Believing in better for all families
With just a few days until the Easter holidays are upon us, my mind has turned to my favourite pastime – how can I occupy my child for the most amount of time but for the least amount of money.
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I cannot work out whether as I get older I am turning into my mother, Hyacinth Bucket or Victor Meldrew. I suspect I am channelling all of them and quite frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.
One of the things that brings out these pedants in me is semantics, defined as the meaning of a word, phrase or text.
In the world of our children and their challenges, there are a myriad words and phrases so loaded that the actual meaning of the words is lost beneath a mountain of inference and vernacular – and if I sound like I have swallowed the Oxford English Dictionary then good – think of this as your claim to intellectual reading for the week!
Ok, so what am I actually getting at? Well I have 5 words or phrases that really get on my t##s (normal service resumed). They irritate me much more than they should and cause Hyacinth and Victor to surface dramatically.
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Last May I gave up my job of 18 years. I had totally fallen out of love with teaching – not with the actual act of teaching, that is, but with the increasing nonsense and narrow curriculum that went with it. As I have mentioned several times before, I felt I had no choice but to home educate my son, so there was a swift exit, don’t look back!
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Hurrah for half term in Pash Towers!
Last week was a ‘catching up with reality’ week, and it got us thinking about the little strategies we have developed that make a big difference.
Some are attachment related, some sensory and some adoption – so hopefully there might be either something you can use or something you can add. We don’t know about you, but if you can make a difference with the little things, life can run just that tiny bit more smoothly. And if life is running more smoothly, we can save our time and energy for the really important stuff.
So here are some of our top tips and strategies for dealing with some of the everyday sensory triggers our children face, plus a couple of extras on managing tricky adoption related stressors!
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We went to London as a family at the weekend. Ted loves all things London. He has a full wall Underground map in his bedroom. Big Ben bedlinen. A bowler hat light shade.
We’ve been to London before but they were much younger then. We had a great time apart from Ted braining himself on a railing whilst boarding a river cruise.
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The conversation in the car went something like this…
Bob: We are made of water you know.
Miss Minx: We are made of DNA.
B: What’s that?
MM: Erm bones and things and stuff inside!
B: Oh!
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I didn’t watch the ‘Dispatches’ programme on Channel 4 this week. Its focus was on children who are not in school.
The programme blurb said:
Continue reading‘As the number of children leaving school in favour of home education doubles, Dispatches asks why, and if parents’ rights to remove a child are coming before the education, or safety, of children.’
Today I was gifted a snow day by the wonderful English weather- huzzah and hoorah!!
Small child’s school was open so I waved him off and treated myself to some lovely self care involving hot chocolate, trash tv and snoozing. As I lay supine on the couch with the dogs and cats I got to thinking (thanks to the snowy headspace) about how much has changed in the last 18 months…
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“Lots of people go mad in January. ” ― Karen Joy Fowler, Sarah Canary
Ain’t that the truth! I laughed out loud at that quote. Especially after the last couple of weeks here at PASH towers. And a lot of the madness in our part of the world is courtesy of a certain 11 year old girl.
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