Discussion: Good for both Vince and Edda

Not applauding the missed controls for Vince as such but the ambition to try Brown. A thought since you were going to bring him to the training weekend and I'm fairly certain he has completed an Orange solo at one or more of the past several events - if I have that right, he's met the bar to take part in the occasional junior training sessions Boris puts on in conjunction with meets, the next one being planned for this Sunday at Mason Neck, starting at 10am. Maybe he'll be more inclined to take pointers from Boris than from his mother. Even if not, to whatever extent he hasn't already met the other juniors who are regulars at QOC events, many of them should be taking part.

I hesitate to second guess you as to whether Edda was grokking orienteering at all (did you have her punch the controls?) or just enjoying a walk outside on a nice day. It's too bad, whatever she was liking, even the white course is rarely as short, flat, and generally gentle as that one. Even the upcoming white course I've designed for the extremely flat Mason Neck will feature a couple of significant drops into and then climbs out of stream valleys, one of them rather steep, as well as an additional kilometer.

Edda & I certainly lucked out with this particularly flat & short course. Edda is not really orienteering, she is just concentrating on walking on rough terrain which hard enough for her. She has Rett Syndrome, so there is significant cognitive impairment as well as her physical difficulties. One of the hallmarks of Rett is that she can't use her hands, so she can't hold onto anything or point to anything, so I was punching for her, though I thought is was only fair if she was within arm's length of the control. So the last one before the finish was challenging because it was on an information kiosk which required her to step onto the platform and that took a little coaxing from me. You know, I think she could have gone another km and I think she might even be able to manage some elevation gain/loss with someone taller/stronger/heavier as her helper. As she's so close to my height & weight, I feel like I don't have as much leverage if she starts to tumble. We'll have to rope my husband into coming on Sundays, I'm not sure that will happen. Maybe!

Thanks for the tip about the junior training sessions, I'll email Boris. Vince indeed has met the bar to go to those sessions.

I don't think anyone is going to quibble over just how close Edda gets to controls. Having just skimmed the first few relevant search results, it looks as though I shouldn't be extremely hard on myself for not having heard of Rett before. I'm somewhat amazed it wasn't even described medically until 1966. Affecting 1 in 8500 females doesn't intuitively seem quite rare enough to explain that but I guess it must not have been easily distinguishable from some other syndrome(s) before the genetic basis was discovered. Thanks for my small decrease in ignorance du jour.

I'll look forward, on behalf of QOC, to possibly collecting/ensnaring your whole family some time in the future when conditions are propitious for an outing with Edda and there are no business trips or epic bike rides scheduled.