Twenty One

"Twenty One today" - another blog milestone....I have turned 21. Yay for me.

Well, it's school holidays, which brings both blessings and challenges. No rushing around (blessing), no packing lunches/getting school clothes ready (blessing), no work for me for the first week (blessing AND challenge - work keeps me 'sane', and I use the quotation marks as I know some of you reading this probably already question my sanity!), no daily interaction with other kids for Will (challenge), no structure (definitely a challenge)......no idea what to do for the week at home!!!

Not true actually, we have a lot planned. And it does NOT involve going to the Royal Melbourne Show.

Monday during the day we will be cleaning, as one of my new work colleagues will be visiting with her children in the evening so that we can all head off to the Drive In to see 'The Smurfs' on the big, outside screen. The Drive In is an awesome place to take kids - Mondays especially so as it is really cheap to get in. It's so much better than the normal cinema, there is no need to be quiet, you can talk all you want during the movie without having someone saying 'Ssshhhh'. There's never the chance that you'll get stuck sitting behind someone with a big noggin thereby blocking your view, and if you wish to you can simply doze off in the driver's seat while the kid's movie finishes. Awesome.

Tuesday we will be having our pyjama day - this is a tradition at my place, one pyjama day per week during the school holidays. A time to chill out and relax without having the pressure of getting dressed. Usually pyjama day is also 'Eat what you like Will, I don't care today' day. He loves it and I love it too.

Wednesday has turned into 'Restaurant' day. We are meeting the lovely CD and her two boys for pizza lunch at the local pizza restaurant, and then catching up with a family friend who is over from WA at the local pub for dinner. 'Restaurant' day will thus also be known as 'There goes all of my money' day.

Thursday will see us head up the Hume to my sister's place in Benalla for a couple of days. William brought home some school work on the last day of term, with one worksheet all about places the students like to visit. One of the questions was 'Write about somewhere you like to visit', and he had written 'I like going to Aunty Raelene's house'. So, being the good Mum that I am, we'll pack our suitcase on Thursday morning and head up there mid afternoon. Free accommodation, a 'tank-and-a-bit' of petrol and a happy child. Oh, and a visit to Beechworth (my favourite place on this earth) on Friday to down some calorie laden cakes at the bakery.

We'll skip the Grand Final, won't even watch it on the telly, we will be heading back down the Hume on our way home. With any luck the fact that we are travelling on Grand Final day will mean that there is very little traffic to deal with.

So, I'm hoping that the week pans out well, and that the break away from school does us both some good.

And quite frankly I truly believe that I will do all of these things for only slightly more than a day at the Show would cost - my god, I checked out some of the prices with the consideration of taking William and it is ridiculously priced, just ridiculous. Like, truly ridiculous. By the time you get through the gate it's already bloody fifty bucks or close enough for just the two of us (I just looked it up again - gate entry is $45 for the two of us). Throw in some rides (I mean, it's pretty hard to take a kid to the show without a couple of rides), with the cheapest that I can see on the website being $5 and even just ONE showbag (yeah right, 'one showbag' - although my absolute maximum would be three, which is still too much but kind of falls into the 'well, it's only once a year' category) and we're talking at least one hundred bucks for a day out I reckon. For one day. I have budgeted for the coming WEEK, and it's really only going to be two hundred or thereabouts for the full WEEK. (This is due in no small part to Monday night being 'kids are free' at the Drive In, and Wednesday night being 'kids EAT free' at the pub).

Will's eleven; kids get to an age where visiting the animal nursery just doesn't cut it anymore, the show becomes all about the rides and the showbags once you hit nine or ten years of age!! And that's fine - it's almost a rite of passage really - but it's also the reason that we're not going. Is that being an awful mother?

Found a psychiatrist for William last week. The school had reccommended this guy, although it took them a while to actually mention him to me. Funding is SO SHIT that even though William attends a specialist setting he still needs a referral to the school psych, who only works a few days a week and didn't have any space for him (despite discussions about this referral occurring early in first term). I had tried to source our work psych, who I really like and who had seen Will before on a couple of occassions, but it just wasn't going to work logistically.

Will has been having really rough times lately, even talking of suicide (see previous post), and doing a lot of self harm (biting himself, hitting himself etc) with HEAPS of negative self talk and incresing violence towards me. According to his teachers he can now only be with the other children for five minutes twice a day before he starts playing up big time, being disruptive and negative. (They had to clear the room a couple of weeks ago, as Will was hurling chairs and being violent towards the other kids). The result is that for most of the time on most of the days he is in a situation where he ends up on his own. He hates this, but cannot seem to make the connection between behaving with respect towards others equalling them actually wanting to be around you (and therefore also the opposite).

He is increasingly turning to his imaginery friends for consolation, and trying to introduce them to the group at school, and the other boys are ostracising him for this as well. And so the cycle of self loathing continues, as the other boys (quite understandably, given that they too are on the spectrum) are nasty and derogatory towards him about his imaginery friends and his obsession with certain things.

A couple of Fridays ago he punched me, and that was the last straw for me. I emailed the teacher and pleaded with her to just give me a name that I could start the ball rolling with, someone that she KNEW was a specialist in the field. She came through with the goods, and told me of a psychiatrist that she had experience with and that she felt was really good. She wrote a letter to him, detailing the problems that they have seen escalate in the past three months.

Anyway, we managed to get an appointment on Friday at 3pm (I suspect that my parents were watching over us that day and there was a convenient cancellation - one very rarely calls a psychiatrist on a Wednesday to be given a Friday at 3pm appointment), and the doc seems OK. Based on one hour that is!! William found the courage to tell him how he was feeling, because this guy was pretty good at asking the right quesitons. The next appointment is with me only, I suspect to give a history or whatever, and then William will see him again after that.

So, hopefully we are on track to a better quality of life for Mr William, because as I have said before, it just breaks my heart to see how he views his life. As his mother, it's just so hard for me to watch him go through this, and hard for me to try to deal with it and manage it. It's got to be hard on him -- he is living it.

Gotta go, William watched Lord of the Rings at Michael's this weekend, so tonight we are going to start reading the book together before bed.

Talk another time

Janeane
xx