Category: family anecdotes

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Bloxham Marketing family anecdotes More about me Technology Work

Looking backward, looking forward…

So I mentioned recently that my cousin from England was coming out to Oz, to stay with us for a few days. Well, the few days turned into almost-a-week, which was even better – plus, he left just as my family decided to come down with a vomiting bug, so he and his family left at just the right time, I think!

During his stay, we visited my parents at the retirement village where they live. Here’s my cousin Phil with my dad. A strong family resemblance, wouldn’t you say?

It was lovely to also meet and spend time with his fiancé, Jo, and her daughters, Darcy and Hope. My kids loved them to bits and were quite upset when they left. In fact, Mr 3 unfortunately ‘dropped’ my iPod onto concrete in his distress – chalk up two devices, now, with newly cracked screens. I’m seriously going to have to look into stronger cases for them, I think!

Here Phil and the family are laughing because Mr 3 is ‘copying’ me, taking photos on the iPod while I take them on my iPhone. They thought it was hilarious, that he was pretending to take photos – until I showed them that he actually *was* taking photos! They were amazed that he could navigate to the camera all by himself. I mentioned that he’d being doing taking both photos and videos for about a year now…

So that was last week. And it ended with me being sick all weekend. By Sunday I felt ready to die. I was SOOOOOOO overwhelmingly nauseous that I swiped one of Hubby’s Phenergen tablets – which knocked me out for a good few hours. When I did eventually wake up, it was like trying to move through thick, cloying mud. It was incredible!!! I’d never been like that before – ever! (Well, the mud yes – at Emu Gully some years back now, but that’s another story!) And the nausea was gone, which was great. What was not so great was the realisation that the nausea had been masking three very distinct stabbing pinpoints of pain in my stomach. Which was not so much fun.

But it’s Monday now. Hubby and Miss 7 have just left for school, and I’m heading off soon to meet with a potential client; then later head down to Caboolture for a ‘Round Table Discussion’ of three schools. It should be an enlightening day. Hopefully my still very tender stomach will be able to handle it all…!

Have a great day, dear readers!!!

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family anecdotes More about me Random thoughts

My dogs

When I was growing up, I was a ‘cat’ person. I never really thought about being a ‘dog’ person. To me, they were smelly, loud, rough creatures that I knew of but had little do to with. My family had a cat. We had ducks. We had mice. We had guinea pigs, and fish. But no dogs.
So the first time I bought a puppy, I was 23 years old. Hubby and I had been married for a couple of years, and we owned a gorgeous grey “Ragdoll” cat named Rascal, but we were just browsing in a big pet barn one day (I have no idea why we were there; we just were…) and we both saw him at the same time. And it was love at first sight.
He was a male German Shepherd puppy, 7 weeks old, all floppy ears and huge floppy paws. We named him “Smudge” and he was a great dog. Huge (eventually), dominant, but completely loyal. And he loved us, and he loved chasing Rascal. But mostly he loved Patch, the blue healer we bought about a year later. The two became inseparable, and so it was hard when we had to put Smudge down. But that same afternoon, a very emotional Hubby bought our second Shepherd, Storm. She was from a breeder, and had a ‘glamour’ coat, which is halfway between a long haired and a short haired coat. Again, she was a gorgeous dog. Very sweet nature. She coped tremendously with a grieving Patch, and when he eventually needed to be put down (cancer), was more than happy to accept a black labrador pup, who we named Max.

Just a few years ago, Storm passed on. She’d eaten something she shouldn’t and her death was sudden and very traumatic for Hubby, who had lost his sister just a few months prior. Max soldiered on, half blind, mostly deaf, and partially lame, and bravely dealt with the puppy attacks of Aksel, Hubby’s next German Shepherd pup (short haired, this time). Then late last year, when we knew that Max was getting the worse for wear  – Aksel was just too boisterous for him – we bought Rocky. He was a 7 month old Blue Heeler, whose owner, being physically disabled and about to move into a home, was no longer able to keep him. Aksel and Rocky bonded pretty quickly, and although they both were confused by Max’s passing in early January this year, their close friendship meant that there wasn’t the ‘grieving’ that our other dogs seems to go through.

Phew! That was a longer story than I had expected it would be!

Anyway, I started this entry with cats, so that’s how I’ll finish it. You see, I miss having a cat. But I don’t know how one would fit into our lives right now…

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#blogjune family anecdotes

Boundaries

Mr 3 has always been a climber. And a runner. He just doesn’t recognize boundaries the way that other kids do.
In the past couple of days (of course, only since I’ve been sick and haven’t had the energy to stop him / teach him that it’s wrong / it’s dangerous) he’s taken to pulling all of the clothes out of his wardrobe, then using the shelves to climb up as high as he can before he’s discovered. And the shelves are deep, so he crawls right inside and can’t be seen unless you’re looking. Luckily the evidence, spilled all over the floor, gives it away…

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This is the shelf he climbed to today. It’s easily one and a half meters off the ground.

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Now how am I meant to stop this??! Ideas, anyone?

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#blogjune family anecdotes

ECDP

It’s Wednesday. Which means it’s the day that Mr 3 and I attend his Early Childhood Developmental Program. It’s basically a playgroup run by a teacher trained in Special Needs. There are 6 children in total (all boys – interesting, hey!) aged between 2 1/2 and 3 1/2. After 3 1/2 they then attend the ECDP Kindy program, until they are old enough to go to Prep.

The difficulty with attending the ECDP Playgroup on Wednesdays has been that it is for the diagnosed child and his/ her parent/s ONLY. And with Miss 4 not yet in school, and with child care being just so darn expensive, she stays home with me. (Well ‘staying home’ isn’t entirely true. Both Miss 4 and Mr 3 also come to meetings with me, appointments with printers and advertising people etc etc for Bloxham Marketing!) Organising to go to the ECDP with Mr 3, and only Mr 3, was problematic – until we realised that there was a centre at Talara Primary College, which is around the corner from my Mum’s place. So now, every Wednesday morning, Miss 4 goes to ‘Grandma playgroup’ and Mr 3 and I go to the Talara EDCP, then his Speech Therapy session, where he amazes us with stuff like I wrote about on Monday.

We missed going to the ECDP last week. I was too snowed under with work, and he was coming down with a cold anyway, so we missed a week. As a result, I’m looking forward to today. He enjoys it, and it’s good for him to get some early exposure to ‘classroom routines’ that he’ll come across in a couple of years. And just for your enjoyment, here is a short video of their “outside playtime” the previous week. He, of course, is the one in the green hat. With the red shirt and the long black pants. The cute one. (Not that I’m biased!!!)

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#blogjune family anecdotes

Viewpoints

I blogged yesterday about Mr 3’s ‘different’ viewpoint on life. I used to think that it was due to his gender that his thinking was so different to Miss 7 and Miss 4. But since his autism diagnosis a few months ago, I’ve been questionning whether it really *does* just come back to the fact that Hubby and I are parenting a son for the first time.
So I thought that today I might share some of these differences. Cute examples like when he took two bits of straight Thomas track, and instead of adding them to the track he was making, he joined them together to make a longer piece, put this over the bridge of one of his feet, then sang (his version of) See Saw Margery Dawe while seesawing the train-track back and forth over his foot.
Or a ‘focussed’ example, like I wrote about yesterday. Where he was fixated on being in a two player game on the PlayStation. Usually he plays these with Miss 7, but she was at school. Never mind; he used both controls at the same time.

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Sometimes he’d win against himself…

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… at other times he’d lose.

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It didn’t matter though; he was happy!

And lastly, a quirky one that surprised even me. It was at his first ever Speech Therapy session, and his therapist Maria, was testing his comprehension. She pulled out a number of large square cards, each with a 3 x 3 pattern of squares on them (like in bingo, or in tic-tac-toe) and placed these on the table at which Mr 3 was sitting. One 9square card went directly in front of him; the others went into a small stack to one side. Each of the 9 squares showed a picture of an easily identifiable object – apple, ball, car, etc. My little man was then given a few individual cards, slightly smaller than a single square on the larger card. On each card was a picture, identical to the pictures on the 9square card on the table. The aim of the ‘game’ was to see if, once Maria had said the word, he could match the smaller card in his hand with the correct spot on the 9square card, and place his card on top of the correct picture on the larger card. So she said, “Apple. Can you find the apple? Put your card over the apple picture.” The square with the apple was the bottom centre square, and so we both expected him to put his small ‘apple’ card over the apple picture, centre place in the bottom row.

Mr 3, however, decided to turn his smaller cards over. He noticed that the card with the apple picture on it, had the word ‘apple’ on the underside. He then picked the 9square card up off the table, and noticed that its underside was also split into 9 squares, each containing the word of the picture. In the centre square of the bottom row was the same word, ‘apple’. So Mr 3 placed the 9square card down, word side facing up, and put his smaller ‘apple’ card (word side up) over the word ‘apple’, on the underside of the 9square card. I was gobsmacked. Maria, also, was rather surprised. “Well, I’ve never seen anybody do *that* before!’ she said.

Yep – that’s my boy! Sees the world differently. And that can be a good thing.

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#blogjune family anecdotes

The journey begins…

It’s Friday, June 1. Day 1 of the 2012 #blogjune challenge. And yes, I’m in again. Hopefully this year I’ll be a little more consistent!
I was thinking that I might blog about my journey as a mum of a fairly recently diagnosed autistic child. It’s been a very emotional rollercoaster over the past few months, with some very low lows, some times of infectious amusement, lots of introspection, and even more adjustments to lifestyle changes.
All in all, we’re making progress. Slowly, in all of us, we’re making steps towards this new life being a ‘normal’ one. And I’d like to use this #blogjune challenge as a way of daily recording this progress. I hope you might enjoy the journey too, dear readers!

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family anecdotes Life

Help needed, please…

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I’ve been aware for a while now, the differences between girls and boys. According to Miss 7, girls have eyelashes. And this has been the case for the last few years. In fact, the colouring in she did just last week (pictured) wasn’t a female bird… until she made it one! Isn’t it great, the way kids see things!
But something that Miss 4 said this morning has me stumped. And if anyone has any clue as to it’s interpretation, I’d love some help with it!
“Mummy, some girls can be good girls, and they have lips. Some boys can be good boys, and they have lips. But some boys can be very naughty, and some girls can be very very naughty, and none of them have lips.”
What the?

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Bloxham Marketing family anecdotes Technology

Inspirations

Earlier this year, I waited, impatiently, for a week while Pinterest processed my request to join them. Once accepted, I was an avid user. Several times daily I would hop on and browse. I loved the embedding feature, and used it both here on Hmmm… and on my work blog. But the growing number of tweets regarding Pinterest’s dodgy Terms of Service concerned me, and I finally made the decision to cancel my account after reading this blog post. It was a very sad day.

On the upside though, I was inspired by many images I saw in my time there. One such image inspired me to experiment in the kitchen. My kids were delighted with their dessert the other night, as it ‘drove’ out of the fridge and ‘parked’ next to their plates! Here was my first attempt…

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… and, in case you’re interested, they’re not that difficult to make – even for #notagoodcook like me!

Have a great day, dear readers!

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family anecdotes Life Random thoughts Uncategorized

Wise furniture choices

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It’s now coming up five years since we moved from Landsborough. We had built a four bed 2 bath brick and tile home there, back in the year 2000. After a couple of years, we extended it and enclosed a large patio, creating an entertainment room. We furnished this room with a lovely 6 piece outdoor setting – wicker-look chairs and tempered glass table.
Fast forward seven years and you see us moving house. To a cute (read tiny) place that definitely would not fit all of our furniture… well, not if we wanted to fit in there too. So we halved our furniture, keeping the outside setting and giving the dining table and chairs to Neighbours Aid Community Stores. Reason being, even though it was larger, the glass tabletop helped to not make our new dining / lounge area too crammed – and the wicker look fitted in with the holiday feel of our new place.
Fast forward again, to April 2012. Mr 3 has decided to develop the habit of spitting / dribbling any unwanted food out of his mouth – in full mouthfuls. Outside furniture copes well with this. Just take the chair outside, hose it off, wait half an hour, and then everything’s hunky-dory again. Bread, milk, cheese, tomato sauce, tuna, soggy chips, ice cream – it really doesn’t matter.
I was thinking about this, this morning after my little man decided to experiment with tipping his large cup of milk all over his right leg, and then screaming because he was surprised by the consequence.
Because it doesn’t matter if I hose off one chair, two chairs, or all six chairs in one go – they’ll still all be fine in about half an hour. And think that’s pretty cool.

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family anecdotes Life

Readers

Miss 7, like most Grade 2ers, I guess, has readers. She doesn’t particularly like them. I don’t particularly blame her. Nevertheless, she needs to read them, so she does. She’s pretty good at doing what she’s told. And I like that.

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So anyway, I started this blog post last night, while reading with Miss 7. I then set aside my iPhone, which I’d been using to blog (with the WordPress app) when I realised later that I had inadvertently published it. And I’m not entirely sure but I have a feeling that it sent it immediately through to both my twitter feed and my Facebook account. Whoops!

It (the above) was going to be the lead-in to a post on reading. And how Miss 7 doesn’t like it, and how I think that’s due to vision problems. Today, she had a second appointment with a Behavioural Optometrist, who confirmed it. Long story short, she chose some frames today and in a couple of weeks her glasses will be ready. She’ll be the first in our family. But as Hubby and I are both in front of our computer screens for hours every day, and as he’s gone 40 and I’m nearing it faster than I had hoped to, I doubt she’ll be the only for long…

Anyway, sorry for the mixup, dear readers – and for the email you received, my even dearer subscribers! I’ll be more careful when blogging from a mobile device in future…!