Sean and Snow - January 27th

Saturday January 27th 2007.

Sean sitting on his bed, wrapped in his comforter and chilling out. Why?

Well, it's 10 am and guess what? It's been snowing since 6 this morning. Not a blizzard of course, just some steady light snowfall. The sixth week in a row...

Sean seems to take the enforced idleness in stride. It would be very dangerous to take him out in the snow, while he is good at walking and, as you can see from previous entries in the blog, he can gain confidence enough to walk over the field, the footing has become so treacherous that we don;t want to chance it.

Several people have asked how Sean knows it is snowing as he is deaf/blind. Of course we don't have a definitive answer but there are a couple of things that bear on it, we think. Sean can see light and dark, shadow and color. Rubella meant that when he was born he had very dense cataracts, they were removed and almost immediately they came back. The doctors and we made the decision to remove the lens altogether so that there would be light and color and some sight but Sean has no lenses to focus.

Sean does make good use of his residual vision and as he grows familiar with an area he gets better and better at functioning in it.

So to answer the question - how does he know? We think it is mainly due to the quality of the daylight. Most of the time, here in Colorado, it is sunny. For you unfortunates who have not been here and may not know this - most of the time we have crystal clear blue skies and sunshine. It is gorgeous.