stay home and ordering businesses to shut down, we were in San Diego, getting the last of the installations onto Lady Zephyr, the Mercedes Sprinter van my husband has converted into our family camper. Lady Zephyr and her mobile wifi hot spot have carried us away from the burbs and through deserts, mountains, canyons, lake country, redwood forests, and beyond.
We've long dreamed of one day home-schooling the kids and traveling. Now, with distance learning, that one day is our real life. Our unwillingness to confine ourselves to the boxes that social distancing guidelines put in place has us out and doing.
Distance learning was great for Marley, but it did not work for our other child. Through emotional meltdowns, boredom, isolation, and tears we tried to wait out the kinks in his online classroom. Finally we decided our best choice was to withdraw him from what public school was offering. After much research we found a homeschooling plan that would work better for Jackson, a gifted learner. We subscribed to the Time 4 Learning homeschooling curriculum. We supplement with lots of trips to the library, 180 Days workbooks from Amazon, hands-on creative teaching in the kitchen, and of course our many travels on the road. Jack and Dad take turns reading the signs on the trails we explore.
I have not tested out the Time 4 Learning site to see how accessible it is for blind students yet. As the primary homeschooling parent, and as a blind parent, I haven't run into any problems on my end. Jack is even learning Braille so he can write notes to his sister and make a Mother's Day card for me.
What's that common saying about April showers and May flowers? Soon our backyard garden will be bursting with sunflowers from our Earth Day experiments.
From our family to yours, we wish you a colorful spring filled with plenty of proactive thoughts and mindful plots, so vibrant and loved it glows.