Hello, I hope the sun is shining on you all today. It's absolutely glorious here, which makes a lovely change, although it's still very chilly. Hopefully it will start to warm up soon so that we can get out and about a bit more. Having said that, J and I have been out and about to a few cool things recently. In half term we went to see a show at the Southbank Centre in London called Dinosaur Petting Zoo, which was fabulous! At the start of the show, the presenter asked if anyone knew any dinosaur jokes, and J's hand shot up so he was called down to the stage. My heart was in my mouth as I didn't know how he would react (especially when she got his name wrong!) but he got up there and told his joke into the microphone and took a bow - brilliant!
We then saw various different dinosaur "puppets" - which were so lifelike! After the show, they had brought one of the "baby" dinosaurs out into the foyer so that everyone could have a chance to pet it, but J had a bit of a meltdown as there were so many kids crowding around it, he just couldn't get close and couldn't cope with trying to squeeze his way in. Luckily, I managed to grab the guy just as he was going back into the theatre and, when I explained about J, he let us go back into the auditorium with him so that J could have a "private" viewing, which made his day!
Last week we had our first session at "forest school", which was at the local land-based college again. Although it was very, very cold, I think J enjoyed his time out in the woods, it was a nice small group of kids (from our ASD home-ed group) which worked really well.
Our hedgehog house!
In a couple of weeks J will have been out of school for a whole year! It's gone so quickly, I can hardly believe it. I must confess, although it has been a really positive experience, I'm having a bit of a "wobble" at the moment. I'm still really happy with home-ed, and have no plans for J to go back to school, but I think because this milestone is approaching, I'm over-analysing things a bit and worrying about our lack of "formal work". I know we've covered loads of stuff and he's learnt lots, but the two things that I was most concerned about - writing and maths - well, I'm not sure that he's made any progress at all. Even after a year, it's still hard to get out of that mindset that progress must be made! And we're still struggling with getting up in the mornings - the reward system seems to have lost all interest to him at the moment! *Sigh* Still, we shall keep on going and I'm sure that some new inspiration will come soon.
R x
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