Weapons!

Rob is down at his father's this weekend. In good news, it looks like his Dad is coming up the weekend of April 11th, which means I get to caravan up to Michigan for a weekend weapons camp - woohoo! I get to go regardless, but if Da is here, then I can carpool up with everybody else, pay 1/4th of the gas, and arrive in time for the evening session. Whereas if he weren't, the odds are I would have to stay until Rob got home from work (about eight hours later), and not only pay more and miss the Fri. evening session, but I wouldn't arrive until about 2am, which would leave me groggy for the Sat. session. Not good when playing with weapons!

Weapon choices are tunfa, sai, nunchuks, gusan and kama, and I need to decide which one I want to work on while I'm up there. Kama is out because they'll only teach black belts kama. If I want to do gusan or nunchuks, I need to decide now so that I can buy some, whereas I already have a pair of sais and a pair of tunfas. My initial reaction is to try tunfa - I already have them, but outside of Weapons Connection, I won't learn anything about them for another year or more. OTOH, I am already learning sais, and it might do me more good to consolidate my base level of knowledge there before heading further afield.

Aaron graduates from PT on Thursday! He's been going weekly since Sept., and he's come a long way in core strength and general coordination. This last session he managed to ride a bike (with training wheels) about 1000 feet. It might not seem like much, but when we tried him on a bike last summer, he could kind of steer, or kind of pedal, but neither went very well, and he was completely hopeless at doing both together. This coming Tuesday is an OT evaluation, so he should be able to move smoothly from PT over to OT, and with any luck get help with all the self-help tasks the school OT doesn't do, like buttons, zippers, knives & forks, or (God help us) tying shoes. Aaron retains skills very well, but gets discouraged easily when learning new stuff because it's so hard for him compared to other kids his age. In some ways I think his very intelligence works against him right now because he understands intellectual things easily comparative to his classmates and his tendancy is to stick to the areas where he shines and avoid the things where he doesn't show so well. He's so proud of himself when he learns a new skill though. It's awesome to see!

Writing progress:

A Country for Children
Finally finished rewriting the scene I lost before. For some bizarre reason it was much harder to write the second time than it was the first. Sent it back to L for updating.
Previous Word Count: 17,027
New Words: 1238
New Word Count: 18,265

Ghost Dancer:
Still working on the new scene. No precise word count, but approx. 500 new words today. I need to come up with an excuse for a third roommate to move in with Kira, since there's nothing like a little conflict to liven things up, and Ms. Gray (the potential new roommate) would definitely add some conflict. Plus she's relevent to the political background I'm trying to work in. Of course, then Kira needs to be living alone by the next big plot twist, since that's already written such that roommates will not work. But there's a year's book time in between, so I'm sure I can work something out.