Nearly a year ago I posted this about how T managed to destroy all the furniture in his room and we’d started to ask about some specialist furniture being fitted. Well, the wheels of health/social care bureaucracy do grind exceeding slow, but we got there in the end and here is T’s beautiful new bed;
And our lockable bathroom cabinet.
DoublePLusGood 
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.
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).
T is up to his old tricks. It’s 11pm, he’s been officially “in bed” for four hours now but he’s nowhere near asleep.
And he’s back in furniture removal mode. Well, there isn’t actually any furniture in his room except for a mattress, but I’ve just been up there to check on him and found it on the other side of the (fairly large) room.
Never mind; hopefully we will soon have his new bed installed and fixed to the floor (made by these folks). That’ll settle his hash.
Wish he’d go to sleep a bit earlier though, he’ll be impossible to wake in the morning.
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.
Cor, I haven’t been doing much blogging lately. RL verrrrrrry busy right now.
But I just have to pause for a minute or two to record that T is finally getting the hang of this toilet training mularkey!
What a clever fellow.
I am in love. Big Time. With this building:
The outside is gorgeous enough. But it’s the concert hall that really took my breath away (however, i didn’t think to take a photo. duh.)
So what were we doing in Newcastle? Well, it was time to pay a visit to my MIL. The North-East is really a bit far for a day trip for us, so we decided to risk an overnight visit, splashing out on a funky urban apartment on the Quayside.
Here is the view from our window
And here it is at night
How many bridges can you count in this picture?
The whole trip went really well. T coped with a night away from home brilliantly and a good time was had by all
T has been getting much more active in his bedroom in the evenings, literally bouncing around till 10, 11 or even 12pm.
And the casualty of all this is his furniture.
At the beginning of the summer we had to remove the small drawer unit that holds his clothes because he kept knocking it over. About three months ago we had to remove a large wooden chest of drawers from the room (which is mostly used for linen storage) because he was jumping up and down on it and had cracked the top. Two weeks ago we had to empty all the plastic containers from his storage unit because Ted just kept pulling them out, tipping all his toys on the floor and then getting upset by the mess. Last week we had to move the unit itself because Ted discovered that if he pushed it on its side it made a really good frame for practising tightrope walking on (and he’s got the bruises to show for this particular experiment).
At the weekend, we had to take the base unit of his bed out of the room. He’s always pulled the mattress off the bed to use it as a crash mat for his evening workout. But now he’s he discovered how easy it is (and how much fun!!) to turn the base unit upside down and jump up and down on it. He’s broken the drawers in the divan and I wouldn’t put much hope in the frame lasting much longer. So we’ve removed it.
And last night he pulled the bookcase to pieces
So now all there is in Teddy’s bedroom is a mattress (and it’s a big room). We are giving the toy storage unit away and the bed frame and bits of bookcase will have to go to the dump. The drawer units are now living in our bedroom.
And i used to say he wasn’t destructive.
The whole family went for a breezy walk up Parlick in the Forest of Bowland this afternoon.
Once we got going we were fine, but there was an unexpected sticky moment when T flatly refused to get out of the car. Very perplexing as it’s quite out of character - generally he loves the open air and countryside and needs very little encouragement. The current working hypothesis is that we don’t often do car trips with all four of us together and when we do, they are generally very long and involve packets of Opal Fruits and Extra Strong Mints. Clearly we had deviated from the script.
Anyhow, the walk was great and we were all mesmerised by the paragliders whirling over our heads as we climbed the hill (which was very steep)