someone, who heard it from someone else who was talking to someone she bumped into the other day said she had heard from someone that the Scrapbooking Memories Masters Book would be out in 10 days time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Doing the happy dance, I can't wait to see it!!

In other news.... we have a bug.. it is nasty

Also.... we got all the reports in from the specialists and they are on their was to the DSC (disablilities services commision) and tomorrow I have to spend the morning at centrelink to hand in our carers allowance application. Even when I sat in the doctors office listening to him dicate the letters I still shed a tear, I know he was no more autistic at that moment than he had been 10 minutes before but it seemed so final, we will be in the system soon and then the paper work starts for funding applications.

Yesterday we had a wonderful day. I decided I didn't want to go anywhere so we had a play day at home. My gorgeous friend Lissy had sent a thank you card that was a scan of one of E's masterpieces and Alec saw it and said.."mummy can we do painting" so I whipped out those paints and grabbed a pile os paper my dad saves for me and off we went, we started off painting and then I thought I would see if Alec would touch the paint, he not only touched it he painted it on his own hands. Once we were done with hands he asked to go outside and do foot prints too, I've had to wait almost 4 years but I finally got those hand and foot prints. We could never get Alec to uncurl his fingers, they were alwasy very stiff, another of those missed signs.



So after that the guys sat down and watched play school, they made jelly and sang a wibbly wobbly jelly song and Alec asked if we could make wibbly wobbly jelly too, so we got out the stools and Alec and Riley watched while I made the jelly, then I poured it into a bunny mould. I think Alec checked that jelly every 10 minutes, I told him we could eat it when Michael came home, the minute we walked in the door from the train that jelly was out of the fridge. Once we turned it out Alec sat and sang the wibbly wobbly song while shaking the jelly.

It was a good day.

yep, shit. How as a mum am I supposed to gently and calmly help my child when he is so distressed he is crying, screaming as though he is in pain and biting his clothes he is so frustrated. Once again I'm not even sure what set him off, this was all over a treat. Was it the wrong treat? was it in the wrong bowl? should it have been on a plate? After 10 minutes of distress Riley started getting concerned, he kept saying "aaic crying, aaic crying" he took Alec his eeyore and started collecting things he thought Alec might like, the poor baby, he was screamed at too.. that was when I called Michael, I know it doesn't stop anything but it keeps me from getting more upset than I am and Michael can sometimes give me a different insight into the cure for the meltdown.

We of course survived, writing this and just getting him a second treat I realised what I did wrong, Alec is a creature of habit and when we first had fruit m&m's (skittles) he would sit at the table and eat them out of the little container, well wrong container and wrong place were my first mistake after that nothing else mattered really. It has been one of those days, he has had about 5 or 6 crying spells while we were out at morning tea this morning.

I need more tools to deal with this and I need to do more reading on autism and the therapies we want to do, Michael has the time for the reading but wont be here I don't have the time to read and learn and I am the one that has to do it.

This is frustrating, heart breaking and oh so stressful.

For the lack of anything witty or enlightening and an overlaying miasma of fatigue I just don't have much to say right now, the boys are all well, the diagnosis trifecta is complete and we are sitting back getting ready for Christmas.

Every night I make plans for my quiet time after the boys have gone to bed and each night I find myself flopping down in a heap too tired so no washing gets folded no cleaning gets done and the scrapbooking sits there gathering dust along with the rest of my house.

This year along with the pressies Michael and I will be including a little something from the TEAR gift catalogue , for $5 you can buy a years supply of school supplies for a child, $10 gets you a mosquito net to help reduce the risk of contracting malaria, $50 buy a goat for a family, the list goes on, you can either purchase these for yourself or TEAR will send you a card to give. Check out there web site for more information, and pass the link along if you think you know people that might be interested.

Michael along with some other people in our community are going to try and raise $2000.00 over the next 12 months and this will help a community build their own school.

It seems I have an abundance of these, I just seem to have difficulty turn them into actions. My list of deeds undone is growing by the day.

I wake with the intention of cleaning...Well anything, I wake with the intention of going for a walk, calling friends, doing paper work, cleaning, washing, losing weight, shaving my legs ..The list goes on and on and each day I am a failure. My friend Danelle bought back my steam mop on FRIDAY.. and today is WEDNESDAY.. It is still sitting at the front door where I left it.

Am I disorganise? Lazy? Absentminded? I don't know. I mean I start to clean but then I either get overwhelmed, have to find something for someone or get them milk/eeyore/bubba (dummy) pick them up and cuddle them or diffuse a screaming fit because I wont dispense green lid treats (this is the jar that holds the mily ways) at 7am so by then I have said stuff it. It isn't like I am sitting and scrapping or working on projects either and apart from when the boys have a nap I try to avoid the computer, I could avoid it a little more so as to make myself do more but to be honest with you I loathe cleaning, I have friends with clean houses and I envy them, why can't I take enough pride to keep my house like that?

Michael makes my excuses for me when I say this but it is also because he wouldn't notice if I did clean up.

Mind you one of my good intentions has been turned into action, we are eating better meals at the same time, this happens if I cook as Michael has no concept of time so when he cooks we eat at 9pm which with 2 little kids just doesn't work for me so dinner is now over and done with by 7pm.

ok..I'm done going to organise my work table as I have 2 projects and a dozen pages to catch up on

take care :)

or a really stong drink may help me recover from yesterday.

We completed step two of our diagnosis yesterday, a two and a half hour visit to a child psychologist. It was once again very stressful and we learnt of more of Alec's weaknesses. The psych said on first meeting Alec he wondered why we were there as he presents as a bubbly normal little boy, but then he listened to him playing and went ahhhhhhhhhh. I don't see it really unless he is having a meltdown, which he did on and off for 6 hours on Saturday afternoon, I feel so helpless and he seems in such pain and so confused during these episodes.

During Alec's assessment I wanted to help him whenever he was stuck on a question, it hurts so much to see him struggle. He scored well for vocabulary but he doesn't really have the comprehension to go with it, his problem solving was good too. So after that the poor little guy was so tired and I was going to quickly going to drop into medicare to get some paper work registered, well the doctor hadn't used the codes medicare wanted so after 25 minutes there we had to go back to our GP, they called medicare then medicare wouldn't talk to them and I just burst into tears at that stage, medicare talked to me we added the extra billing code paid the bill and went to yet another medicare office. I sat there on the verge of tears willing it all to go through properly. Everyone we dealt with was very helpful, it was just more un-needed stress though, I had to keep calling my friend Ali who was taking care of Riley because here I was thinking we would be back by 1:30, we finally turned up at Ali's house at 3:40pm, but now it is done, I have banked the cheque and sent one off to the psychologist.

Now to take care of this house! it has been neglected for 4 weeks now and I am up to load 4 of possibly 8 loads of washing!!! The cleaning can just keep until Saturday a girl has to get some scrapping done after all.