Today was a great day. I started a new job and as far as I can tell I’ll be working for myself for the first time. It’s a job for a company and I don’t know how long it will last but I’m being brought on to do exactly what I want to do. I’m coming in to define the processes for the entire business and help them find holes and optimization opportunities. I’m starting by working with the sales department and helping to develop customer profiles we will then construct standard offerings that provide a specific customer type. This will help shorten our sales cycle and decrease the time until full integration. This of course leads to more revenue more quickly and I’m psyched to help my first client achieve this. So that’s how my day started.

Well, it ended with reading to my daughter which I’ll get to in a minute, surfing the internet, Finding a blog about BADD – Blogging Against Disablism Day (May 1st), and deciding to finish writing this article for the BADD day. You can find out more about BADD at Diary Of A Gold Fish This site is linking back to all the blogs that wrote an article for today.

And Finally, I get to my story for the day:

I was upstairs putting my daughter to bed. Every night when I put her to bed I read to her. As a dyslexic when I read out loud there are OFTEN times I read a word incorrectly. ie. Tonight instead of the picnic bench, I read Pinch bench.

Well, that started the giggles and the story we were reading was really getting funny right there anyway. It talks about a girl pushing a boy and then saying “it was the darnedest thing that boy he pushed himself.” Then the daddy sits down on the bench and hits himself in the head. The kids proceed to talk about how the daddy person has lost it and he now needs to call in backup. My daughter thought this was the funniest thing in the world tonight and couldn’t stop laughing. She was laughing so hard she got me laughing with her.

After reading through everything we went back and made sure we understood all the saying and funny words. Well to do that I had to do some demonstrations. For instance, when the daddy person sits down on the pinch bench with a blank look and hits himself in the head I had to show her what it meant. She understood what was being said and why it was funny but she couldn’t come up with her own visual representation until I showed her one. As many who read this blog regularly know she has CP. One of the aspects of CP that affects my daughter is her visual perception. I’ve seen her perception come amazingly far in the last year but she still has trouble in the abstract. This is one of the areas my own “disability” provided me the experience to learn about learning styles and how to communicate so you could be understood. And it’s the ability I’ve developed because of my disability that has provided me my core strengths in listening and understanding which provide me the ability to earn a living and sometimes the ability to really help my daughter fully understand and get a concept.

It was a great day.