Month: June 2012

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#blogjune

Sunshine and toys

It’s Wednesday morning; ECDP and Speech Therapy morning. Work happened earlier, I think my clients are getting used to emails dated pre -6am!
Hubby and I were talking about my ‘return to work’ (ha!)
yesterday. The original plan was that I stay home with the kids, and Miss 4 would start Prep next year (2013) and Mr 3 the following year. Then St Paul’s offered a Pre-Prep class for next year; and so then Hubby’s plan became ‘all three kids at school next year / Ceridwyn returns to full-time teaching’.
Trouble is, Mr 3 won’t cope with Pre-Prep in six short months time. And I certainly can’t see him coping with Prep just 12 months later!
I was thinking about this earlier in the day… how his progress in the last couple of months has been amazing… but he is still SOOOOOOOO far ‘behind’ his peers. He has maybe a dozen spoken words (intelligible by others, not just me, and only when in context); he has zero interest in toilet training, he spits out his food as often as eat it, he tantrums when he doesn’t get his own way, and so on and so on and so on. We were looking at a book this morning, and the thought crossed my mind that ‘I hope he reads, one day’. Then I realised what I was thinking and I teared up. The thought that my boy might not read…!??! I never would have expected that one day I would ever have questioned the possibility!
Very sad. And the next thought, possibly sadder still. That he wouldn’t even know what he was missing.
Still, as I sit here in the sunshine, watching Mr 3 play with toys at the ECDP, talking with a parent of a Downs Syndrome child, and looking around to see other children with other various special needs, I think that ‘parenting is parenting’. You just do your best, hey.

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#blogjune

The smaller, the cuter, right?

I blogged last week about Mr 3’s love of small spaces.
Well, he’s now taken this to the next level… it took BOTH me and Miss 7 to extract him from this one. Not once, but twice!

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#blogjune More about me

cruisy…

So for my day 17 #blogjune last night, I posted a question. Thanks for the responses! Yes, it was tricky without context – I had deliberately given none, so as to not bias your answers. But here ’tis…

A couple of nights ago, Hubby and I were talking about our children, and their emerging personalities. I mentioned that Miss 4 was cruisy (in comparison to Miss 7 and Mr 3) and that she took after him. I think he got a little offended at my summation of his character, as he immediately retorted, “Cruisy?!! I’m not cruisy!!!”

I explained further. “In comparison to me, I mean. Compared to me, you’re cruisy.”

“Compared to you, Ceridwyn, Road Runner is cruisy!” was his immediate reply. At which I laughed uncontrollably, because although I knew that I was a pretty intense person when it came to doing stuff – a lot of stuff – in a short amount of time (hey – I’ve only got one life; I want to cram in as much as possible and live it to its fullest!) I didn’t think that I was so full-on that I made Road Runner look crusiy!

So, yes, my immediate thought was ‘hey – that’s cool! Yeh, I like that; that’s a pretty apt description of me!”

However… I’ve since related the story to some IRL friends. And they agreed with him; but unlike me, they weren’t laughing uncontrollably when they heard it. And that made me realise that Hubby hadn’t either. And that made me ask him, “Did you mean that as a compliment? Or was it actually an insult? Or an indictment on me?” His answer, “Ceridwyn, you over-think things!” wasn’t entirely satisfactory, and what was worse was knowing that it’d probably be the last answer I’d get from him on the topic. Hence my question to you all yesterday.

My IRL friends, although agreeing with Hubby, had not necessarily thought of it as a compliment – but rather, took it as a warning that I should probably stop “burning the candle at both ends”. Online responses tended to lean towards the ‘Yep; it’s a compliment”. I think I’d prefer to side with the latter. LOL!

So anyway, that’s my take on it. I’m an intense person who travels through her life at a million miles an hour. And that can be a good thing – but I need to remember than others choose to not do this, and that’s okay. Which is REALLY important to remember when I’m travelling through life with an autistic Mr 3!

CC Image courtesy mark_gilmour at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mark_gilmour/5473967864/

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A Question

If you were told, ‘Compared to you, roadrunner would be cruisy!’ how would you take it? Would you see it as a compliment? An insult?

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top 100 books…

I was thinking of copying @flexnib’s idea when I read her post, counting how many she’d read… and since reading @jobeaz’s post, I’m now even more interested to see how many I’ve read. So here goes… (and keeping with ‘tradition’, I’ve bolded the ones I’ve read…)

1984 by George Orwell, England, (1903-1950)
A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, Norway (1828-1906)
A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert, France, (1821-1880)
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner, United States, (1897-1962)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, United States, (1835-1910)
The Aeneid by Virgil, Italy, (70-19 BC)
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910)
Beloved by Toni Morrison, United States, (b. 1931)
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin, Germany, (1878-1957)
Blindness by Jose Saramago, Portugal, (1922-2010)
The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, Portugal, (1888-1935)
The Book of Job, Israel. (600-400 BC)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881)
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, Germany, (1875-1955)
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, England, (1340-1400)
The Castle by Franz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924)
Children of Gebelawi by Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt, (b. 1911)
Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina, (1899-1986)
Complete Poems by Giacomo Leopardi, Italy, (1798-1837)
The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924)
The Complete Tales by Edgar Allan Poe, United States, (1809-1849)
Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo, Italy, (1861-1928)
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881)
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, Russia, (1809-1852)
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910)
Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, Italy, (1313-1375)
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Brazil, (1880-1967)
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Lu Xun, China, (1881-1936)
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, Italy, (1265-1321)

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain, (1547-1616)

Essays by Michel de Montaigne, France, (1533-1592)

Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark, (1805-1875)
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany, (1749-1832)
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais, France, (1495-1553)
Gilgamesh Mesopotamia, (c 1800 BC)
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, England, (b.1919)
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, England, (1812-1870)
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, Ireland, (1667-1745)
Gypsy Ballads by Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain, (1898-1936)
Hamlet by William Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616)
History by Elsa Morante, Italy, (1918-1985)
Hunger by Knut Hamsun, Norway, (1859-1952) (I have read Hunger Games, does that count?)
The Idiot by Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881)
The Iliad by Homer, Greece, (c 700 BC)
Independent People by Halldor K Laxness, Iceland, (1902-1998)
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, United States, (1914-1994)
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master by Denis Diderot, France, (1713-1784)
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, France, (1894-1961)
King Lear by William Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616)
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, United States, (1819-1892)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, Ireland, (1713-1768)
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Russia/United States, (1899-1977)
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia, (b. 1928)
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, France, (1821-1880)
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Germany, (1875-1955)
Mahabharata, India, (c 500 BC)
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Austria, (1880-1942)
The Mathnawi by Jalal ad-din Rumi, Afghanistan, (1207-1273)
Medea by Euripides, Greece, (c 480-406 BC)
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, France, (1903-1987)
Metamorphoses by Ovid, Italy, (c 43 BC)
Middlemarch by George Eliot, England, (1819-1880)
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, India/Britain, (b. 1947)
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, United States, (1819-1891)
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, England, (1882-1941)
Njaals Saga, Iceland, (c 1300)
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad, England,(1857-1924)
The Odyssey by Homer, Greece, (c 700 BC)
Oedipus the King Sophocles, Greece, (496-406 BC)
Old Goriot by Honore de Balzac, France, (1799-1850)
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, United States, (1899-1961)
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia, (b. 1928)
The Orchard by Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, Iran, (c 1200-1292)
Othello by William Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616)
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo Juan Rulfo, Mexico, (1918-1986)
Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren, Sweden, (1907-2002)
Poems by Paul Celan, Romania/France, (1920-1970)
The Possessed by Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, England, (1775-1817)
The Ramayana by Valmiki, India, (c 300 BC)
The Recognition of Sakuntala by Kalidasa, India, (c. 400)
The Red and the Black by Stendhal, France, (1783-1842)
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, France, (1871-1922)
Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, Sudan, (b. 1929)
Selected Stories by Anton P Chekhov, Russia, (1860-1904)
Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence, England, (1885-1930)
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, United States, (1897-1962)
The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata, Japan, (1899-1972)
The Stranger by Albert Camus, France, (1913-1960)
The Tale of Genji by Shikibu Murasaki, Japan, (c 1000)
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Nigeria, (b. 1930)
Thousand and One Nights, India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt, (700-1500)
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass, Germany, (b.1927)
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, England, (1882-1941)
The Trial by Franz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924)
Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett, Ireland, (1906-1989)
Ulysses by James Joyce, Ireland, (1882-1941)
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910)
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, England, (1818-1848)
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis, Greece, (1883-1957)

11 out of 100. But to confess further, I’ve also italicised the ones that I attempted – some, better than others. There were 5 of those. ‘Don Quixote’ I only really glanced at, and decided that I didn’t have the time… but War and Peace I started twice, giving up at around the same place both times, and the same with ‘Crime and Punishment’. I persevered very hard with both Chaucer and Dante, but eventually decided that they were just ‘too hard going’. And I almost finished Chaucer, too! But got busy towards the end of it.

I’m a little surprised though. I would have thought that Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas would have made the list, or even Oscar Wilde or H.G. Wells?

So anyway, that’s *my* take. How about you?

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Uncategorized

The top 100 books of all time

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#blogjune

Lazy Saturday

It was a rough night last night. Mr 3 decided to enjoy screaming, lots of times, very loudly, and for really no apparent reason. We woke this morning to discover that our bread was too old to be edible; difficult when all three of your cherubs like toast for breakfast.
So Hubby elected to stay home and fix the fence, to try and keep our dogs from escaping, and I took our three to Currimundi McDonalds for HotCakes and strawberry thick shakes. And I managed to catch up on yesterday’s #blogjune entry while they explored the playground. Then it was time for a quick shop before Mr 3’s appointment at Deanie’s Kids Cuts.

They have a great place there – designed specifically to keep kids entertained while their hair gets cut. Essential when the child getting his hair cut is my Mr 3. He’s getting better, I must admit. And let’s face it – for any little kid, a stranger approaching their head with scissors, is probably a little on the nightmare-inducing side of things! Anyway, hair cut over, we came home. It was a beautiful day, with very little wind, so the kids and I spent time outside. Miss 7 built a sandpit tunnel for the very first time (quite an accomplishment when your younger brother likes filling in holes in the sandpit!) and Miss 4 did *not* fall off the trampoline, and Mr 3 – of course – terrorised the fish in our fish pond.

Back inside when the wind picked up, I was soundly thrashed by Miss 4 at Uno (she’s actually getting very good at it!) and so the afternoon progressed.

I don’t know about you, but I love ‘lazy’ Saturdays! Days when I don’t turn on the computer until after the kids are in bed – just so darn precious!

And now, having caught up on my #blogjune entries, its back into it. Work beckons. See you tomorrow, dear readers!

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#blogjune

Fishing in a pool

My husband is an excellent fisherman. He’s been fishing since he was knee- high to a grasshopper, and he’s very very good at it. Spending the majority of his teenage years as a local on North Stradbroke Island didn’t hurt either; there’s not much else to do over there than surf and fish. So, that being said, he is an excellent fisherman.
Enter Miss 7 into the story. She got her first fishing rod for Christmas when she was 2. Yes, 2. Years old. Okay… Six months later, she had caught her first fish. She also caught the ‘fishing bug’. She will, also, be an excellent fisher woman, I think.
Enter Miss 4. Yes, you probably guessed it; she also received a fishing rod for Christmas when she was 2. And again, had caught her first fish by 2 and a half. So the tradition was set.
Then Mr 3 was born, and Hubby got a new job. One that left me, virtually, a single mum. That was how little we saw him. Which was sad. And so Mr 3 got his fishing rod only a few months ago, for his third birthday. He’s been out with Hubby once, and he screamed so much when the boat was moving that he apparently put himself to sleep. Coping mechanism, apparently. I was horrified when I heard what had happened on their return. To think that he was *that* distressed, that to cope he had to put himself to sleep?!! Crazy! Insane!
Needless to say, they haven’t been out together again since. Sad, really. So Mr 3 is yet to catch his first fish. 🙁
On the upside though, he loves the idea of fishing, so he’ll probably get there eventually. He loves watching the fish swimming around in mine and Miss 7’s fish tanks, catching computer fish on the PS2, and if allowed to, will spend hours and hours playing with the water, the rocks, and the poor terrorized fish in the fishpond out the front of our main bedroom.
So yesterday, when I took an hour or so out of ‘work’ and visited my next-door neighbour, we sat and chatted while Miss 4 and Mr 3 played near her pool. Mr 3, with fishing rod in hand.
Very cute, in my opinion!

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#blogjune Bloxham Marketing Life Random thoughts Work

Parenting

Do all parents second-guess themselves? Or is it just me?

I started this #blogjune challenge intending to explore the journey I’m on as a mum of a newly diagnosed autistic son. But today, I spent close to an hour in the emergency waiting room of Caboolture Hospital with Miss 4. She’d been at family day care with Mr 3, playing on one of their scooters, had fallen off and sliced open a deep gash just below her mouth. So she and I spent time at the hospital, while Mr 3 played back at Day Care, and my work continued to pile up back at St Paul’s, where I had decided to have a rare, kid-free day, to catch up on the mountain of work not yet completed.
And that’s when I started thinking about the whole ‘mother guilt’ thing again.

Miss 4 is with me 7 days a week, with the exception of ‘grandma playgroup’ when she’s not allowed to come to Mr 3’s ECDP. It’s very very very rare for me to organize a day of childcare for her (and Mr 3) because not only is it rather expensive, but also because Mr 3, being autistic, doesn’t like changes to his routine.
So when I do, and she gets hurt, I wonder ‘would that have happened if she had been with me?’ (No, because I don’t like scooters because they’re dangerous, so we don’t have any here at home… but that’s not to say that she could have hurt herself some other way…) I wonder ‘should I have put her in care today, or just kept her with me… seeing as I didn’t get the work done that I wanted to, anyway’. I wonder ‘what sort of mother puts her child in care when, really, she doesn’t absolutely *have* to?’ I wonder ‘this is the second time in the space of a few months that Miss 4 has ended up in Emergency… is this coincidence, or an indicator of something deeper, that I should be aware of but am not due to my busyness?’ I wonder how I’m going to catch up on the work I’m missing out on doing. I wonder if by some strange turn of events, @fionawb might just so happen to wander down to Emergency, and we might meet IRL. I wonder why the Caboolture Emergency is so drastically different to Nambour Emergency; where we were late last year… or Caloundra Emergency; where I’ve been with Miss 7… and Mr 3. I wonder if other mums visit Emergencies as much as I seem to; or if my kids are just clumsier than average; or if I’m one of those hypochondriac mothers who’s always imagining medical conditions on her kids.
And (as an aside) I wonder where the St Paul’s ad is, that we’ve been paying for for over a year now, that is meant to be playing in the Caboolture Hospital Emergency waiting room…)

Anyway… that was my afternoon. I want to thank my online friends for their messages and tweets wishing Miss 4 well. Your support means so much to me!!! It’s unexpected, and therefore all the more treasured. Thanks for being there for me! You guys rock!!!
So now, it’s late, and my inbox is still beckoning. I love my work… but can see that the day is coming where I’m going to need some staff…

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#blogjune

Red riding hood

I blogged last week about how Mr 3 was more than happy to play two player against himself on the PS2. Today, he took that idea to the next level.
Maybe it was buying ‘Shrek Super Slam’ last week, maybe it was watching ‘Hoodwinked’ as a family on the weekend; I’m not entirely sure. But this morning, while I’m getting us ready for Miss 7’s excursion, Miss 4 to ‘Grandma playgroup’ and Mr 3 to his ECDP and Speech Therapy, he sets up the Playstation, turns on the tv, and plays a 4-player game, by himself, on aforementioned Shrek SuperSlam. So I have visions of ‘The Amazing Race’ (it’s the same music) while I’m hearing “Red riding hood! Versus… Red riding hood! Versus… Red riding hood! Versus… Red riding hood!”
Okay…

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