Anyone got any mice that they don’t want? They’d find a warm welcome here and would save me from having to hoover 18 times a day! Toby is currently having 2 inset days from school and is in a major grated cheese phase. Cubes and lumps don’t satisfy and coarse grated doesn’t pass muster – only finely grated, easy-to-drop-all-over-the-floor cheese will do!

I know that all kids have food fads but in autistic kids this is often taken to extremes. We’ve had the ‘only eating milky bar buttons’ phase (and then only if they are perfectly round – any irregularity discarded), the mini cheddar biscuit phase (again discarding any with broken edges or an irregular shape), the custard cream phase (ditto if not perfectly sandwiched together) and the banana (only if cut into 3 equal parts) phase. How I long to be able to cook a meal and have all 4 of us sit together at a table and eat the same thing – it’s a small dream of mine and a work in progress!!

Roll on wednesday!

If you drop in here regularly you'll know that I do my best to keep my blog focused on the happy aspects of my life and mostly on my knitting. But ocassionally there's a need to give it a little flavour of what is going on in the background as there are times when I struggle to be positive and carefree. So today I'm going to be self-indulgent and get something off my chest so that next time we can go on with the business of knitting and having some gentle fun.

Since Toby was diagnosed as severely autistic I've had times where I'd wake each morning with a feeling of expectation and find myself thinking "things will start to get better when…" …he starts nursery, …he starts school, …the summer comes… and thinking in that way is probably a saftey mechanism that has helped me get through some especially tough times. The problem comes when the realisation hits that things haven't got easier and I start to think "what if this is as good as it gets?"

This weekend I realised that I had got through the summer
holidays by thinking that once Toby was back at school
things would be better – foolish thinking because of course they are not. In fact the last week has been one of the toughest for a long while. For a start Toby slept less well than usual (and usual is bad enough!) but he's also been incredibly restless and demanding and the constant high pitched keening noise that he makes when he's distressed is especially hard to take.

Because Toby can't communicate we were left guessing as to why he was so out of sorts and then on Sunday evening I made a breakthrough! I spotted a wobbly tooth. I don't think it was actually causing him pain – it's just the fact that it felt different and in Toby's world different ain't good!

This kind of sums up autism – that something as simple as loosing a first tooth can cause so much angst and distress and in turn push a family to the edge of reason. We're all very grateful that yesterday the tooth fairy zapped the offending tooth and since then Toby has seemed much happier and actually slept through last night!

* Since the offending tooth has disappeared without trace (probably swallowed) I've had to use a stunt tooth – one of Amy's which the tooth fairy let me borrow (just incase she reads this!)