Busyknitter

Cold has not materialised.

Elder son is streaming, but that doesn’t matter because he doesn’t sing.

I’ve got a choir event in 10 days time; quite low key, a workshop not a concert. But I do have a bit of a solo part.

And my throat is starting that ominous tickle………..

07:30 - 08:45. Wave delightful children off to school [clue, organise your day off in term time]

09:30 Relaxing swim followed by sauna

11:30 Vacuum inside of car [doesn’t really count as leisure, I know. But it wasn’t going to get done any other time and the car had started to evolve its own lifeforms].

12:15 Go out for lunch with husband at the New Continental Pub. Eat very scrummy meal. Allow husband to pay.

13:30 Put feet up to read a book

16:00 Wake up just a few minutes before delightful children return home.

16:01 Normal life reboots.

What can I say, we had a completely awesome time. Huge thanks to my good friend who came to help out with T; couldn’t have done it without you. It was also great to spend some time with my brother, who is a Greenbelt old lag (compared to me that is)

As for the little fella, he loved it! Quite the little autistic party animal he was. He especially enjoyed any event with music.

As Greenbelt newbie, it took me a day or so to work out what was going on and when. But we still did loads. Beer’n Hymns was a particular highlight (two nights in a row!) As was a talk by John Swinton on the theology of disability. Also one by a bloke who walked the entire route of the M62 and wrote a book and a blog about it. And then there was the Taize worship. And the dinner I had from the Pie Minister stall (almost a religious experience in itself). Oh, and the Iona Big Sing. I could go on.

Camping with T was not too bad at all. The first night’s sleep was a bit rubbish; we went to bed at 1am and T woke us up before 4 and that was that. But Saturday and Sunday were a lot better.

And I spent a small fortune on books

Here’s a few pictures. There will be more on facebook.

A very quiet day; My sore throat from Tuesday flowered into a fabulous head cold, so I had to cancel my afternoon singing lesson.

The friend who is coming to Greenbelt with us came round in the morning for a planning session. We decided to go for the minimal kibble approach; i.e. no cooking.

I popped into town while T was with his carer in the afternoon and snaffled two pairs of festival-suitable cropped trousers at a charity shop plus a very nifty little baglett for keeping Really Important Things safe while mooching around the festival.

After tea, T and I went for a walk and got totally soaked in a rainstorm.

And in the evening I reached a major milestone with this bloomin work!

As I said, a very quiet day indeed.

Took T to the church holiday club for a little while in the morning. I couldn’t leave him there as they aren’t set up with enough workers to give him the attention (but I think I will start asking for them to lay something on next year).

He really enjoyed it. When we arrived, there was just one chair placed in the middle of the school hall with all the activity going on around it. T plonked himself in the chair as if he were waiting for church or school assembly to start and just sat there happily waiting. It was very sweet.

Then some girly shopping; face cream, mascara and a new nail varnish. I also got collared in the street by someone flogging a promotion for a local hair salon and Oh My Goodness I signed up for it (which is quite out of character). essentially I’ve prepaid for six months worth of hair treatments - cuts colour, head massages, styling etc. If I use everything, i’ll have paid £55 for £350 of treatment. Now I know I won’t do that, but even if i get two cuts and a colour out of the deal, I’ll be quids in. They’d better be good.

And here is some free advertising for them Spencer Hair Company

T’s respite carer thinks he is starting to echo back simple phrases that people say to him.

Watched the Ingmar Bergman movie in the afternoon.

Carried on working in the evening. It’s very dull but I am making good progress with what i need to do.

Ooh, and I made a huge batch of cauliflower cheese for tea and the freezer. Though i say so myself, I make the best cauli cheese on this planet.

Not much reading going on this week, though I have finished Buddenbrooks at last (Poor Hanno!). Must look out a good stock of books to take away next week.

I have a sore throat.

Husband and older son plus my Mum have toodled off to Paris for a short autism-free break, leaving me and and the little fella at home. We have no grand plans because we are off to the Isle of Wight on Saturday.

I thought I’d keep a daily diary of our very quiet week at home. Here’s what we did yesterday:

Good Bits
-T enjoyed his first visit to his respite carer in a while (she’s been on holiday herself). She’s recently moved house but is still very close to us.
-While T was out, I spent the whole afternoon messing around learning to cook a new curry - chicken dhansak, mmm-mmnn.
-We cycled to the pool and had a very relaxing swim.
-Overnight I taped a ridiculously long Ingmar Bergman movie off Channel 4 to watch over the week - Scenes from a Marriage

Bad bits
- Have you any idea of the horrible mess that can be made by an autistic boy in search of sensory fun armed with only two slightly overrripe bananas?
-I spent the whole evening working, grrrr.
-correction, I spent the first part of the evening struggling to work with my underpowered laptop then gave up and moved onto husband’s smart games oriented PC (I’m going to have to do something about this in the autumn).

I am very excited.

Following the success of our trip to Newcastle, we are planning two nights in London, hopefully staying in an apartment hotel somewhere central. We’ll do fun stuff with the boys during the day and take turns to go out in the evenings. Mr. BK is planning a night out with some of his pals. But I’m plotting to go to a Prom, which is something I haven’t done for over twenty years. Wheeeeee!

The past six weeks have been a bit busy, to say the least. Things have calmed down a bit, so I guess it’s time to get back into the blog. Here are some of the things that have been keeping me occupied.

-Work, work, work, work, work. I won’t go into detail (this blog is about my real life after all…..) but the past few weeks have been consumed with the preparatory phase of a Seriously Big Project. We get a little break for a few weeks, so it’s back to just doing the day job for a while.

- My choir had it’s summer buffet concert.

- I knitted my first Baby Surprise Jacket. Does anyone know any surprise babies needing one?

- My beloved (but admittedly rather knackered) old wooden Adler treble recorder finally gave up the ghost. It split in four places. So I have finally succumbed to the world of recorder consumerism and am now the happy owner of a Moeck Rottenburg in Palisander from the rather wonderful Early Music Shop and a Moeck Tuju in maplewood bagged on Ebay. I’m playing them in now.

And I had two holidays at half term!
-For the bank holiday weekend, T and I went on a specialist weekend for autistic families organised by Through the Roof. It was just so relaxing, and fun. T was looked after for much of the weekend by the incomparable Vicky and had an absolute ball. I mostly sat around drinking tea and nattering. Which was just what I needed, given that the deadline for all that work I’d been doing was lunchtime on the day that the holiday started.

-We got back home on the Monday evening and on Tuesday morning, all four of us set off for the wilds of Ardnamurchan for what turned out to be the first successful family holiday we’ve had for four years. Define success? Well everyone enjoyed it and we didn’t come back thinking that it would have been easier to not bother taking T away from home. Nice weather, too.

And Mr. BK went to Poland and brought me back a picture of JPII as a present! And S did his Year9 SATs. And he had his 14th birthday. And I had to go to a beancounters conference that night so missed it. And T had his annual statement review - all presented on the smartboard with the lad doing cute and clever things like buying bananas in Sainsburys or parallel playing with a classmate.

Thus endeth my lenten internet fast.

It’s been an interesting ride.

A couple of things happened early on which made it vey obvious that I couldn’t in all conscience step away from my online life completely. I’d always planned to keep track of emails and of course I have to use t’Interweb for work. But there has been some serious life and death stuff happening over the past six weeks to people I care about, and with whom I mostly interact online. So right from the start I’ve been bobbing in and out of a couple of important websites.

Jesus was never legalistic, so I guess I should try to not let that sort of thing bother me either.

Which meant I’m not wearing a hairshirt over buying vacuum cleaner bags online. Or that Amazon order.

What I wanted to achieve from the fast was to break my growing habit of eating up time aimlessly by surfing around websites when I know full well that there is nothing interesting to read and I’d be better off sleeping, praying, reading or speaking with a human being who is actually in front of me. And for the first four weeks, I really managed to keep my internet usage down to that minimal activity. I even spent some of the extra time doing all those excellent offline things.

I did watch more telly than usual, which wasn’t really part of the plan.

However, for the last two weeks of lent it all slid rather badly; Daily newspapers, the BBC, Arts and Letters Daily, Spiked! - all my favorite information sites proved too tempting. I did manage to keep well away from The Ship of Fools (in fact I hardly missed it at all), blogs and all the knitting sites.

Normal service is now resumed; except that I plan to keep one or two of the good habits that I tried to instill in myself.

Have I learnt anything? That in the virtual world, some parts of it are more virtual than others. That living on the internet is no different to concrete life in that it’ really is all about relationships (or the lack thereof).