Monkey Business
Today my five year-old severely autistic, non verbal son, who has very limited ability to follow instructions and whose normal reaction to anything stressful or difficult is to throw himself on the floor and start hitting himself, went climbing.
More precisely he attended George’s Kids’ Club – a specialist session for children with special needs run at our local leisure centre. I’m a total novice when it comes to climbing, but this looked like a farily serious facility; an entire 50 foot high sports hall, completely clad with walls of all sorts, some with some fairly scary overhangs.
T was fitted into a harness (thankfully he never seems put out by different types of clothing) and then attached to a belay rope at the bottom of the 20 foot beginners’ tower. For the next 40 minutes, his belay partner and an extraordinarily patient teenage lad gradually coaxed and guided him up the wall.
He absobloominlutely loved the whole experience, got the hang of what was required pretty quickly and everyone was completely stunned by his natural climbing ability. I wasn’t surprised by his ability (I know him too well) but was totally bowled over by how quickly he got into the whole thing.
When he got to the top and realised he was king of the castle we had a different problem, which was how to get him safely down again. He didn’t seem inclined to follow anyone else’s lead on this one, so guess what? Mummy had to put on a harness, shimmy up the tower and sort him out. We actually lowered him down the very steep overhang on the other side of the tower. I chickened out and abseiled down the wall that I’d climbed.
I felt quite emotional afterwards. This is the first time in T’s short life where he has ranked up an achievement that I can boast about in comparison with what you could expect of any child in general. It feels pretty good.
