Banishing Herbs have arrived!

Kind of excited really, firstly I found a wheel extension for Oatie's current wheelchair which costs $600, but it converts your standard wheelchair to being like a Jogging stroller. So I'm looking into that. As the all terrain wheelchairs are really expensive! I would like to get out and about a lot more than we do. AND apparently this Wheel extension make getting over snow and ice a piece of cake!!! I NEED a piece of cake for Winter.

My eldest came back from the YMCA camp that he went on, he loved it so much he would like to go back next Summer!

I have started to take Oatie out more in his wheelchair these days as the baby will need to move into the stroller that we've been putting him into soon. And also when I need him to, Oatie can self propel. Maybe I've finally gotten used to Oatie being Handicapped lol! I don't know.

About to go swimming with the kids... catch you later

Oh and the Smudging herbs arrived!!!! YAY!

I can't believe it's back to school in under 2 weeks

I can't believe that it is almost back to school time! It sucks! I was enjoying holidays and just got used to the carefree nature of it before, and now the thought of school bells, SNOW yes I said the S word... SNOW. Snow is a offensive word here as it sucks for people in wheelchairs!

Had I known Oatie was handicapped, I'm not sure I'd have picked a snowy province!

Well one thing we've decided is that ABR is the way to go forward with Oatie, in combination with Swimming. He has been happy and jolly and not in pain since we started our months swimming fest. Sorry for the lack of posts! But Oatie is now swimming lengths on his back, front and jumping in and everything all with his "konfidence" jacket that his grandparents bought for him last year!

I am trying to agree a time to take him out from school at lunch and take him to the "diversity" swim, (handicapped swim) across the field... however the field is usually filled with SNOW for 6 months of the year! which then makes the 500m distance seem like a journey to the moon!

Yes I am writing about the S word, on a day when it is one of the hottest of the year, nearly 30oc today! + that is +, yes we have a 80oC swing in temperature here, -40oc to +40oc!

My eldest is away at a YMCA camp this week, camping and canoeing and archery and all fun things, but I only let him go if he could swim and feel happy falling out his canoe... My elder daughter also learned to swim but there was no space available, so Instead she is going to dabble in synchro swimming in the fall to put her new swimming skills to the test.

URGH school starting up, more battles coming up... GROAN! No they haven't got back to me about the therapeutic riding, they don't even need to do anything apart from give me Oaties plan!

And my Smuding herbs should be arriving soon, I can't wait, my good friends (family) the Dzialo's suggested doing this ages ago and I couldn't find the herbs locally, and after bad luck after bad luck, I suddenly had the eureka of buying online, and when I did,... the shop that I chose is in the same city as us !!!! lol! I am going to smudge even my CAR!

Oatie has started his road to independent swimming

We have done our annual month quest of encouraging our kids to swim, all reluctant swimmers well the elder two are... Oatie loves the water but is ill after ill in the Winter.

We tried 6 weeks of back to back swimming lessons and additional swimming at the weekends, swimming 3 times a week for years....

Anyway in the end financial bribery has seemed to work!

My eldest can now swim 25m and Oatie can now swim with his boyancy jacket unaided!!! he used to grip our hands and not let go, but he can now swim around with the jacket on and he LOVES it!

Oatie's elder sister is a reluctant swimmer but his baby sister LOVES swimming too!

Passed Kindergarten

Oatie passed Kindergarten... they wanted him to repeat it, but we refused and said no...so he passed it lol!

Well at the start of the year, he was 2 years behind everyone if not 3. Now he is just one year behind and so another good year, he hopefully should catch them up!

For the first time EVER he has friends... and real friends, people brought their kids from more than an hour away each way, to come to his party!!! He had 14 at his party and two more couldn't make it because of the flood!

OATIE has friends! real friends and they wanted to take his friends away by keeping him in K? NO WAY was that happening!

I told them, you can catch up in school, but you cannot buy true friendship! you just can't!

A Drawing of Oatie and his friend. Look Oatie's friend drew his walker, so cute.

Getting some sort of normality, whatever that is lol!

The Summer holidays are finally here! Finally! We were luckily that we were not flooded, however we have done food bank donations and the red cross let everyone down in my opinion, and so people collected food and articles for the flood victims ourselves and organised people with trailers to take the clothes to them.

According to the Red Cross, these people didn't need CLOTHES right now... however we found totally the opposite. Our friend who had the trailer was regularly asked by flood victims to rummage through the clothes to find something to wear for WORK. (according to the Red Cross) they didn't need clothes!

They needed clothes more than ever, as their homes are lying there valueless... lost all their possessions they've ever owned apart from the clothes on their back... they even lost their pets (if the pets couldn't swim).

Anyway after 2 weeks or more, finally the Red Cross came to "Help". They have taken over the rec centre and the Red Cross volunteers, have "private shower and sleeping facilities" and the flood victims are in a curling rink with no screens or privacy at all or darkness to sleep, what if they worked shifts!". When the evac centre (our rec centre) was run by volunteers just normal people in the community.... they didn't require private shower facilities... or private rooms...

My last beef about the red cross, when the community sorted out the flood victims, they took MONEY which could go anywhere in the world.... and local people wanted to help their neighbours etc.... and then how much of every dollar actually get to the intended recipient, there was a figure in the UK about 10-15 years ago it was 25p of every pound donated helped people.

hmmmmmmmmm

This is our local area! We are fine, we live on a very steep hill....

Bureaucratic red tape...

Today Oatie had a visit from the lovely "speech pathologist", I've always found that term different as pathology to me usually means the study of diseases and causes etc. Oatie doesn't have a disease... oh well!

Well, anyway she's very nice person, very approachable and totally into her job which is just so nice to see and it's actually genuine too, which is just fabulous.

I don't know if you remember my post about A government agency that does nothing... well this lady contacted them, to find out the outcome, as she was the lady who referred us, and guess what??? she's left two messages and they haven't returned her call in two weeks! The funniest bit, was when they said that they didn't endorse Apple products, this lady actually went to a seminar where one of this "team" stood up and gave 2 different demonstrations on apple products...

Well back to Oatie, she was amazed at the progress that he's made, from joining in in the class routine, to the whole reduction in the aggression in the room since the bullying stopped, his recital of the alphabet and his speech and well everything really including his walking.

I was also told how due to red tape and funding cuts, it was why we haven't seen her for ages, as her budget was already used up... but apart from having an aide (who is magic by the way, this man who's Oatie's aid is just first class, through and through and I have the highest respect for this man, he is just so nice to Oatie, and they have a special bond and everything he does with Oatie is fun, he make learning fun). They haven't really done anything else to help with his speech or his OT at school. Luckily his teachers/aide and my husband and I are all working as a team for Oatie which ultimately is going to be us to do that in the first place, I suppose I would have liked to see some "strategy" or plan on making sure that when he gets to kindergarten age, he'll have the skills to be in a mainstream classroom, which is still 18 months off, but the plan I think needs to be in place now. So I go back to the drawing board, speak to more people find out the low down and go from there, which usually starts at the Swimming pool funny enough....

So this nice lady, did bring her itouch and her ipad to see which worked better for Oatie and we both decided the ipad is the best device for him, so just waiting till Friday to place our order for his Ipad. He calls it his "Magic Book". He actually asked when could he use the magic book again, it helps!

Well I'm going for a nice cup of tea and chocolate cake.

Love Oatie's Mum
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Mallet - Hammer game at a fair...

Stuff the term "chicken and egg", I'm going for whac a mole!

whac-a-mole

Oatie and the review meetings!

Well My own life feels like I am a plate spinner... lol!

And then Oaties' life feels like Whac-a-mole...

You have the diagnosis... and then there is the forward and the backwards steps and then you press here and this pops up so you hammer that and then elsewhere pops up... and well it is just "Whac-a-mole".

I didn't even know what this was called in North America, I have an aliens version of it from the UK. I just remember loving playing it at fairs when I was a kid...

For example... Oatie was getting beautiful structure from his ABR therapy... but then became agoraphobic as we wheeled him everywhere so he did stay and not undo the hours of work... (by him mangling his body further).

However, with the Agoraphobia came missing out on his childhood of exploration as he couldn't go and see stuff for himself and had us wheel him where we wanted to go rather than his older sibs who would tug your hand to go and look at something.

So then came the walker,...the walker made me cry.... on the one hand, he started to LIVE and be a person rather than a kid with CP. He had choice and made decisions where to go and what to look at... HOWEVER (what made me cry) was how he is mangling his body in the walker...

So then came the exploration of the service dog... multi fold of the companionship, love, and balance aid from the dog (we are waiting for the dog it might be another year until we get the dog) but that will be way better than the walker!

With the walker, he matured enough to go to Kindergarten where he has the best friends in the class that anyone could ask for... everyone loves him in the class and he has genuine friendships... genuine-genuine... (not manufactured by parents).

So this year, he's done amazingly, he has closed a 2 year gap on his speech to one year... which is brilliant! (partly from him using the walker as he's been able to walk where his peers do and be involved in every aspect of the class too).

So today we have his "where to next... meeting". The speech lady on the phone said that she is happy for him to go to g1... but then at the meeting today they were wondering whether him repeating K all over again would be a good idea....

Both Oaties dad and I were like no! (the K teacher is actually the nicest teacher in the entire school and she is brilliant) so nothing against anything.

I said, that if it was the preschool class that he was in, then maybe (to get away from them would be worth it)... but he actually has a "family"in his class, they play and interact and LOVE him, and that to me is priceless... totally priceless.... you can have extra maths lessons and language lessons, but you can't buy genuine friendship! To us, that network of friends that he has around him at the moment are part of his support network! For him to see his old friends go up a year and him start all over again with building friendships would crush him. Also a lot of his current classes older siblings are in his siblings classes so it adds even more strength to his network... as their big brother or sisters are friends with his brother and sister.

Oatie as we know is very bright... and by holding him back would really kick his confidence... (the school saw a huge improvement in him this year and didn't want him to find grade 1 too hard), my point was at some point he will have to leave kindergarten and my eldest ended up repeating Kindergarten twice (because we moved country) and it switched him off from learning for years.... in the end I stuck him in pure French, (he could only speak English) in Grade 4... and for the first time ever Oatie's big brother has had to work. (his big brother gets like 100% in his PAT) tests.

So I said, if he didn't leave K, and just stayed there, then what happens next year and the year after and the year after... Sometimes you need to release the bird and let them soar! Oatie has me, his dad and his older two sibs to help him as well with his school work.

So we made the decision to let him leap to Grade 1 with the rest of his class. It will mean that he will have to do full days at school as that was their condition. So I agreed thinking that we might just re-arrange Oatie's day to fit in his ABR. But I would like their support back to get him to the swimming pool which is 400m from the school if that a few times a week and get him in the adaptive riding programme too.

I said that if a few times a week he could swim at lunch, it will get rid of the recess fatigue of being in his walker, it's relaxing for him, he gets CV workout too and I found it realigns his focus to learning.

With Oatie, Skiing, riding, swimming and skating, it will also help him to mature up too.

So, now I need to try and work everyones schedules out, so I can schedule in his ABR and full time school now for September!

So hence it's like Whac-a-mole, you push here and then that area of his life pops out and so you push that back in and well... that with the plate spinning....