Monday 30 July 2012

It's All Fire and Ice

Of all the things that Alec's learnt, how to puff has probably been the most difficult. You can demonstrate, you can blow your cheeks out you can heave, but still it's a bit of a leap of imagination to actually copy it. And Alec only learnt how to copy about a year ago.

His speech therapist came up to me at school the other day. Full of excitement, she said they had given up on bubbles (he tried to eat them) and instead tried light pieces of paper. Eventually, after a few 'huh-huh-huuuuuhs' his mouth formed the correct shape and he blew. A few days later, he'd remembered it.

I'm so glad she told me this. We've got a five-week holiday and it'd be a tragedy if a new skill this important were to be lost through lack of practise.

I know that school has health and safety limitations, but I don't, so I got out a box of matches this morning. It was quite simple, blow out a candle - get a biscuit/piece of banana. Alec will do anything for food. About ten matches later, he was feeling quite pleased with himself and was also fairly full of biscuits.

He did try and set fire to himself a few times, but I was on hand to prevent it. That's Al. If I counted the amount of potentially life-threatening situations he got himself in, we'd be here all day. Only last Friday he decided that the Chinese Musk/water mix in our decorative oil burner looked like a distinctly great tipple. I reckon parents in situations like mine probably need an award for every month their kid fails to make an appearance in A&E.

Bobby filmed the whole thing on his camera, offering some encouraging 'Well dones!' Bobby later took his Nintendo 3DS to me and said he'd been hunting for some 'blow games for Alec'. Since you can actually blow to work certain games on the DS, this wasn't half a bad idea. He eventually found a nice keyboard game that he thought Alec would like, made an 'Alec' folder and persuaded me to pay for it. Now that's brotherly love.

Meanwhile Alec's discovered that those cold cubey things he likes to crunch on are found in the top compartment of the freezer where he can get his mitts on a whole tray of them. So I've been teaching him how to close the freezer door after himself. Small steps...

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