The "One-eyed wonder" gets new depth perception

Hi. Weird title eh. (see...look how Canadian I am. I even say Eh on my blog!)
I have always been a one-eyed wonder. That means I am a part of the 5% of the population who has one eye that stays totally perfect while the other one changes and weakens over time like normal eyes. When I was in junior high school I started needing to wear glasses (which i HATED) and eventually contacts because my left eye was weak and became blurry. My right eye stayed the same. Ever since then I have worn glasses (rarely) or one contact for my left eye. I had many people ask me if it was weird only wearing one contact, or if I felt imbalanced from it. I admit to being imbalanced sometimes, but it had nothing to do with my eyes! *grins*
So for the last 20 or so years I have had one perfect eye that never changed (right side) and one slowly weakening eye that needed help to see. It was sort of nice since if I forgot to put my contact in, or when I got up in the morning, I could still see pretty good. Mostly it was my depth perception that was thrown off by the imbalance. Maybe they thought that the weight of the one contact would make my head tilt to one side or something? Um...no. Anyhow, I digress.
I have a theory. I could be totally wrong, but I've always wondered if I caused it to happen. You see, in elementary school and Junior high school I loved to read. Still do. But back then I had to go to bed and lights out by a certain time. I never wanted to put down my book, so i would read by the light of the readout on my digital clock. Yeah..crazy I know. I would hold my book up to that little number readout, squint, and read for a long time. Not sure my parents ever knew that...but I guess they will now! hahah. But when i squinted, I found that i squinted my left eye and fully closed my right eye to read better. SO my left eye was getting strained and my right eye was safe. Anyhow, its all just a theory.

So why a blog post about all this? Well, its relevant to what is going on in our lives! Paul and I had discussed for several years about me getting corrective surgery on my one eye. As we move closer to leaving for Niger, which is the land of eternal sand on the Sahara desert, wind storms, multiple days in the villages with no way of truly keeping clean hands and clean contact lenses. So we made the plunge. In very quick succession (literally a few days from start to finish) I had my assessment and surgery. Yeah, last Thursday I had laser eye surgery. Once again my perfect right eye saved me from the normal double eye surgery (and made it half price!)
I spent most of the day there. Most of it was waiting time. I would meet the optometrist, talk for 5 min, then wait 45 min to see that next person and so on. I had the eye surgery at 2:30 in the afternoon. I couldn't believe that the actual laser procedure only took about 1 minute. I layed under the machine, they made a flap in my cornea, flipped it open to reveal my eye, lasered the tissue a specific amount for my prescription, flipped the flap back and brushed it down. Voila! Very weird seeing it all happen through the eye they were working on! But completely painless. My low blood pressure made itself known and I almost passed out, but not from the surgery...maybe just the expectation? I went home and slept and by the next morning my eye felt normal. Perfect. Clear. I can see! My left eye is 20/20 vision now! And the best part, I have perfect depth perception, don't need to put any contacts in, and I can put lotion on my hands first thing in the morning without having to think of putting my contact in first. Sweet! SO that was my week. My eye feels so great. Like nothing even happened except that I can see perfectly now. If you've ever thought of getting it done - I highly recommend it! i went with Lasik Vision here in Calgary.

Plants Part 3

This is the last installment of our Toronto trip.

Here is Paul working with his korean language tutor. For 8 hours over the 2 weeks we got to meet with a language tutor to practive all the tools and tricks we were learning to acquire language. They couldn't find anyone who could speak Tamasheq or Fulfulde, so we got to learn Korean! So what did we learn?
- names of family members ( mother, father, boy,girl,baby, grandma, grandpa)
- names of items of clothing
- names of desktop items (pen,pencil,book, etc)
- table setting items (bowl,plate,cup,etc)
- modes of transportation (walk,bike,bus,car)
- locations (office, home, church, airport, hospital)
- common greetings
- commands (stand up, sit down, pick up, put down, eat, drink, etc)

And then we learned basic sentence structure to be able to put some of these things together to say (for example) The mother walked to the church, or the grandmother took the bus to the hospital)
It was hard work but gave us confidence to learn using picture books, items and physical response techniques



Here I am getting my course certificate from the MissionPrep director


On the way home on the flight, the kids were really good. Bennett found a little friend at the airport and since we were delayed 90 minutes, they played with plastic animals and walked the Lion King together on the laptop.



During the flight Bennett talked to the flight attendants and had them all wrapped around his finger! At the end of the flight he even got to go meet the pilot and look at the cockpit! Lucky boy!



So why all the special treatment? Check out his shirt on the flight...he was one of the them!

Toronto over the weekend

Toronto is known as the most multicultural, ethnic city in the world. Their website claims that most cultural groups, even many small ones, are represented here in Toronto. There are over 160 languages spoken in the city.

Saturday morning we started out by heading to Kensington market. This area is full of small shops, street vendors and stores crammed with colorful goods. It is close to the heart of Chinatown as well. We saw lots of signs, foods, and bins. Here are some pictures I took of the sights of Chinatown, full of colour and vibrancy.



These are all dried fish. Tiny dried shrimp and tiny long silver fishes, etc. Bennett (who has a phenomenal sense of smell) kept saying "Mom...whats that smell?"


Dried fruit and nut bins. Some fruits I didn't even recognize. And I can smell Durian a mile away :) Ah..brings back memories of our hotel in Cambodia.







Decorations. I think Chinese New Year already passed for this year, but all these red posters, silver paper red decorations and wild party stuff made me think they were still celebrating?





At in the heart of Chinatown, amongst all the bright neon signs, there was still a Starbucks. We went and had hot chocolate and warmed our toes. Bennett really warmed his toes, and whole legs for that matter, by dumping his whole hot chocolate all over his pants. Ooops. Anyhow, we were interested to see Starbucks, so culturally North American and calm, filled with old Chinese people, sitting around tables and talking fast. We watched their mouths, using our newly learned phonetic skills, to try to see how they formed some sounds, etc. They probably wondered why we were staring :)



We also spent an hour inside an army surplus store while Paul looked for some desert coveralls to work in for Niger. There was this really interesting old man there who walked around with us, helped us out, and told us stories.





Then on Sunday morning we went to the Toronto Alliance church. This is a church plant in the heart of downtown to minister to all people there, and restore lives. It was an awesome, touching and transparently honest service. We loved the integrity and love of the people. A wonderful small church in a very needy place. You can check them out at their website.
www.torontoalliancechurch.ca

Then in the afternoon we wandered around a little bit, and then spent a wonderful evening at home with our community family here having chocolate fondue and watching a movie.

We are so blessed to be in a guesthouse with 3 other Alliance missionaries. We eat together, learn together, and take care of the kids together. The W family have 2 boys and with our two kids, there are 4 kids under 3 1/2. Talk about chaos and fun! All four of them got in the tub and had a blast playing together. And in the kids program all day they enjoy each other's company. We love the W family, who are going to the Arabian Peninsula, and are thankful for this time with them. And of course Kristi is here with us too..every one's favorite Auntie Kristi. She leaves for Niger in 25 days now!!