Hello all

This past couple of weeks has been a bit odd on the home education front! It's been opposite ends of the spectrum if I'm honest!! Callum was keen last week for a start, haha! Which was a complete turn around from the week before which is where I suppose I should begin.

Weather was pretty good that week if I remember correctly and Callum (admittedly I was pretty much the same) just wasn't interested in doing anything remotely workbooky (I know that isn't a word, but it fits). With all this in mind we decided to say "let's have a social week instead" and he agreed! Now a lot of you may think that any kid would prefer a social week to a work week and I'm sure any school kid would love a week at home seeing his mates instead of being stuck in a classroom, but Callum, as we have ascertained on many occasions, is a bit different! Socialising to him can often be as stressful and as awful predicament than sitting in front of a workbook or, heaven forbid, sitting an exam! He doesn't 'enjoy' socialising unless it's on his terms and certainly not more than about once or twice a week, so the fact that he saw his best mate since nursery 3 times and had some children back after trampolining AND went to Gore Farm on the Sunday with my friend's (and his) girls was a bit of a shock!! 5 days out of 7 is a big thing!!! And he coped well and he enjoyed it and he wanted to do it, so all was good!!

I felt a bit guilty not getting anything remotely curriculumy (again I know that isn't a word) done all week, but learning to interact with others is just as important for kids such as Callum. In fact it is the only question/concern that his paediatrician has ever had about him being home educated; it was also the first question the LEA guy asked and that's before he knew about Callum's Asperger Syndrome. This leads me to wonder why all the concern with exams, SATS, school league tables, etc! If, once out of school, their only concern is social interaction, does this means that all those 'wonderful and interesting' opportunities that they get to learn in the said curriculum are a complete waste of time? I often think that they are! I sit there sometimes looking at the books and thinking 'I remember doing this, but I've never used it'! Yes, the ability to read is always useful. Of course it is! We wouldn't be able to read road signs, tell the difference between a can of beans and a can of peaches or understand the 1001 forms that we seem to have to fill in over the course of adulthood (actually I can read well and some of them still stump me). We do not have to have a love of reading to need the ability to read. The same is for writing! We need a certain standard, not so we can write the next bestseller, but so we can fill in those 1001 forms I've already mentioned. The same goes for maths, but honestly it's the ability to add up and take away that's of importance. Even multiplication and division could be argued as just a quicker way of doing the adding and subtracting. When was the last time you used a Cosine for example? Yes, if you want to make a shed, you need dimensions; if you have the desire to buy a new sofa, you need to be able to work out if it'll fit in through your front door (and we have made that mistake in the past believe me), but you don't need a degree in physics to do either, you need to be able to add up and take away! And when on earth have you ever been asked when Henry VIII ruled over England - only in an exam about history!!! My point being is that although I felt totally and utterly guilty about not doing 'schoolwork' I shouldn't have. My adult life has been spent having to interact with lots of different people from different walks of life, different ages, viewpoints, abilities, etc! So the fact that I spent a whole week getting him to interact was probably much much much more important! In fact, I should feel more guilty about this last week as we did 'schoolwork' and had an 'incident'!

Now the reason we did 'schoolwork' was because Callum wanted to, in fact he was very keen to do it! So keen in fact that one day he was filling in a worksheet at 8am by himself without my help!! He didn't do fantastically well at it, but he did it off his own back without prompting which is fantastic (it was a literacy one, hence the not being fantastic bit - literacy being his worst subject)! We don't follow a timetable as such, but we have a little list of things we'd like to achieve each day and last week we achieved and did more! Education City was a godsend and printing off the worksheets to do the following day and looking for similar pages in our various workbook collection helped to make sense of it all. We also baked cakes as I had an old friend come to visit and we rediscovered art!! He did see his best mate on Wednesday, but (as I felt really crap on Thursday) we didn't go trampolining and so he didn't see his usual crowd. But it didn't bother him! So looking back over the past couple of weeks from the sofa of ill on the Thursday afternoon I was feeling pretty smug! We'd socialised when it had suited him and it'd had been successful; we'd done schoolwork when he'd wanted to and that too had been successful. I thought 'I've cracked this Aspi thing'! However, Friday brought me straight back down to earth with a bang!

We were attending a workshop about castles at the Guildhall Museum, Rochester on Friday afternoon. I'd 'checked out' who was going to be there and there wasn't anyone who he didn't like; he'd been before, so no new situation; and most of the people going he knew/liked a lot. Plus the guy who runs the workshops is really good with our kids, so I thought we were safe and all bases had been covered! But no!!!!! Well, I say no; all bases were covered except I'd forgotten that Callum can be a bit of a git at times!! Now I don't mean that in a nasty way, I really really don't! But once Callum has 'one on him', it is incredible difficult to get him out of it! And to be honest he needs to learn how to get out of it himself! Callum had been fine about going for weeks, in fact he'd been quite keen until the day that is! Friday morning he spiralled into a mood of doom and gloom. By Friday afternoon he was the child from hell. I know I should have just not gone, but we all have to face situations sometimes that we don't want to (see previous blog) and I knew that it would be interesting and fun! Had it been London or had I known that there were people there he didn't like I wouldn't have pushed it, but I knew that that wasn't the case, so I did!!

We arrived early and met up with a couple of other families for lunch which he was fine with, then we got to the museum and again he was fine! But as soon as we went into the room he started! He refused, at first, to go in! I explained calmly that he didn't have to sit on the floor with the other children, he could sit with me, but that was good enough! I eventually ordered him in and he sat down with me, his back to the 'tutor' and proceeded to kick the leg of my chair and pinch my hand and arm! I tried to ignore it as I knew he was just after attention, but after 15mins of this I lost it - sorry, but I did!! You see I knew that there was nothing there that should have caused an 'Aspi moment'! I've been his mum for nearly 11years and home educated him for 3 of those! I know his triggers, I know what is going to set him off and I know damn well that there was absolutely nothing there. I avoid those kind of situations like the plague as it'll be me that suffers in the long term (who wouldn't avoid them?)! Sometimes Asperger/Autistic kids are just being pedantic just like neuro typical kids! They are just being naughty! And, I'm sorry, but to continue to kick my chair and pinch me for 15mins was being naughty! The workshop was interesting, it was hands-on and it was fun! If he could have come down off his high horse he would have enjoyed it! I know this because during an experiment which he refused to join in with, we went around the museum and he was fine! After the workshop, we went over to the castle and he was again fine! He was just being a kid who had worked himself into a frenzy of 'I'm not going to enjoy this and I'm going to prove I'm not by being disruptive'! If he truly had been having an Aspi moment he would not have calmed down at all, no matter where we were and what we were doing, I would have had to take him home, but that wasn't the case!

The outcome of me losing it was that I said something I never say "you are going back to school mate"! He looked at me completely aghast, stopped pinching me and turned around! It didn't mean that he joined in, but he stopped hurting me! That night I sat down and explained that I don't do this for fun, I do it because I care about him; because I never ever want to see him in a situation where he can't cope; I don't put him into those situations because I know how much they can confuse and frighten him; but I am not going to be his punchbag everytime he has a sulk! And if he can't respect me as much as I respect him then this will never work! He apologised and I think he understood and, of course, I would never really send him back to school. However, after having such a brilliant two weeks, we have ended on a bit of a sour note. I'm hoping that next week will be better and I'm sure it will be. It also just goes to show that, home educating or not, children will always be children.

xx