FIRST DAY OF SPRING!

Hello all

Happy Ostara to you all. It's the first day of Spring today and it's been a beautiful day. The sun has been shining and Callum awoke in a very good mood.

He came down and decided to make a cup of tea for me and for him and sort himself out some cereal. He then sat down on the sofa with his breakfast AND his maths! He whizzed through his questions, pointing out that he wasn't up to date on some of the sheets, so he was going to do extra to get them all on the 50 mark. He'd finished both breakfast and maths by 9am!

As I was totally unprepared for this rush of inspiration, I decided I needed another cuppa to get my head around it. So Callum played on Wii Sports until I'd done what was necessary.

He then spent another hour on the computer researching pictures and some pictorial information about two of our projects that we need to sort out. Doing title pages for both and cut and pasting relevant pictures he'd found. One was for Waves, which we are doing at the local Home Education Science Fair in May and the other was for Transport which we are hoping to cover in a couple of months. He still has Titanic (we are going to the exhibition at the O2 next month) and Space, which we have been covering off and on since Christmas, to do, but he'd had enough and, to be honest, he'd done quite a bit.

After lunch, and still happy, we went off to trampolining. He was fine on the way there, fine when we got there, fine going in and then suddenly he was playing up. Wouldn't listen to James and started mucking about and being very half hearted about the whole thing. We let him have a play bounce to see if that worked, but it didn't. 20mins in he still wasn't himself and I stopped the lesson and asked, seriously, what was wrong. "I don't want to do it, it's boring!" was the reply. Well, I know for a fact that he doesn't think that, so I asked if anything was bothering him. He replied "no". I told him that he was wasting James' time and his if he was going to muck about and asked him if he wanted to continue or get off. He said he'd get off and then promptly burst into tears! This is when Asperger Syndrome can be it's most challenging. I know Callum's triggers and I hadn't seen any. I rechecked in my memory and still couldn't see any. James had a think and he couldn't come up with anything either. I know that there doesn't always have to be a trigger, sometimes it just is, but it's a lot easier to deal with when you know what's going on.

Luckily James didn't need to rush off so we gave Callum plenty of time to relax and 'come round' before we had to leave. When asked if he wanted to do a lesson next week to make up for it, he replied that he would. See, I knew it wasn't because it was boring. At least at the end, we ended on a good note.

Afterwards we went up to the Medway Park sports complex to ask about swimming lessons and we had a nice look round and a cuppa in the cafe. By the time we left Callum was much happier and we had a nice laugh and joke whilst doing a bit of shopping.


On our return we got out the Arts and Crafts drawer and started making flowers, buds and butterflies to go on our Season Tree (a bunch of twigs tied together which we decorate in accordance to seasons and festivals). So we now have a nice Spring themed 'tree' with chicks around the bottom. And mini chocolate eggs in a basket to nibble on as we walk past the table.

So in conclusion; we started the first day of Spring on a good note, it spiralled a little downwards in the middle, but it's ended back on a high again.

Cya

PS: We've just had a bit of a crisis. Some chick shaped candles just burst into flames!!!! Callum was a little freaked, but didn't panic. One wet T-towel later and doors open to stop the fire alarm, all is well with the world again. Plus a nice little lesson on fire safety! ;-)