NotSheep

I forgot to write about Toby’s appointment with the Speech Therapist last week. Never mind. He had another appointment this morning, so I’ll tell you about both of them now.

The SLT who did the speech assessment last week was the third that Toby has seen. I can’t say I’m very impressed with the speech therapy services in this area – the actual SLTs have all been great, but the system seems to be barely hanging together. We asked for an appointment way back in late 2006, and he was assessed in April 2007, then again in September that year and then again in November, when he was finally put on the waiting-list for treatment (rather than just assessment). He had a very short course of speech therapy in April 2008 – only three appointments, because the SLT was about to go on maternity leave, and so he was put on the waiting-list for review in August or September. After I chased it up in September, they sent us another appointment, but it was on a day when we had dental appointments arranged elsewhere, so I phoned and left a message to say we needed to change it. A week later I got a call – the day before the day of the appointment – to cancel it We finally got another assessment in October, but the SLT who did it only works two days a week and couldn’t fit Toby in at a time when I could attend without Louie, so we had to wait until someone could… In February, I chased them up, and we finally got another appointment, for last Wednesday.

Our appointment was for 9.15, but we didn’t get in until after 9.45 (which was strange, as we were the first appointment of the day). Once we were in, however, L, the new SLT, and Toby hit it off right away. She said, “Hello Toby!” and asked him if he knew her name. He nodded. She asked what it was, and he leaned back against the wall and looked at her as though sizing her up. And then…he farted. And immediately grinned, clearly feeling that he was clever and hilarious. And L agreed with him – she burst out laughing, and the two of them were instant friends.

I suggested she skip the bit of the assessment which tests comprehension and vocabulary, as a) we were running so late and b) I know there’s no problem there. She went straight to checking out his pronunciation of various sounds. He delighted her by making a wide range of animal sounds, and by teasing her with the wrong sound sometimes (you can tell from the grin and the sideways glance that he knows full well what he’s doing). She showed him a picture and asked what it was. He told her it was a house, and while she got her bits of paper organised, she asked what colour it was. He listed off all the colours on the house, and then insisted on telling her all the colours for every other picture in her flip-chart. He told her that he’s “three-and-a-half”, and that he is “getting giant, but Barney is already giant”, and lots more besides. It wasn’t long before she looked at me and said, “I see what you mean about the vocabulary!”

At the end of the assessment, she offered a short session of speech therapy beginning this week, at 9.15 each Wednesday morning – that works for us, because Scratchy can go into work a bit later than usual, which allows me to leave Louie at home and focus better on Toby. So his first treatment was today.

We were crossing the car-park to the door of the building when L arrived and got out of her car. She spotted Toby and called “Hello!” and he called “Hello!” back. And then he showed her how to get into the building, and which doors to go through, and which corridors to walk down, to get to the Speech Therapy department

Toby had his “workbook” with him – the first Superphonics book, which he “reads” when his brothers are doing “their work”. And so the appointment started with him telling her all the sounds he knew from that – which is most of them. Then she showed him some pictures from the Jolly Phonics range – which has to be the most illogical and unintuitive phonics programme I’ve ever seen. The sound “m”, for example, is represented by a drawing of a plate with a knife and fork. From this, the child is meant to think “food” and thus “delicious” and thus “mmmm” – never mind that most children his age will say “yum” rather than “mmmm”. (I was looking at it and thinking, “uh…meal?”) The airplane picture represents “n”. A pair of castanets is “c”. A drawing of a cat might not be very exciting, but at least most toddlers would recognise what it was. L agreed with me that many of the pictures are bizarre choices, but it’s what the local schools use and thus it’s what the local SALTs use.

Fortunately this won’t make up a lot of what L plans to do with him. He can make almost all the sounds – in fact he can make all the sounds that are on their chart for children aged 4 to 4.5 years. He can also put almost all the beginning consonants together with following vowel-sounds – things like “ma, me, moo, my, mo”. The only ones that cause him any difficulty are “g” (which he often turns into “d”) and “c” (which becomes “t”) – and these are the two sounds that I, without consciously thinking about it, have been using in games with him recently – hence the names of our ducks in the bath, for example.

We talked about quiet sounds and loud sounds, and about letting him feel the difference between the two by touching his throat as he makes them. L said “he’s a bit young for that, but then he’s very advanced in everything else so maybe he would get it okay”. And indeed, he got it just fine when we tried it out this afternoon.

She asked him to make his animal sounds again, just because she enjoyed them so much last week, and she laughed at the things he said and did and told me (repeatedly), “He’s brilliant!” He has certainly charmed her – and the feeling seems to be mutual, for he’s already making plans about what he’s going to tell L when we go back next week. I only hope she’s ready for him

It’s been one of those days already, and it’s only 8.15 as I write this. I woke with a headache – I’m becoming increasingly convinced that this happens whenever I’ve eaten chocolate the night before. I’ve also got conjunctivitis, for the first time in – oh, it must be nearly twenty years. I’m hoping I can get some over-the-counter drops for it, because if I need to see a GP, it will take at least a week to get an appointment.

But anyway…life goes on…I got up, washed, dressed…and less than two minutes later, poured half a bottle of hydrogen peroxide down my front. So it was back to the bedroom to find more clothes, and then downstairs to get the poured-on clothes into the laundry as quickly as possible – but ah, the washing-machine is still full of the clothes that I washed yesterday and that Scratchy offered to hang up last night…so I got those out, got another load of laundry started, took the washed ones outside to hang up, and promptly poured all my clothespins out of their bag onto the ground. And it looks like rain. But I’ve hung the clothes anyway – I’ve nowhere else to put them. Sigh.

Maybe it’s a 24-hour frustration bug. I hope so, because if it is, the 24 hours will be up soon. Yesterday involved a visit to the library that never happened. We gathered all the books, and left to go to the library, and I stopped to do an errand or two, and then we got to the library, and I discovered there was nowhere to park, because the market had taken over the car-park opposite the library. So I stopped on the double yellow lines outside the library and told the boys to go in and be back out in ten minutes. And they took the next ten minutes to find the book-bag, which was now empty, as they’d taken all the books out while I was doing my errand, and left them all over the car. Meanwhile Louie was making it very clear that he’d had Enough of Being in the Car, and a pair of police officers had walked past, and I’d spotted a traffic warden along the street – so Barney took the books in and then we all came home.

And that wasn’t the only thing that never happened yesterday.

People who’ve been reading for a very long time might remember that Barney used to go to a fencing club. Then he went off to France, and when he came back, we could no longer find the fencing club. It never had a contact phone number, just an email for someone from another club who helps out – I emailed him again, but never got a reply. We drove by the church hall where they’d previously met, at the time they’d previously met, but nobody was there. And then Barney decided that he didn’t like having to take his glasses off to fence anyway, so we let it go. Recently he’s decided to take it up again, and I found, through google, a pdf file about the club which had a mobile phone number on it – ahah! I rang the number, and was told that the club had changed location, and had also changed from Fridays to Thursdays, and that it was definitely on this Thursday. And Barney planned to go – and so did George and Freddy, as they’re now also old enough to attend. Last night, Scratchy took off with the three of them in the car…and about 40 minutes later, arrived back, with the three of them in the car. They’d arrived at the community centre, where the custodian had been adamant that the fencing club met on Fridays, not Thursdays. This seemed bizarre; during my conversation with the guy who teaches at it, we’d both mentioned Thursday by name several times. Not only that, but there was another parent and son there, who had also been told that it met on Thursdays. But the custodian said nope, definitely Fridays. Hm.

Twenty minutes after they all got home, there was a knock on the door – the other parent who’d been at the community centre. He lives just down the road from us, and recognised the boys, so figured out where we lived – and he came to tell us that he had discovered what was going on. The fencing club meets in the old community centre, not the new one. On Thursdays.

Right, that’s my ranting over, for now anyway. I’ve got most of another post written, much less moany than this one and talking about things we’ve done, rather than things we’ve managed not to do, and I’ll try to finish it later today so that this isn’t the top post on the site for too long. If you’ve any no-frustrations vibes going spare, send ‘em this direction…

So having done the ranty blog (below, unless you’re reading a monthly archive, in which case it’s above), here’s the updatey post.

We had a few days of sunshine and we made the most of it – getting out into the garden at every opportunity. It hasn’t been particularly warm, but it has been sunny, and living where we do, I think we need to make the most of it when we get a bit of the yellow round thing in the sky. So I kicked the boys out of the house a lot, whether they liked it or not (and now that the rain has returned, I think we’re all glad I did). There was a lot of trampolining – George, Freddy and Jack are pretty good, and even Toby does well. I got suckered into judging a trampolining competition between the them this afternoon – “first one to get 100 points wins”, and I agreed, then immediately realised that no matter what I said or did, someone was going to hate me for it.

We tidied up the patio a bit, and I took the pressure-washer to the paving stones and all the garden furniture. We’ve also been planting seeds for veg, a little bit into seedling trays each weekend, and they’ve started spending daytimes outside, although they’re still coming into the conservatory overnight. Barney set the trays on top of the aquarium one evening, with one of them too close to the edge, and during the night it fell down, so we lost a few. I retrieved about half of the tiny seedlings, but now I’m not sure what they all are! Rocket and lettuce look very similar when they’re just starting to grow, and the five or six not-quite-peeking-out-of-the-soil plants that are at the other end of the tray might be onions, or they might be cucumbers…I’ve planted more of each in the hope that it will help me identify what I’ve got

Jack spent a lot of time playing outside J, who lives down the street and who is something of a wanderer – I’ve been keeping a close eye on that, because I suspect Jack would cheerfully wander off too, given half a chance. They’ve seen a bit less of one another this week, now that J is back at school, but Jack still spent most of yesterday afternoon at J’s house, and today J came here; they spent a happy couple of hours making play-dough and playing with it, and then J decided to stay for dinner. I made a quick phone-call to check with his mum to check it was okay, and he polished off several sausage-rolls.

This evening, Freddy is off at a new ju-jitsu class. Both he and George decided they didn’t want to go to the old one anymore. I can’t say I blame them – every week they were coming home upset about something or other. It’s a very large group of juniors (close to 60 some weeks), and I don’t feel the adult supervision was nearly adequate – and with such a large group, they were getting very little small-group or individual teaching. I researched what other ju-jitsu clubs are in the area, and we’ve found one that sounds good – much smaller, with juniors split into two classes of 10-15 each. It’s a few minutes further away, but it’s worth that if they are enjoying it and doing better. We’ll see what Freddy thinks of it when he gets home in an hour or so. George was supposed to go to the earlier class this evening (he’s a belt or two behind Freddy), but he’s had a very meltdowny day, and when he was throwing clothes around his room instead of putting on his gi, I changed his plans.

Jack wants to start ju-jitsu too – I’ve delayed him so far, because he’s really Not Very Good at Doing What He’s Told and with such a large class, it would have been a waste of everyone’s time and my money – but if the smaller groups work out, I’ll probably let him start next week. And the older three are also interested in Taekwondo, but the nearest club is over-16s only, and the next-nearest is about half an hour away, which means at least two hours of someone’s time for the taxi-ing, so I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Toby has had another couple of speech therapy sessions since I last blogged about it, and seems to be making progress. There is definitely a mutual admiration thing going on between him and L, the ST – he calls her his “biggest friend”, and she regularly tells him he’s brilliant and tells me she could keep him all day. She’s given him lots of “work” to do – lots of phonics-y worksheets, which he’s enjoying, and as it saves me having to keep looking for things to keep him busy while his brothers study, I’ve no complaints.

Barney has submitted his final assessment for his OU science course, and his next CMA for his maths. The science assessment seemed to take forever – mainly because Barney decided that neither the OU nor I knew what we were talking about, and thus we could safely be ignored when we talked about taking notes and active learning. He just read the book and assumed his (admittedly very good) memory would get him through. Negative consequence: he struggled with the assignment. Positive consequence: he’s learned that the OU and I might just have a point. Maybe.

He has also started into his GCSE science courses, so he’s got quite a heavy load on at the minute. I had hoped to get a lot more skoolwork done with all of them over the last few months, but between various illnesses etc, it hasn’t happened. Never mind, we’ll catch up when it rains all summer.

He’s supposed to go flying with Air Cadets next weekend, but yet again, he’s going to miss out. It feels like there’s a conspiracy to prevent him from getting behind the controls of a plane – so far he’s had his plans thwarted by cloud-cover, by the cancellation of a flying day, by not getting his forms in soon enough, and this time, because we’ll be away for the weekend (at an En Famille exchange weekend).

And he’s decided to go back to the fencing club, as mentioned in the rant below (or above).

Louie is still a velcro-baby, although he has at least decided that being velcro’d to someone other than me for a little while occasionally isn’t such a terrible thing. He still hasn’t got any teeth – should I be worried? All of the others had teeth by this age. Hm.

Bus-like blogging – nothing for a couple of weeks, then three posts in two days. Anyway.

Freddy returned from the new ju-jitsu class last night and proclaimed it was “brilliant”. There is just as much space as the big class has, but about a quarter of the number of kids. Freddy was also impressed by the Sensei: “She’s really good at controlling the class; she didn’t even shout once!” – which tells me something about the other class, I think! He’s quite sure that he wants to stick with this class, and from the sound of it, I think it will be a far better fit for George and Jack too, so that’s one thing sorted. It does, however, mean that there will be parent-taxis (mostly daddy-taxis, I admit) heading out six days a week. Monday will still involve Air Cadets for Barney, Tuesday still has St John Ambulance Cadets and Beavers, Wednesday still has Cubs and Scouts, Thursday is about to acquire fencing, and now Fridays are getting ju-jitsu. On Saturday Barney goes to a youth-group in the city, and George wants to start attending that in a couple of months when he’s old enough. We’ll need a weekend to recover from the week and the weekend.

Scratchy had an appointment for an eye-test this morning – he had his eyes checked just a few weeks ago, but he has been complaining recently of haziness in his vision, and couldn’t remember if he’d mentioned this at his previous check, or if he’d been asked if he had noted any problems He kept going on about it to me, as though telling me about it for the tenth time would make me suddenly remember that I knew how to fix it; eventually I made the very difficult decision that he should get it checked out (a decision he should have made himself, of course, but that’s not how it works). It turns out that he has a very small cataract in one eye. The optometrist is writing a letter for him to take to the GP – which will be interesting, as he isn’t registered with a GP, but there’s an eye clinic at a local hospital that he can attend instead. The GP would probably only refer him to that anyway. From the little bit of research I’ve done today, it seems it’s not likely to be a major problem, and it’s probably better that he knows about it now so that it can be checked regularly and treated if necessary.

After his eye-exam, he went shopping. For netbooks. Three of them. Mind, they were reduced to £129, and they will certainly get lots of use here – the boys have mostly been using some very old, very beat-up laptops (the kind where you mustn’t press the keys very hard because if you do, they fall off). The netbooks are being funded partly by the boys themselves, from their savings (because it’s not Christmas or their birthdays) and partly by us (because I don’t want to hear the inevitable sulky “well I paid for it!” when I tell them to turn them off). They all run on Linux – there were Windows versions available, but I figured that the kids could do almost everything they want to do on Linux – and there is still one mostly-functional laptop here, as well as a functional desktop and an almost-functional-again desktop, all running Windows, so they can use those for anything that requires it. And there’s less rubbish available to download for Linux, which, when it comes to this lot, is a good thing.

So there’s a blurry bit in the budget as well as Scratchy’s eye.

Barney went to the youth-group after lunch, and then went with some of his friends from the group to a restaurant, where he had a Turkish-Delight-flavoured milkshake. Yes, you read that right Jack took off down the street to his mate’s house, and George, Freddy and Toby helped me plant more vegetable seeds and re-pot the seedlings that had come up in trays. The seedlings were inadvertently left outside last night (by which I mean: it was all Scratchy’s fault! ) but they seem to have survived; let’s hope they also survive my less-than-skilful repotting. The newly-planted seeds are in trays on a patio table, which will be brought into the conservatory overnight, and the big pots containing things which had already started to grow are now up on the patio, where they’ll get plenty of whatever weather we get: sun and/or rain – and I just hope it’s not too cold overnight for them. I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to growing stuff, to be honest, so I’m making it up as I go along. Much like the rest of my life, really.