Taking a little break

I'm closing down for a few weeks while I recover from my RSI - brought on by.... knitting. How embarrassing.

Bright Eyes is doing well. His latest love is playing marble blast on the computer! He's also enjoying dressing up in his spiderman outfit.

And tonight, hooray hooray, he sat down at the table with us all to do 'journal time'. He glued in a photo of himself getting his face painted and even picked up a pen and fiddled with it on the page. Yay!

nice things

How cute today to see Bright Eyes holding his little brother's hand as we walked to school to pick up his sister.

How funny to hear him chastise his dad at the dinner table for burping. "Dad, that's disgusting!" He's normally the one letting out gas!

How great to see him cope really well in lab time with me bugging the heck out of him as we played a 'monster' game. We're practising building resilience and flexible thinking so that he can cope with things that aren't perfect. So far so good!

Thank you

I would like to publicly and thankfully acknowledge the generosity of so many people in Bright Eyes' life.

There are many who give their love, acceptance and friendship to him, and to us with him.

There are many others who show their concern and commitment in praying regularly for him - and for us.

Then there are three particular lots of people who give generous amounts of their money to help us pay for the RDI therapy that is making such a difference in his life. Thank you to my parents, my grandfather, and now our next door neighbours!

You all help so much. We couldn't do it without you. Praise God for you!

You've got to get worse before you get better

If you'd asked me two days ago how Bright Eyes was going, I would have been despondent and depressed. He was yelling, angry and scripting madly.

The past 48 hours, however, have been a very different story. Today I had a much brighter eyed (literally) little boy, who was enjoying interacting with me and communicating much more dynamically than before. His understanding has gone up a notch as well.

We had this lovely conversation this morning:

Him: "Can animals go in the bus?"
Me: "Well, I don't think a giraffe could go in a bus. It's too big! It wouldn't fit."
Him: (thinking) "A baby giraffe fits."
Me: "Yep. A baby giraffe is much smaller. It could go in the bus."
Him: "And a dog. And a cat. They fits."
Me: "What about a bear? Do you think that would fit?"
Him: "No!!! A baby bear can go in."

That, my friends, is a great example of dynamic communication! Yay yay yay!

So what's changed? I'm not very sure, but I think it's down to a few things:
- prayer support
- wearing off the effects of Easter chocolate
- new homeopathic dose taking effect
- getting rid of clocks and Thomas

One of these? Or a combination? Who knows!!!

Poor me

Yesterday Bright Eyes had a great morning, and a rotten afternoon. Something triggered off his anger - maybe he was tired*? - but he just spent the afternoon yelling at everything and everyone.

One of the things I find most difficult about him is the lack of 'prosody' in his voice. He is not able to fine tune his tone, pitch, expressions or volume. It's either on or off. And when it's on, it's loud and really really annoying.

I feel guilty about not liking his voice, and yesterday I lost it with him several times. Of course, this does absolutely nothing to help anybody. It makes him louder and angrier and gives me a sore throat and more work to do to calm everything down.

I was feeling very sorry for myself and rang my mum, whose first words were, "Oh, darling, you poor thing. I feel so sorry for you." Aaaah. With that, I could breathe again, and felt ever so much better. Thanks Mum!

*I think he probably was tired. He's been getting to sleep about 10.30pm and sleeping in until 9 for the last two months or so. But last night I couldn't believe that he was conked out at 8.30!!!