Hi all,

Been a couple of weeks now, so I hope you have all settled back in to the termtime thing, whether that is at school or otherwise!

We've been busy, then lethargic, then busy, then poorly and hopefully busy again next week!

We never made it to private trampolining. Callum just wasn't feeling up to it and, to be honest, neither was I. I think that was the start of the Autumn hibernation time and possible bugs.

We did go to the Natural History Museum though for The Deep! Had a great day and his friend Callum D enjoyed it too! I started the day feeling rather smug but was promptly brought back down to earth again! I thought I'd covered all of Callum's issues, but you can pretty much guarentee that there will always be something I've missed! There were no escalators involved in either of the tube stations - check! I'd got tickets in advance, so no queuing - check! As it was first week back at school, there were no school groups - check (Callum still freaks out if he sees a school uniform!). I'd got a packed lunch I'd knew he'd eat, so no having to make decisions re food - check! However, numpty here forgot about the main hall!! No, it wasn't the large dinosaur bones he was freaked by! It's the fact that it covers the whole building from floor to ceiling and is therefore really really high!! He can't stand high ceilings, it's like vertigo in reverse! So what did we do? Well, everytime we had to cross the main hall, he'd get to the edge, I'd point out an opposite alcove and he'd leg it as fast as he could to the appointed target while myself and the other Callum took a slower pace and caught him up! There's always something, but we normally find a solution! The joys of Asperger's!

Talking of Asperger's, another little quirk is the 'I'm a smartarse' syndrome. Take this for example; I told both of them (both have a diagnosis of Aspi, so it was double whammy day) that they could go on ahead, but not too far and not to leave the exhibition and to make sure that if they did go ahead because something had caught their eye, they were to tell me first! Fine, all was well and they did exactly as asked. However, half way round they were getting a little restless and wanted to go ahead a bit (we'd reached a bit of a bottleneck, so they needed some space). Off we went, but something caught MY eye and I stopped to take a photo! Next thing, no Callums! Eeek! Bad enough losing your own kid, but when you have someone else's too, it's a bit more eeek!! Anyway, off I go in the general direction we were heading and found them round the corner, quite happily waiting for me and using the computers to send images to their emails at home.

"Why didn't you stop and wait for me?" I ask.

"We didn't know you'd stopped!" My Callum replies

"I thought I'd lost you!" I start to say, but I get interupted by my Callum going

"You told us to tell you if we were stopping or going ahead! But you just stopped and didn't say anything, so it wasn't us that got lost, it was you!"

Hey ho! That was me told then!! And to be honest I couldn't really argue as he was right - smartarse!! And, at least they didn't go too far, although if the computers hadn't grabbed their attention, I'm not sure what would have happened.

Anyway exhibition wasn't bad, although Callum did point out that it was pretty stupid to give the kids an activity sheet when it was so dark that you couldn't read it - smartarse again! But, in his defense, perfectly true!!

Decided to get them both a sticker book from the gift shop and Callum D had some money of his own to spend. My Callum wouldn't buy anything as it was "too expensive" (said rather loudly while I looked for a hole to jump in) and then proceeded to reorganise all the rubber fish so that they all faced the same way (3 trays worth I'd like to mention!). So impressed was the shop assistant that he said it was a shame he wasn't older as he would have shown him to his supervisor and given him a job! £6.50 an hour if you're interested!

They then decided to go round the rest of the museum and were especially taken by the dinosaur section and, in particular, the robotic velociraptors and the TRex! So much so that my C wants to do a project on them. Most boys love dinosaurs from a very young age, but he's never been interested until now! I can feel a Jurassic Park film session coming on and a good old ferret around for some books + we have Dino-opoly (Monopoly with dinosaurs), so we might actually get to play it after owning it for 2yrs!!!

The rest of the time up to now has been the usual round of trampoling, seeing friends, working on workbooks and doing science experiments. One of which was a rather cool one involving hot and cold water. The cold water is heavier than the hot water, so it stays at the bottom, while the hot water 'floats' on the top! There is no paper between the jars and it is the water that is coloured, not the jars themselves. It was rather brilliant! We are currently immersing an egg in vinegar for a week to make a bouncy egg - it already feels really disgusting and we experimented with weight and found that 4 raw eggs will withstand nearly 11kg of weight before 3 of them broke. The books were so heavy that even we had trouble lifting them!

Other news is that Callum has decided to read! By himself! No pushing from me. He's reading every night before he goes to bed and yesterday I caught him reading the local free paper and moaning like an old man that of all the events that had happened locally this past weekend they had only covered one of them!!! Perhaps he'll be a journalist - haha!

Well, that's about it for now, cya!