Wishing you a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from the Putz family!

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I had the honor of attending the birth of Diego Ruben, who entered this world on Monday evening at 9:40 p.m. in a beautiful homebirth.  Congrats to the Martinez family!

Diego’s Birth Story: The Honor of Attending a Birth

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Me, Tracy and Tammy

I’ve got an itch.  I don’t know what it is. 

Last week, one of my co-workers picked me and another co-worker up from the Tampa airport in a convertible and we zipped along the highway with the wind whipping through.  Along the way to headquarters, the two guys talked about their upcoming plans for the afternoon.  One of them had a Harley and the other was going to rent one.  They were going to ride the hogs around Clearwater and up to St. Petersburg after they dropped me off at headquarters.

And dang it, I wanted to go with them.  I wanted to ride a motorcycle on a clear Florida day.

Like I said, I’ve got an itch.  Forget the usual mid-life crisis solution of having an affair.  I don’t want an affair.  I want an adventure.  I’ve done 15 years at home raising my kids and now I want more.  The problem is, I can’t quite figure out what “more” is.  Over the weekend, I met a deaf barefooter down in Florida and I learned about Judy Myers, the 66-year-old gal who took up barefooting in mid-life.  I wanna be like her when I grow up.  So barefooting again is on the list.

I thought I solved my mid-life crisis by buying a jet ski.  But the problem is, there’s snow on the ground outside right now.  The jet ski is packed away in a shed. 

When I look back at my youth, I have to blame my Dad for this.  You see, one day, he came home with a boat.  He didn’t even ask my Mom if it was ok.  He just drove home with the yellow boat that was nicknamed “The Bumblebee.”  We took it out to Fox Lake and I learned to water ski in the polluted lake when I was nine. Then he bought mini-bikes.  One of the mini-bikes was missing a cover over the motor.  I remember one day, me and my friend Lisa took off in the mini-bikes up at the lake.  “Watch your legs!” my Dad hollered before we took off.  We were halfway around the lake when I hit a hole and my calf brushed against the spinning motor.  I dripped blood for a good two miles before we arrived back to wash up with the garden hose.  The mini-bikes disappeared shortly after that.  Then Dad came home with two snowmobiles.  Somewhere, down in the basement, is a photo of my brother Kenny taking off from a three-foot snow ramp that we built in the middle of the yard.  I have memories of a caravan of us snowmobiling up to the restaurant by I-94 and having breakfast there.

Then there were the ATV toys that the Kronewitters brought into the picture.  They had two ATVs and a Dune Buggy.  The very first day that we unloaded the brand-new ATV off the truck, the youngest Kronewitter rode it into a tree and bent the foot rest.  That didn’t stop us. Tammy, Tracy and I would pack a lunch and hit the roads around the lake.  We explored abandoned houses and got lost a couple of times.  We built a dirt ramp in a field and borrowed Tim Brown’s dirt bike to add to the mix.  At one point, I had to go to the bathroom, so I rode the dirt bike home and headed inside.  Mom stopped me at the door.  “Whose motorcycle is that and why are you riding it?”  She was not pleased.

Fun was the operative word of my childhood.  Tammy, Tracy and I often came up with crazy ideas to pass the time.  We did an all-girl pyramid with me at the top.  We did three of us on two pairs of skis, with me riding in the back binder of each.  We tied ropes around black truck inner tubes which folded practically in half when pulled, but we hung on.  We boat jumped (don’t even ask).  We attempted to jump over each other with kneeboards–which ended right after I knocked Tammy in the head.  We settled for pulling up on the rope and jumping over the rope instead.  And one day, we had a competition with another boat on the lake, to see which boat could pull the most skiers.  We won, with eight.

Is it any wonder that I’ve got an itch?  And my Dad, he didn’t stop when he got older.  In his late seventies, he bought himself an ATV. 

I wonder if I can con my Dad into buying a motorcycle this summer?

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Indeed, as a Sales Manager for Zvrs, I shared that same frustration as this customer.  Several times, I would see a missed call from an 866 number and I’d have no way of calling that person back.   The 866 numbers no longer function, except when a caller uses a VP-200 to call another VP-200.  When a person uses a videophone from a different company, the call is automatically routed to a relay interpreter.

I also learned that Sorenson customers automatically have their 866 numbers displayed as the default setting.  This is the reason why the 866 number is showing up in the caller ID instead of a local number.  However, Sorenson customers can change the way the caller ID number is displayed and set it so that the LOCAL ten-digit number is displayed instead. 

How to change the 866 number to display the new local number:

Go to Settings > Personal > User and then select “Local.”

Fo more information about calling 800/866 numbers, read the two editorials by Dr. Z and You:

The 800/866 Fiasco

The 800/866 Fiasco, More Information

Update:

The FCC has temporarily reinstated the 800 numbers and ordered the 800 numbers to be put back into the national database so that they can function from one provider to the other.  This means that for the next four months, the 800/866 numbers will connect properly between videophones.

Ed’s Telecom Alert shares more on this issue: VRS 800 Issue.

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I was browsing through my camera and came across a few photos taken at the Zvrs booth at the recent Deafnation Expo. I first joined Zvrs during last year’s Expo, and this year, I ended up running the booth with the local Z team. We had fun, despite a hectic, very busy day!

After the clean up, the Z Team took a moment to pose for a picture:

After dinner, we were walking back to our cars when Mike Aubry spotted a “Z” high up on a building:

What a cool way to end the day with the Z Team!

Stay tuned to www.zvrs.com and watch for the release of the upcoming Z4 software! This software can be downloaded to a Mac or PC for FREE– and you can have a three-way conversation with the Z4. Check out the new video for more information on the Z4 (with captions):

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At a Career Crossroads.

Yes, I know I’m going to regret Florida in the middle of a brutal Chicago winter and y’all can razz me about that in mid-February.  But at least summer will come around again and I’ll be here:

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I came across a post this morning, The Shame of Wearing Hearing Aids and it brought back memories.  I was one of those kids who hid a hearing aid under long hair.  It wasn’t until I was in college that I finally wore my hair up and my hearing aid perched for all to see.  Kinda sad, eh?  All those years spent trying to hide something that was basically a part of me– except I didn’t want any part of it.

I decided to raise my kids with a different attitude about their hearing aids.  From the start, we went with brightly-colored earmolds with swirls and glitter.  I even joined my daughter in getting matching glitter earmolds.  I’m pretty sure I saw my audiologist hold back a gulp when I asked for the blue with glitter when she squeezed the earmold goop into my ear.

So far, no one has had the guts to tell me that I look foolish sporting glitter at my age.

Despite my years of preaching about being proud of those two pieces of technology on their ears, my kids had minds of their own– each of them have made decisions about color vs. minimal color.  My 12-year-old recently decided that he had enough of the wild colors and chose clear earmolds at the last fitting.  After years of wearing boring beige hearing aids, the oldest went for a slick black pair with clear earmolds.  It was now my daughter’s turn for new hearing aids and we sat down to go over the colors for a new pair of hearing aids.  Staring at the hearing aid website, I was floored at the color choices.  When I was growing up, it was pretty much beige and black as the choices.

I was pretty sure she was going to pick out something cool.

“Look, there’s zebra and giraffe patterns!” I exclaimed.  “And look at this cool blue and whoa– that purple!  Oh and look–they have this cool see-through hearing aid!”

She picked beige.

Yes, boring, typical, oh-so-ordinary… beige.

“Mom, I’m going to be wearing these hearing aids for a couple of years, maybe even into adulthood,” she said.  “Do you really think I want to go to prom with a giraffe pattern or purple– what if it doesn’t match my dress?  Besides, I can change my earmold colors anytime I want.”

Yeah, she’s got a point there.  Earmolds are $125 a pop.  Hearing aids are nearly five grand.

“The beige looks nice,” I said.

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We were standing at the edge of the pier, looking at the water that lapped over the brick wall in front of my parent’s house.   The lake water was at a record high and it threatened to creep into the crawlspace if it rose any higher.  Every day, Dad was climbing down the rickety crates that formed a makeshift staircase into the crawl space to check on the sump pump.  Some of the neighbor’s homes had water in them.  He was doing everything he could to keep the water from coming into the house.

“It’s been a shitty summer,” my Dad murmured. He gazed at the flagpole, which was surrounded by water.  The brick wall around that area was nowhere to be seen.

Shitty summer.

The flooded lake.  The cancer.

Dad was in the middle of his six-week regime of grueling cancer treatment: five days of radiation followed by chemotherapy inserted into his port.  The rest of us stood by helpless as we watch the pounds slip away.  The tumor that blocked his esophagus made it increasingly harder for him to swallow any food.  By Labor Day weekend, he was sleeping all day and all night.  He could no longer get any food down and was only taking tiny sips of water.

I fought back the panic all weekend.  I was terrified.  I didn’t want to entertain the possibility that he might not get better.  So I asked him to start thinking about where he wanted to go after he got well.  He looked at me with a little bit of surprise–why the hell was I talking about taking a trip when he was so sick and we didn’t even know what the prognosis was?  I didn’t care if I was being a Pollyanna about the whole thing.  So we talked about Yellowstone and the logistics of getting there and what to see.

By Labor Day, I tried to convince him to call the doctor and request a feeding tube.  Being the strong, stubborn WWII vet that he is, he insisted that he didn’t want to bother the doctor on a holiday.

“Promise you’ll call him tomorrow?” I asked before I got in the car to head home.

“Yea, I’ll call him.”

He finally obtained the feeding tube toward the end of the week.  Rather than getting better, he continued to decline as the effects of the chemo still barreled on.  He still could not eat and that worried me.

“Don’t you think he would be able to eat by now if the chemo and radiation worked?” I speculated with my sister.  Naturally, we feared the worse.  Sixty seven pounds had melted off my Dad’s frame and he hardly moved from the living room chair.

Dad was scheduled for a PET scan last week to determine if the tumor was still growing or if it had responded to treatment.

We all held our breath.

My mother sent an email.

“Good News!!!” was in the subject line.  I just looked at the subject line and started to cry.

“Just got back from the doctor,” Mom wrote. “The cancer cells are dead. He goes back for a checkup in three months.  This is such great news!”

So, Dad, where did you say you wanted to travel to again?

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I’m sitting in a restaurant in Northbrook as I type this.  I have just dropped off my daughter at the International Center for Deafness and the Arts (ICODA) and I’m passing the time as she practices for the upcoming Peter Pan play.  Three, sometimes, four times a week, we make the one hour trek from our home to the tiny theatre where she joins a group of deaf and hard of hearing kids of all ages.  Each and every time, she’s so excited to go and hang with her friends.

“Hey Mom, look at this neat ASL phrase I learned today!” she signs. 

She’s picking up the lingo, learning the slang and gaining more and more confidence each day as she converses with the kids.  This is from the kid who spoke entire sentences at the age of fourteen months and wanted nothing to do with ASL when her hearing suddenly went south at the age of four.  She’s the hard of hearing kid who spends time yakking on the phone with her best friend from Texas, the one who is quick to raise her hand at school and jump into a hot debate– the child that I thought would never embrace sign.  

And here she is, surrounded by a group of kids who are signing faster than the speed of light and she’s not shying away– she’s right in there asking them to repeat.  Sign it again, she signs, when the rapid-fire signing “goes over her head.”

With a start, I realize she’s applying the same advocating technique that we’ve taught her over and over throughout the years– when communication doesn’t happen, change it so that it does.  Ask for a repeat, ask for a re-phrase, ask for it in a way that gets the message understood.  She’s soaking up the ASL and incorporating it– and loving it.

There was a time she hated it.

“Mom, don’t sign.  I don’t need it.  I can hear you just fine.”

It has been fun watching the metamorphasis over the years, how the diverse communication modes have weaved in and out of her life and how she’s grown and changed.  I love how she’s been able to find her niche with a variety of friends– hearing, hard of hearing, deaf/Deaf. 

I’m often reminded of something that I first heard from Janet DesGeorges and Leeanne Seaver about the parenting journey when it comes to making choices for our kids:

Nothing is set in stone.

Sometimes when we set out on a certain path, we think we’re heading down that path for a long time.  And sometimes our kids lead us down a different path or change the direction in our sails. 

Sometimes the time is just right for a new direction and as parents, we just have to give our kids the opportunity to explore all the different paths.

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Wordless Wednesday:  It’s a slam dunk off the side of the boat!

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