T-Bird Anni Rides Again

I’ve been with Blogsome for ages.  Years.  Trouble is, their anti-spam measures are laughingly inefficent.  Last week I had friends who couldn’t comment because they couldn’t work out what the "captcha" was meant to say and yet I got 48 spam comments in one day.  You can’t turn captcha off.  They won’t let you.  So, I have a new blog   it’s here  and thanks to Tim from Making It Up, all my old blog is also there.  I have some very lovely friends on the tinterwebs

I’ve just renewed our tax credits.  I do find it deeply irritating that we are heavily penalised because I don’t work enough hours to use up all my tax allowance!!!!  I have arround £3k spare allowance, which would make a huge difference to our finances but because you can’t transfer it like you used to we can’t access it.  However, tax credits are calculated exactly the same for us as they would be for a family where the balance of income means the same gross income comes in but because it’s equally earned between 2 people, they make the full use of both tax allowances.  They would have an extra £3k in their pocket at the end of the year (give or take a bit as obviously they would lose a bit in National Insurance) and yet they would get the same amount of propping up from the government that we do.  Frustratingly, if I could pass my extra tax to Duke then we could manage okay without the ***** tax credits which would suit me fine, it would be one less PITA to deal with annually!

Of course, it could be much worse…. if I earned nothing at all but Duke was fortunate enough to earn on his own what we currently earn together (which was what he was earning when we first got married) then we would be arround £7k worse off adn yet, on paper he would look fairly well off!

 I just do not understand a system of taxation where 2 families with the same earnings can possibly end up with such a huge gulf between their actual available money.  What ever happened to "family friendly policies" ffs???

It’s been rather busy and I suspect that I’ve forgotten a lot of it already but here we go….

Last week I finished my course.  I’m not sure how good the final essay was, I did a bit of a daft thing and didn’t allow enough time to really sink my teeth into the essay so it’s possibly not going to be the best I ever wrote.  But that’s by the by.  It was done adn sent adn now I don’t have to worry about essays for a few months.  Im sure I’ll find something else to suck up the hours.  I don’t know how people work and do OU - I really find it hard to be at home, be a mum and wife and do OU.  Maybe I need some time management lessons.  Maybe I need a job with a lunch hour that would be unreservedly mine to hide in the car and study…. nah, that wouldn’t happen!

So, anyway.  On Friday she had another art session which she was a little subdued after but I suspect that had as much to do with tiredness as anything else.  Brownies was a mix of good and bad.  The good was that she has finished her "Brownies Go For It"  which is about bridging up to Guides, finding out about it etc which she has been working on for a while.  The bad was that Brown Owl dropped the bombshell that the older girls are all flying up to Guides in a few weeks.  This includes Aprilia.  Oh dear.  She was planning on staying a little while longer for serveral reasons not least that she can’t do her Rider’s badge until summer because her riding instructor will only do it with the girls on the longer "summer school" style sessions when she has time to see that they can do it all properly.  She was very wobbly.  However, we appear to have come to a cunning compromise - there is no rule that says that you cannot put badges onto your badge blanket that you have not earned.  Many adult members collect badges and have full sets of different "formats" (there have been severla differing designs for badges for all the sections over the years) so I am going to buy her a Rider badge just as soon as she has done the work for it and it can do straight onto the camp blanket.  Problem solved!  It also seems to have finally occured to her that really, in all honesty, she does not fit in her Brownie uniform any more   There really aren’t that many Brownies who are that tall and thus they don’t sell uniform that size!  I am going to investigate special ordering Guide uniform in "extra long" sizes…. they make it penty wide enough for her (I have a body warmer designed for Guides, it’s baggy on me but just the right length) but considering that she is already taller than the average 14 year old aparently, and the uniform is known for being on the short side, I think extra long would be good!

Saturday was Party In The Field.  The weather, as has been noted by others, was not great.  However, my little Vango Sigma is designed to be sturdy and did a good job.  It did require a bit of extra help for me to put it up (I had visions of me paracending into the village clutching onto the guy ropes….) but once up it stayed up.  Phew.  Didn’t leak either.  Phew again!

I had a lovely time catching up with friends, drinking gallons of tea and eating far too much.  Aprilia had a mostly lovely time (apart from a few totally random wobbles) although she claimed not to have eaten much.  I’m not entirely sure I believe that statement though.  I do beleive I saw food going into her mouth on several occaisions.  What she meant was that the whole buffet wasn’t stuff she loves and thus she couldn’t scoff as much as some of her less picky friends!  How on earth I managed to spawn a child who does not like colslaw and potato salad I really don’t know   I doubt she was in any serious danger of starvation.  

There was a walk at one point, one that was within even Aprilia and my feeble abilities.  I was glad we went up, not down, that ladder though.  yes, I’m a wuss, okay?

There was some sort of "campfire" in one of the bedrooms involving singing, eating dried fruit and marshmallows (cough, didn’t eat hey madam???) and a fake campfire made of sticks, pine cones and coloured paper.  Once this broke up, she asked to be taken to bed, so I did.  Aparently I rolled into her several times in the night.  Odd really as every time *I* woke up she was squashing me and I was off the other side of my mat I guess we both wriggle about a lot in bed!  I can once again confirm that our lovely little tent is very warm, snuggly and DRY.  The very cheap from Aldi camp mats are fine if you put a few woolen blankets down first (and obviously the soft springy grass under the tent helps), I think this will have to do for a while as it’s going to take time to save up for those lovely thermarests that I want to replace them with.

We had a leisurely get up in the morning and Aprilia went off for some pony worship which aparently involved her standing at Tipsy’s head with the kangaroo pocket of her hoodie stuffed full of carrots.  This kept said pony fairly still whilst several other girls preened and pampered her.  Alas it also got the front of said hoodie covered in bits of chewed carrot and pony drool.  Nice!  Whislt she was occupied, I struck camp so that we could flit as soon as she was ready.  I was hoping that this would be later rather than sooner but alas she failed fairly early on so we headed off for the next part of our weekend a little earlier than I’d hoped for.

In hindsight, it may have been easier to just let her chill for a bit then set out later.  There was some sporting fixture taking place in Manchester which involved seeing how many people from Huddersfield you can fit onto one stretch of motorway with a side challenge of how loudly can you sing in service station toilets.  Sigh.  Thankfully we were soon heading off that route and into much less traffic.  The rain tried valiently to keep with us but we managed to shake it off eventually.  Obviously we stopped at Tebay.  It’s in the Rules.  We stopped again about an hour later as we appeared to be in some sort of scary time loop where I kept on driving in vile weather (it must have caught us up when we were dining) but the time remaining to our destination didn’t change by so much as a minute.  I was getting a bit hypnotised by the swirling rain too.  The rain stayed on the motorway and didn’t follow us into the services and, after a good walk round the car park, a set of Aprilia’s physio exercises and a trip to the loo I felt human again.  AFter that the clock behaved and we made it to the hotel without much fuss and even saw the sun peeping out from behind the clouds.

The beds were, well, I suppose the polite word would be firm.  So were the pillows.  I was very tempted to go back to the car and get our mats and pillows…. the rather wonderful wet room that we had instead of the normal hotel bathroom mde up for that though.  Aprilia has a bit of a thing for wet rooms.  Especially ones with seats in them so she can sit down whilst I wash her hair (she has to kneel in our bath, it’s not very comfortable but I’m now too short to do it any other way!)  Breakfast was good too, although I suspect not as good as the rice pudding that was being discussed as breakfast Off The Path.

There was a small crisis.  My car has central locking which re-locks the car if you don’t open a door within so many minutes.  The boot does not count as a door…. you know wehre I’m going with this don’t you?  We had just loaded up as a brisk gust of wind slammed the boot.  The keys were in the coat I’d briefly put down in the boot.  Sigh.  Thankfully the hotel is on an industrial estate and there is a garage just next to it.  They came to my aid with their car breaking kit and had me in the car within a few minutes (which begs the question, what’s the point with security features like cars that lock themselves if it’s that easy to get back into them!!) and we were off.  We were a few minutes late at Ian Jordan’s but they weren’t even a bit bothered.  

Anyway, the testing…. Obviously Aprilia was slow to talk to so many strangers (Ian Jordan, his wife who is the dispensing optometrist, a trainee optometrist and a receptionist all in one small-ish room) but she trotted off with Mrs J for her eye test fairly happily whilst I chatted to IJ for a while about what she struggles with etc.  He was astute enough to chat to Aprilia’s cuddly toy at least as much as to her and got some fairly direct answers out of the pair of them (no, just don’t ask…. the times I have chatted to Tiger about how Aprilia is feeling just don’t bear counting)   He was not amused with the brick walls we have encountered on the way but to be fair, Aprilia is difficult to pigeonhole into any particular label, especially as she’s so capable on her own terms so comes accross okay most of the time and is at home so she isn’t seen at her wobbly worst most of the time.  Her eye test showed up everything that we already knew about her sight - she’s long sighted (that’s my fault) and has one eye stronger than the other (all Duke’s family have squints and lazy eyes so I’m blaming him for that) and her eyes don’t work together properly.  I knew about that last one as we have been to the hospital about it but it was dismissed as not being bad enough to worry about unless she was planning on being a fighter pilot.  Now, I don’t think she’s going to be a fighter pilot to be honest….. but I did wonder if she had really understood what the hosp optometrist was asking her and I did wonder if a clear picture had been got, especially as the same person said that Aprilia didn’t need reading glasses which 3 seperate opticians have already said she does but that’s by the by.  Her eyes don’t work together.  I did know that she was getting some double vision but as she only ever complained of this when very tired or when doing book work I’d put it down to one of those funny things that Irlene’s syndrome does - for me the text dances about, swirls and flashes different colours (it’s very pretty really) but double vision is also really common.  However, it looks like it’s one of those much more regular things that she’s ommitted to mention to me because it’s "normal for her".  Although, again, it could just be that she was tired yesterday and, as she can’t really discern the difference between "always" and "now", it felt to her like it always did it.  Regardless, even when you are tired, it’s not "normal"!  No wonder she’s struggling to read poor kid.

Then we did the light testing.  I’ve had a different colour test done before (hence the snazzy blue specs) but there are as many different ways of testing for the right colour as there are people doing the testing.  My original test was done by looking down a chute into a box with some text printed on the bottom of it which had different colours of light shone into it.  It took ages and I had to have several rests as it gave me an almighty headache.  This test was quite different.  He shines light onto the desk, which has a sheet of paper with lots of lines and a cross on it.  You sit back and tell him what the light does to the printing.  Dead easy.  He does some other stuff too which borders on quackery but rather remarkably it does actually work.  For example, whilst shining one or other light colour onto the desk he will test how strong your arm is.  Now, I know that light cannot affect your muscles….. but there was no way on this earth I had anything like the same strength in my arm when he used a strongly red light which was actually very disorientating.  He let us both bask in some deep blue light (no laughing Helen!) for a while which was very soothing (adn I don’t care if it’s all in my head…. it made the headache leave my head…) whilst he chatted to us and then we chose frames.  I’ve paid for Aprilia’s which will hopefully arrive in a few weeks and I’m going to pay for mine next month as I have gone for some incredibly decadent frames that I love to bits and are much nicer than anything else in the shop but were Way Over Budget!  I haven’t paid for the report.  I had budgetted for it, braced myself to pay for it… he wouldn’t let me.  He’s writing the report free.  I’m guessing it’s because he knows that the pair of us are going to return every few years for new specs, and maybe drag Duke along.  He says it’s because he is disgusted by how we have got nowhere despite me trying very hard to get her the right help.  I don’t know, maybe I’m just too damned cynical for my own good.

AFter that we nipped next door to Greggs and had lunch   The sun was shining, the day was lovely and Aprilia was happy.  The butties from Greggs were good too!

We had a brief visit to a crafty place where she made a stuffed penguin and then we braced ourselves for going back down the M6.  Obviously we stopped at Tebay South!  We made really good time and the weather behaved so much better and we were home round 8pm.  Aprilia hugged Duke into submission then asked to be put to bed (huh???? okay, who stole my child and swapped her for one that willingly goes to bed???)  I went to work but really was far too tired to do a good job so did the bare minimum and came home.  I’m sure I can make up the hours in teh week, especially as it’s half term so likely to be trashed every day!

She slept last night under a string of blue fairy lights salvaged from the greenhouse (they are outdoor, solar powered LED fairy lights!)  She is quite convinced that this helped her to sleep.  I am not going to argue.

This morning we repacked her stuff and I deposited her at Brownie/Guide camp.  Brown Owl has a similar take on packing to me and her kit list reflects this….. I swear there’s enough clothing in that bag to keep her going for a week not a night!  When I left she was in the centre of a gaggle of girls, her patrol necker had been tied artistically onto her hat and she was howling with laughter.  She is so beautiful when she is happy.

grump grump whinge whine moan.  There, I feel better now!

So, why grumpy?

My wrists hurt like fury and if I do more than half an hour of massage my thumbs are so painful I can’t move them.  So no escape into a better paid job doing something I actually like then.

 It’s still not clear if the play barn will continue trading.  I’d love to take them to a tribunal for the unpaid holidays. It’s illegal, but as the law stands, it’s up to the individual employee to take them to tribunal, there’s no way in law to enforce or punish over this other than sticking your own precious neck out and hoping to God that your boss doesn’t turn round and fire you on some spurious charge.  And it’s not like jobs are easy to come by so these people know damned well that no one is going to rock the boat.

We won’t know for another 2 months if Duke is going to have a job and if so where it will be.  It depends on a contract that the business is bidding on - if they get it then they stay where they are (15 min drive), if they don’t then they can carry on doing what they do now but at Hinkley (a few hours drive each way) or retrain to do "supply logistics" at Elesmere port (about an hour away) or take redundancy.  Duke plus one other have been asked to go to Hinkley every day for several weeks (all expenses paid) to train up the people who will take over their jobs, after which there will be a "significant thank you" which Duke takes to mean money and I take to mean a nice pat on the back and a redundancy cheque.  If they go to Elesmere Port then they get travel expenses for the first year but will be "on probation" as it’s a different job, contract, holding company etc so no security.  If he has a sudden flurry of migraines he will almost certainly not be looked on kindly.  Duke has registered his interest with a temp agency to work where the bloke next door but one works - it’s a 2k salary drop for 12 months (but options to do overtime at fairly good rates after 3 months) followed by a very good pay increase.  Assuming he gets the job of course….   He won’t contenance moving house to something cheaper/closer to EPort.

the Red Cross have failed to pay me for February (about £60) and April (closer to £200) which doesn’t look like much money but I booked a trip to get Aprilia screened by Ian Jordan on the strength of having that £200 to pay for the trip and go a long way towards the glasses/tinted lenses she probably needs.  I’d hoped to have neough to pay for a report that the GP may actually take some notice of but actually, what with other lights being turned off that’s probably not so much of an issue now.

The government are planning on reducing by 20% the number of people claiming disability benefits.  This means that poeple like Aprilia who are not exactly "disabled" but certainly never going to be able to function fully as an able bodied person are screwed.  By taking away middle rate carers element they are taking away the basic criteria for that person claiming carer’s allowance for someone (like a parnt who needs to stay at home to deal with them or professional carer who comes in to do those simple things in life like their cleaning which they would struggle to do for themselves) This also potentially means that many parents who currently are protected from being "helped back to work" due to caring responsibilities are at risk.  Now, don’t get me wrong, if you can work, I think you should at least make an effort before holding out your hand for benefits.  But, if you ahve a child who is ill a lot so you need to go and fetch them home from school a lot/take time off to nurse etc you are not going to be a good employment prospect.  It also means that we do not have a cat in hells chance of winning any appeal to our rejection for DLA as we do not have enough professionals saying she needs help.  This would be because she’s not in school and causing problems.  She’s asked if she can re-join the Guides where her GP is the leader "so that Alex can see how much I hurt all the time, then she might tell the DLA"  She left after she was knocked over (accidentally) during a game and no one noticed that she could barely walk afterwards - when I took her boot off her foot was black and blue - the official response was that she needed to tell someone if she was injured….. you know I’m sure I discussed her inablilty to talk to adults when stressed…. but I got the impression that really the underlying response was that I am an overprotective woman with a spoilt brat of a child.  Maybe they are right.  Maybe it’s just because on the surface she’s so damned normal and capable most of the time.  I don’t know.

I have an essay due in 5 days,  I have 2,500 words of total claptrap which ties itself in knots and it makes up a full 50% of my final score so if I blow this one then all those 70-80% scores all year are for nothing.

I’m tired but when Aprilia isn’t waking me up, I’m waking myself up for some reason and not getting back to sleep

Of course, this is all minor stuff, I readily accept that.  Doesn’t make me any less grumpy though!

sigh, was going to photoblog today as it should have been quite a good one, physio in teh morning at the utterly fab physio unit at Alder Hey then visitors this afternoon.  However, I was awake more than i was asleep last night, when I finally got up I had a pounding headache which a hot shower and lots of drugs did little to shift (quite often my headaches are watersoluble) and we got stuck in a tailback on the motorway that doubled our journey time meaning we were very very late for physio and thus we couldn’t have our normal full hour with one to one attention, we got half an hour shared with another patient so I didn’t feel I could do photos!  I thought Sue was very good to fit us in at all really and I’m sure many other places would have said tough, make another appointment but Alder Hey aren’t like that.  Alder Hey are really lovely (well, apart from their bloodletting department!)

So, we were late heading off for home, and the traffic was still ridiculous and we got stuck behind a bin wagon….. aaaaarg!  Got home with maybe half an hour spare before our visitors were due but they had phoned to say that one of the girls was poorly so would have to cancel….. i’m a mixture of relieved and dissapointed!

Thus my lovely colourful completely a-typical home ed day in pictures is totally scotched.  Ah well.  We are going to re-group and relax for half an hour then we are going to the library.  I may yet manage a picture or two but in the meantime, here’s a link to some before and after shots of the physio unit.  Scroll down - theres a lot of pictures!

I’ve lost my blogging mojo again (you probably noticed didn’t you?) To be honest I appear to have lost my mojo altogether.  I think maybe I left it at someone’s house.  I keep meaning to have a look round the blogring and see whose being extra productive and ask if they are using my share as well as their own….

So, what’s been going on?

 Duke was 50 last weekend.  He wants a meal out with some good friends as his celebration but typically they are busy (and when I say busy I mean runnign round like headless chickens) for the next 3 months so we are postponing that but had a lovely meal out just the 3 of us anyway. He would also love to spend some time with a few of the home ed families who he has developed a fondness for.  Prizing him away from the house is always a challenge though and our house is a bit small for guests and he won’t come to party in the field because it’s too many people (geee, can’t imagine where Aprilia gets her social phobia from, can you?) so I’m not sure what to do with that one!  I think he’d enjoy another short break at Shell Island but I’m not sure how everyone feels about getting sand in their sleeping bags again?  It would have to be the dunes side of the site as that really was part of the magic for him - going up to the top of a dune and being "lord of all he surveyed"

The bunnies are continuing to provide pleasure and cuddles (well, Fudge does good cuddles, Flopsy is a little more independently spirited!) although they are incredibly noisy at night boinging all over the cage!

Sadly this week Whirly the guinea pig finally expired.  She was a good age and certainly appeared to be in good health right up to the end although it was noticable over the past few months that she’s been rather much easier to pick up than she used to be.  I put it down to her finally getting a bit calmer but maybe it was just old age!  A cremation was decided upon as digging deep enough into clay to bury her was going to be just too much for us and ceremonial interment in the wheely bin was not acceptable.  Guinea pigs, it appears, are not terribly flamable and take several hours to dissapear on a wood fire.  If ever anyone else is considering DIY cremation of a pet then take my advice….. get LOTS of wood.  Really, really pile it up under the shoe box, oops, sorry, I mean coffin and up round the sides too, you really do not want the  box to tip over and allow the contents to roll slowly down the side of the pyre whilst it is still recognisable as the dearly departed.  The chief mourner found this quite distressing.  So did I to be honest.  It was my guinea pig after all.  I miss her little squeeing noises.  Sigh, I’m an old softy you know.

I’ve got 1 last essay to do for my course.  I should be writing it now.  3,000 words on how The Graveyard Book fits into the history and tradition of children’s literature and compared with at least one other set book. It’s a very good book.  It’s a very hard essay!

We’ve been back to physio and she got the treat of playing on the video game enhanced exercise bike followed by a special milkshake as she had worked so hard.  The physio is having some effect.  I think the 30% reduction in pain is almost happening but it’s difficult to tell as she really can’t painscore - either something hurts or it doesn’t.  I’m working on a principle that although she’s still in regular pain, she falls a little less and is standing a little straighter as normal rather than needing to be told all the time.  She still pays for it when she’s been busy but then don’t we all?

She’s started at play/art therapy which is every week for the next 6 weeks followed by a meeting between me and "the team" to discuss if it’s worth keeping on with or if it has resolved her anxiety issues.  She played with some air dry clay very similar to this stuff but made by Crayola and costing significantly more on the first week and was keen not only to re-stock on it at home (ours having gone dry over the years of being ignored!) but also to take the info about PlayMerrily with us this week so that the very wonderful Margaret knew where to get hers from next time.  Her initial impressions of her first solo session yesterday were that it was fun but Margaret kept asking difficult questions all the time…. gentle fishing on my part suggested that these difficult questions were such things as what makes her nervous etc.  Erm yes, Aprilia, that’s the idea….. relax and play with various arts and crafts materials and chat to the nice lady about the scary stuff….

Horse riding is going well.  She actually managed to smile and trot at the same time last week.  This week she was outside for the first time and the horses all look so much happier (and go so much faster!)  I do feel sorry for the girl holding her lead reign, Aprilia’s on quite a big horse and when he gets trotting he doesn’t half cover the ground!

Ice skating went less well.  She was tired, Jen was tired so the pair of them flopped about more than they skated.  I think Jen only came because Aprilia was going to be there, she looked very second hand before she’d even been on the ice.  Then Aprilia fell over.  Then Jen said her arms were too sore.  So we all gave up and went home!  It’s quite handy having another home edding, dyslexic, hypermobile family to socialise with.  The girls understand each other so well and it’s good to have a mum to talk to who has already been through the diagnostic process twice (both ehr girls are too bendy and dyslexic, seems a common combo) and who now has 1 girl at college and 1 looking at going part time next year.  Aprilia knows that if they can do it then so can she.

There has been a lot of curled up reading and doing bits of learning stuff recently.  Nothing dramatic, just bits of Stile, bits of Math Mammoth and some verbal and non verbal reasoning in return for lots of Swallowdale (book 2 of Swallows and Amazons)  She has her sights set on being a Play Therapist adn she knows that to do that she needs exams and university so she’s pushing just that little bit harder now.

We got signed off from the community paed this week.  Wasn’t sure how to take her statement of "now lots of professionals are seeing her it’s not so important that I do" but took it as poorly phrased statement meets paranoid parent rather than her actually meaning that now she’s being seen by lots of people, we know she’s not being locked in the cupboard all day so there is no longer a safeguarding issue!  (Damn that BadMan, he’s got me so ruddy paranoid!)  We had another lecture on her weight as she has gained a little more in the last 5 months along with growing 4cm but as everyone keeps telling me that she’s looking a better shape these days (personally I really have no idea, her legs keep peeping out of all her trousers but that’s all I’ve noticed re shape really!!!) I’m thinking that I need to just keep with the physio to tone her up and restrict snackage to wholemeal/lower sugar stuff so she doesn’t feel too deprived. 

I’m sure we’ve done lots of other stuff too but I can’t for the life of me think what….. ah well.  If you find my mojo, can you bring it to Party in the Field for me please?

A little while ago there was a bit of a discussion on FriendFeed about me liking a certain rock band that a were performing somewhere not very far from Off The Path.  Now, one of the very lovely Off The Pathers wanted to go and see this band whilst the other equally lovely Off The Pather wasn’t too fussed really.  And so, purely as a means of making some lovely people happy, and not having *anything* to do with the fact that I would dearly love to see said band live again after nearly 20 years (cough) I jumped at the chance to go and visit J&J and relive my youth

The gig was pretty good, they don’t have quite the same number of band members as they used to so the sound wasn’t quite so much as it used to be but the singer still most definitely has it!  Jonathan had had the forethought to bring earplugs (or was it Jan that had the forethought to tell Jonathan to fetch them?) and so we still had some hearing left by the end of the evening although I will confess to removing them for the final number just to get the full effect of possibly one of my fave all time tracks in the world! (link sound quality is good, video quality is pants… you can’t win em all I guess!)

 As Jan has already blogged, I took M, J and Aprilia for a paddle up on the moor which was very pleasant and there was also much chasing round the garden etc (well, okay, I didn’t do chasing round, but Aprilia did.)

Aprilia started out in M’s room but snuck up to me at some point in the night.  First it was "mummy my finger hurts" (mummy puts finger back into joint), then "mummy the cat is in the bed" (yes dear, you left the bedroom door open) "but mummy, I mean he’s under the covers with me" (yes dear, I know, you could always go back down to M’s room) "mummy, I love you" (mmm, I know, go to sleep) "mummy, is it time to get up yet" (I don’t know, go down to M’s room and see what time it is…..) Sigh, who needs sleep anyway?

Originally we were going to get going fairly sharp-ish on Saturday, then minds were changed and there was more charging round in the garden followed by a serious session of pony pampering which left Tipsy with plaits everywhere (and a slightly bemused expression!) 

Then Aprilia got to the bit she had been waiting for and had a ride!  Interestingly, M set the stirups to where she thought was right which was much shorter than Aprilia has them at her lessons but did actually look to keep her foot in a better position so I may be having a word with her teacher about that next time!

After the ride there was another short playtime before I declared that it really was time to get going.  There was a short rebelion but eventually I scooped her into the car and we set out.  I think she may have been a bit tired by then…

Jax over at Making It Up is hosting a Learning to Read Carnival.  I pondered joining in with this long and hard.  I didn’t want to put a downer on all the undoubtedly positive posts it’s going to generate, all the "this scheme has been wonderful for us" and the "oh my child taught herself, they will if you leave them to it you know" and the "it was a struggle at first but by 7 we had made it work"

But then, sometimes when you are not experiencing that wonderfully positive feeling, it’s comforting to know that you aren’t on your own.  It’s good to know that yours isn’t the only child who doesn’t seem able to make that leap from c-a-t to cat, can’t remember "the" from one page to the next and who looks at a book not with uncontained joy but with deep anguish.  This is our world.  This is the world of a child with such a minor learning difficulty that it goes unnoticed and undiagnosed in children everywhere, causing them to feel worthless and stupid.  This is the world of a child with dyslexia.

When Aprilia was really very small, she wanted to read.  She knew all her letter sounds and names (the nursery taught her the latter, despite me asking very explicitly that they do not teach letter names!) by the time she was 3, I was all excited!  I was going to have a clever little girl who could show my doubting mother how wonderful home education was going to be.  But then it all stopped.  She was absolutely confident with identifying c a and t but could not "hear" a word when we rolled those sounds into each other, and as for asking her to work out what letter sounds may be in a word, well, I may as well have asked her to write an essay on string theory.  I raged at the arrogance of Dr Montessori who confidently stated in her books that all children could learn to read with her wonderfully tactile sandpaper letters and write with the help of beautiflly crafted (or in our case, extruded from plastic) movable letters.  Even "uneducatable" children thrived under her care it seemed.  But then Italian is a purely phonic language and dyslexia is more common in some populations than others.  Eventually I forgave her, and myself, for our lack of progress.

So we left it a while.  We did other stuff, interesting stuff, I read to her, pointed to the words as I read, we talked about what I read, I wrote down her thoughts for her.  I waited.

We tried again.  Jolly Phonics gave way to LetterLand, LetterLand gave way to StudyDog and StarFall, those in turn gave way to ReallyReading and that too fell by the wayside to be replaced by Bricks and Mortar.  They say that normally the 3rd reading scheme is the charm.  3 different ways of looking at it will eventually give the child all that they need and off they go, book in hand, on their reading adventure.  U-huh?

On the advice of many friends and indeed a few professionals, we left it a while longer.  I bought books on tapes to feed her voracious apetite for stories.  Read to her for hours on end.  Wrote for her.  Bought Stile resources that allowed her to develop other literacy skills without really needing to read or write.  But really I already knew what the problem was.

You see, I went through school being branded stupid, or worse, lazy.  If I would just put more effort in I could really go far they said.  They didn’t see me sobbing with exhaustion for hours on end trying to drag the words out of my head onto the page.  They said I needed to concentrate on what I was reading first time so I didn’t need to re-read time and time again to find the information I needed.  They didn’t know that words dance a beautiful dance arround the page, changing colour as they go, I didn’t know that they weren’t supposed to do that so I never mentioned it.  It was a total shock to be told, in my 30s that actually I was very inteligent, in the top 90 somethingth percentile for most of an IQ test…. but in the bottom 5th for literacy.  The report went on for page after page, the bottom line said I had moderate/severe dyslexia.  I had to find out who I was all over again.  I was no longer stupid and lazy, I was rather clever actually but held back by a dodgy bit of wiring in my brain. 

So I knew.  My bright, clever girl was a Dyxie Chick.  If she had been in school it would have been a real problem for her, as it was for me.  But she’s not.  She’s at home where she can get more "one-to-one tuition" than any schooled child ever gets specified on their IEP and that one-to-one tuition is carefully crafted and tailored to suit the child, not simply a 10 week straight out of the box course presented by a teaching assistant.  She ten now and does read, well, sort of!  It was 2 weeks of watching back to back Magic Schoolbus DVDs with the subtitles on that finally did it for her.  2 weeks of seeing the same words and hearing them time and again that finally allowed her to see a cluster of letters and know that they represent a certain word.  Although of course this has presented us with a bit of an issue.  She can read "volcano" and "bacteria" no problem, less scientific or techincal words like "shop" and "cat" are still a bit of a mystery.  Playing computer games helps too.  She may not get every word that pops up on the screen but she has learned to pick out enough to make sense of it, to skip the words that mean nothing to her and fill in their meaning from what she can read.  The reward of "leveling up" is enough to keep her trying.

We still rely heavily on audio books, that way she can enjoy books that excite her, stretch her, challenge her but don’t demand too much effort of her to access.  The very wonderful people at Calibre Audio Library send her a new story within the week of her sending back the last one.  The local library allow her to borrow audio books for free and are happy to hunt down and order in what they don’t carry on their own shelves.  She goes to sleep every night to the dulcet tones of Stephen Fry providing her with her nightly intallment of Harry, she has listened so many times that she can almost recite along with him.  Sometimes she follows the book along with him for a little while.  Not long, it’s very tiring, but every little makes a difference.  Recently we bit the bullet and bought Windoze 7.  I’m not usually a bit fan of expensive Microsoft products but I will forgive them much for the difference that this has made.  You see, W7 has voice recognition software built in.  And it works.  No, really, it does!  So now she can write.  She can pour out the ideas from her head and see them appear on the screen in front of her.  Add in Office and you get OCR software that also works and works remarkably quickly although you have to hunt to find it, hidden deep within their "OneNote" facility.  So now she can scan typed text into her PC and, with the aid of a screen reader, enjoy listening to text, following it along as it’s read to her.  Little by little she gets there.

So you see, it’s not the end of the world having a child with a specific learning difficulty.  It adds a little challenge to life but then, life would be boring if everything was easy wouldn’t it?

phoned dad earlier this evening, had got half way through the pleasantries of how everyone was and had just declared Aprilia to be doing really well thank you very much when there was a crash and a loud wail from her room….. she’d stood up and both her legs had refused to play so had flopped down in a bit of a heap on the floor(tell dad I’ll phone him back, clunk child’s joints about a bit, shovel her back into bed…)   That’s the last time I *ever* say anyone is fine ever again!   For some reason when I phoned dad back and we moved on from Aprilia to Duke I really wasn’t inclined to confirm that his job was okay or that he was in fine health!

I suspect the reason for the sudden outbreak of floppyness has been our rather lovely day today.  The sun has shone, Duke wasn’t off out anywhere so we all pootled in the garden pretty much all day.  We now have one bed that looks really almost presentable, one that at least is no longer home to far too much horsetail and one that is almost ready for some planting. The presentable bed is now the proud home of 1 cherry tree (new this year and a special request of Aprilia), 2 rose bushes (that have been in pots for a few years whilst we tried to decide where they should go) and a small drift of daffs which I think we need to add to as we love having some early colour, these have been blooming happily in pots for a week or so now after we discovered a net of bulbs a few months ago and decided that it was worth planting them even if they didn’t do much this year rather than leaving them to dry out and possibly be useless by autumn.  We have some bedding plants to go into that one too and some chamomile, grown lovingly from seed by Aprilia. We also have a greenhouse that isn’t at a rather rakish angle with shelving inside that doesn’t encourage everything to slide gently to the back corner. That final acheivement took Duke rather a lot of time and effort which was very good of him really seeing as really it’s "my" space (I’m the one who plays in there most) and considering how hot it was in there today.

I’ve had mixed success with seeds in the greenhouse so far this year, not one of my tomatoes has germinated which does seem rather odd but every one of the cucumbers has done and are looking pretty good.  The runner beans that the mice didn’t un-sew for me are popping up but as we have voracious slugs round here I’m not putting them out just yet - once they have gone tough at the base and ahve several pairs of leaves we shall risk them…. The second sewing of sweetpeas are also starting to pop up (the mice scoffed all of the first lot!) and I did have a good looking batch of chard until I went in this morning and found the whole lot grazed off - do mice eat greens or have I got slugs that have learned not to leave tell tale shiney trails?  I’m going to treat myself to another mini propagator for next spring so that critters can’t help themselves before my precious babies have had half a chance!

Other stuff this week has been…. erm…. I know we did somethign… oh yeh!  We went to Alder Hey and found a parking space straight away :-O  the receptionist at physio was amazed!  She had a really good session with the physio and was rewarded for her hard work with a play on their exercise bike which has a video game attached.  Did I mention we like Alder Hey physio dept? 

Monday adn Tuesday slipped past us in a haze of drying out the tent, tidying up and hunting down work examples.  This year I had got a bit of a headstart because I’d thought to throw a few bits into a box as we went along.

So Wednesday morning our LA lady arrived along with an ed psych.  I can’t tell you much of what the LA lady said as she chatted happily with Aprilia on the sofa and rummaged through the boasting box whilst I talked to the EP about Aprilia’s literacy issues.  I think she may have been asking leading questions about other things at one point (things about "social imagination" and other such autistic traits) but I kept her firmly on topic!  It’s not that I am dodging other potential diagnoses but there is a rather irritating tendency round here to attribute *everything* to autism which means that children get really well supported for any social and emotional difficulties they may or may not have but still don’t get the help with reading that they need! Once I had pointed out that I knew Aprilia was dyslexic because I am and I know what I’m looking for, she wanted to know what dyslexic traits I have and also Duke so I spent a while  describing life in our house in all it’s glorious chaos.  I also mentioned that Aprilia is prone to outbreaks of "dyslexic ears" which in the US would earn her a diagnosis of "auditory processing disorder" (and is probably more of an every day difficulty than reading issues as if you can’t always understand what you hear it can make processing the world arround you a bit of a challenge) and she agreed that it’s a shame that that option isn’t available on this side of the pond where it’s considered just a facet of dyslexia as your average teacher sees "dyslexia" and has no idea that it can mean that the child can’t listen properly as well as having troubles reading properly.

Anyway, after a good long  chat and me having laboured the point that we have tried several phonics schemes and eventually resorted to whole word (yes, she did flinch when i said taht!) she said that we would have another meeting in June and that in the mean time she would send some phonics resources for me and some test materials to that she would have a good gauge of Aprilia’s abilities when she came again and could I "action" investigations into Irlene lenses for her.  I said I would, if finances permitted but as they are £300 that may not happen any time soon. AFter the next meeting we will fix a date for when she will do the full dyslexia screening.  

After the EP had gone the LA lady stayed a bit longer and chatted about how she could see that Aprilia has developed over the year (although she thought that maybe she had slipped in some bits of literacy too - probably because I’ve stopped drilling her on all the little words all the time as we were both heartily sick of "the", "an" and so on!)  She is very firmly of the opinion that Aprilia is dyslexic and was somewhat frustrated that she can’t just get on and do the testing herself (she has the qualification to do it alas in her current role she does not have the authority to do it!)  She has given us some very useful suggestions for resources we may like to look at including Toe by Toe which we may be able to get via the schools library service and origami as a way of developing her manual dexterity whilst allowing her to indulge her creative drive.  She also came up with a glaringly obvious suggestion for those moments when Aprilia goes all silent and can’t say Stop.  So glaringly obvious I’d never thought of it…. discs of funky foam in red (for help/stop etc) amber (for I’m getting nervous and may need help very soon etc) and green (I’m happy, just don’t want to talk) that she can carry with her.  Doh, why did I not think of that!!!  She’s also suggested we try bookbinding and make her a little hardbacked book with picture prompts for getting dressed etc that she can take with her if she is away from home.  Never had a go at bookbinding before, I think we could have fun with that one!