Busyknitter

Sunday was a bit of funny day (ha ha and peculiar).

Church in the morning, the monthly family service. Which meant that older son got to bunk off. While he actually thinks a lot about God, faith, the world etc (well a lot for an 11-year old) he absolutely cannot bear corporate worship, especially childrens songs with daft actions. So as an act of compassion, I let him stay at gome with his heathen Dad.

However younger autistic son adores family service. My parish does a fantastic job of looking after T and including him in things as much as possible. While he copes pretty well with Sunday school sundays, he loves being in church itself with all our hymns and silly songs and happily pootles about to his hearts content (it’s a modern building, self contained and very safe).

What really gets him going is the drumkit at the front. He stands about three inches away from the cymbol and gazes adoringly at it, while our drummer (who is also our vicar) tries to avoid hitting him. But this Sunday, we started off with a traditional hymn, and no drums. So T snuck his way to the front and planted himself on the drum stool. And he just sat there through the whole hymn with a ridiculously happy and triumphant expression on his face. I wish I’d had my camera with me.

That was the morning.

In the afternoon, we went off to a country pub to meet a load of people from church to celebrate someone’s 50th birthday. T often cries when we arrive at a place in the car, but particularly new places. He must have been tired or otherwise out of sorts, because the moment I pulled up at the pub car park, he set off into a major, major meltdown (I think it qualifies as his worst ever). Which went on for an hour and a half for goodness sake! He spent most of the time slapping the tops of his legs, which are now all bruised.

‘Fraid I didn’t cope very well. People we knew kept hovering around trying to help and making daft suggestions - “Would you like to come and fly a kite, T?” People we didn’t know just looked askance. We were sitting in the middle of a large, open field, but I only wanted to find a cave to hide in.