Sorry I haven’t written for a while. I’ve been flat out during the day and it’s hard to get onto the computer when the kids are home. There’s been nothing major to write about either.
We had a fairly busy weekend. The kids went to Bev and John’s for Saturday night as I had a garage sale on Sunday. It turned out to be an absolute fizzer but never mind, lots of donations for school’s white elephant sale anyway. Beth apparently went to sleep looking at all the traffic going past on Burwood Highway, along with the trains it can be seen from the bedroom window.
I’ve noticed a calmness in Beth that hasn’t been there for a while. She’s been much happier too in my opinion. I’ll have to speak with her teacher about it to see how she’s been in the classroom as at home it’s been terrific. I wonder if the pill has anything to do with it. We had an inspection today on our house which we are renting while we eventually build our new house. It’s quite amazing how much nicer our moods are when the house is sorted and easy to look after. I think we’ve all been so much calmer. You know what they say, cluttered house, cluttered mind. Well mine’s been cluttered for years. I got rid of so much stuff for the garage sale. I’ve decided that unless I love it it’s not going into the new house with me. I’ve got boxes and boxes of stuff that have moved from house to house. Now it’s all gone and it feels terrific.
School is always hectic at this time of year. What with school swimming, school productions and excursions and organising Christmas things it’s flat out. We’ve also got some awful things going on at school. One of our beautiful grade 1 girls has been battling liver and lung cancer for the last 11 weeks and we now know that she hasn’t much longer to live. My heart goes out to the family, I can’t even comprehend the hell that they must be going through. They’re a religious family which is a blessing. Whether you are a believer of God or not, I believe that at times like this it must give you strength. It’s also wonderful for little Mikayla who truly believes that heaven will be awesome and God is waiting for her. My kids have been very affected by this, especially my Bill. Bree calls him my Eeyore child, the one that thinks that the world is against him. She gave an Eeyore example which was something like (Think in an Eeyore voice) “Why does it always rain on me, there are no clouds anywhere else”. He does tend to be like this but on a serious note, he’s also my sensitive one. He often asks me if I miss my mum who died when I was 13. He worries about me dying and how much he would miss me. He has however never contemplated his own death until now. I feel so bad for him as I of course cannot tell him that he wont ever die or even that I wont ever die. I’ve told him that only the good die young, that Mikayla is such a special little girl and that God needs her help in heaven. We’ve ordered some ceramic fairy mushrooms from a potter lady at school, with the biggest one having Mikayla’s name on it. She’s so worried that she will be forgotten so I sent her a message to say that we will always smile when we look at these. I’ve asked at school about Bill seeing one of the psychologists offered so I don’t know how much more I can do. It’s an awful situation but unfortunately one that sometimes is unavoidable. I’ve sent a message to the parents involved apologizing in advance if Beth blurts out something inappropriate! You know how kids with autism are, they call a spade a spade. To her credit she is actually quite concerned about Mikayla and has watched with interest when there has been stories on the news about her.
We had Sensational Kids this morning. We haven’t been for a while due to staff holidays and time changes. Unfortunately Whiskers (occupational therapist)Â wasn’t there today so we just had Rod for speech therapy. Wow, what a great session we had! Rod has done some new training and approached todays session differently. He set up a real life situation which he and Beth wrote out and then acted. We decided to do going to the movies. Beth devised a step process to how this would be done. She needed a bit of help at first as she jumped from me saying “let’s go to the movies” to sitting down at the cinema. Still, she picked it up well. First we had to decide, get in the car and get there, buy the tickets, buy the food and drinks, go into the movies, come and out go to the toilet, go for hot chocolate and go home. Interesting enough although it’s almost exactly what we do, we always take out own popcorn and maltesers and drinks though she put in that we buy them there.
We acted out the scenario. We had puppets for Bill and Bridie, Rod and I played Paul and myself and of course Beth played Beth. I started by looking on the internet and us all decided that Cats and Dogs was the movie we would see. We got in the car and drove to Belgrave. Rod (with the aide of a toy) played all the extra parts. First Beth went up to buy the tickets. When asked she told which movie it was for and that it was for 3 kids, 2 adults. When it came to the food however there were major stumbling blocks. She doesn’t understand money anyway but that wasn’t really the problem. For some reason she got stuck on wanting to get 10 tubs of popcorn, 10 tubs of maltesers and 10 drinks. We explained that we only had 10 dollars. She just kept asking for the same thing. In the end she ordered a drink for $5 and maltesters for $5. She then had no idea what to do about the popcorn. We helped out, telling her that if she got a smaller maltesers then she could afford the popcorn too.
We then went into the movies where she shared out the ‘food’ and drink. She then insisted on using the real toilet and Rod and puppet Bill pretended to go to the boys toilet. We then went to order our coffees which was so cute. She ordered Rod and I a cappuccino, Bill a baby chino and Bridie a milkshake. She had a hot chocolate with a marshmallow. We then drank them and went home. At the end of the session Rod asked if there was anything she had trouble with and she straight away said the money and the food which I thought was great. Usually when she’s stuck on something she tries to change the subject or mucks around but she worked through it and recognised that as a problem area. I was so proud of her. Of course she got dumped in the ball pit at the end as a reward. Rod said it was a terrific session as she stayed on task for the whole 45 minutes. Clearly this new way of doing things agrees with our Bethie Boo.
