I'm a little sad today.

My boys went back to school, Alec started year 2 and Riley started pre-primary. They will both be gone everyday. Riley has been looking forward to school for weeks, always talking about it almost as a rite of passage, growing older, going up a class. He is already in a hurry to celebrate his 6th birthday which isn't until October.

Alec is 7 in 3 weeks and we still haven't finalised plans for his birthday yet. I only realise once we are among Alec's class mates how much different our lives are. A bit slower living in the now. I suppose when you deal with autism you shed a lot of baggage, I'm not saying this right I know. You try to travel light but with all eventualities covered, bit of a contradiction that isn't it. Things can still change, things you thought had worked well ended up being discarded. Like soccer, we had assumed Alec would want to play soccer again this year, but he started coming up with lots of reasons why he didn't want to, and we can't do the, you'll be right it will be good for you, because I don't want to be standing there at the first day being told I hadn't listened and he didn't want to do it. I don't want him to be distressed, sad, confused, hurt. Already on the first day there were things that could have caused hurt, thankfully this is a time when I feel a little relieved he can't read people. I mean what 7 year rolls his eyes when someone tells them something, we must have missed the bad attitude when it was going around, atleast it let me make a note of who to guide him away from during the year.

We have had lots of sleepless nights the last week, any new thing or change causes concern for him. It seems to manifest itself at bed time, so most nights the last week he hasn't been to sleep before 10pm, then he is awake by 1am, most nights I have tried to settle him again, one night it was 4am before that happened and then he was back at 6am, lucky we were able to sleep until 9am that morning. This morning when he came in I let him sleep on the floor, just so he would sleep.

He was excited to get to school, back to routine, he thrives on routine, it is something he can rely on, he wasn't all that excited about the first day of school photos though and I hope he doesn't fall over his new shoes too many times before home time.