Mid-summer picnicing

July 22, 2021September 15, 2025 Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)19 Comments

Today is Toby’s last ever day at school. Fifteen years in the same severe learning difficulty school is a long time and it’s hard to know how he’ll react to not going there again. In many ways it feels like we are sailing into uncharted waters, I just hope we don’t lose the paddle along the way 🙂

With the long summer break on the horizon, I decided to make the most of the last few weeks of familiar routines to go on a couple of solo mini adventures with my rucksack and camera. We’ve had perfect growing conditions here this year and the countryside around us is so green with lush summer growth. There are summer flowers everywhere: wild honeysuckle, cow parsley, daisies and buttercups. Fruit is swelling on the trees and the brambles are thickly tangled, studded with flowers and busy with bees. So many of the things that I love about our local countryside. I also love picnics and am happy to have had five of them recently, including two lovely ones down in Surrey with Amy, who is staying in her uni digs until the end August. We’re very proud of her as she’s done really well in the finals of her English and creative writing degree, getting a 2:1 mark and is now looking for her first full time job, not an easy task in these chaotic times, but hopefully something will come along.

I hope to post periodically over the summer break, but might not manage to be here very much until the autumn. I will definitely be back though to celebrate my 15th year of blogging in early September. I hope you have a good couple of months, J xxx

Pictures taken at Tewin Orchard, July 2021

Many thanks

June 23, 2021September 15, 2025 Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)24 Comments

Thank you so, so much for the host of kind, compassionate and wise comments, messages and emails that you’ve sent me in response to my previous post. The personal stories and experiences that have been shared help me enormously, and such a kind outpouring of friendship and support from everyone has buoyed me up no end. I will go back and read over the comments on that post, as I often do with the comments on similar posts that I’ve written in the past, and I know that every kind and heartfelt word of advice, encouragement and support will help me with future challenges too and guide our thinking as we go forward.

What a wonderful thing the internet is in this regard – that it can connect people and provide a space to reach out to one another. Some of the best and most useful advice that I’ve ever received on parenting Toby over the years has been graciously given in comments here on the blog, and I’m so very grateful to everyone who has taken the time to write. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous xx

Toby remains settled and content with school still underpinning his weekly routine and I’m currently giving myself some time off from things that require lots of concentration, like paperwork and pattern writing, and instead going with what takes my fancy at the time. I suppose it’s a kind of holiday-at-home. I’ve been reading more and listening to music and sometimes just sitting in the garden doing nothing other than cloud watching and listening to the birds. It feels good.

We share our garden with lots of visitors and I take a lot of pleasure from their visits. In the past we’ve had orphaned hedgehogs, blackbirds, friendly robins and more recently a couple of squirrels, a family of blue-tits and our resident fox, Kit. She’s really made our garden her personal space and though she doesn’t visit every day, she’s often to be found waiting for me first thing in the morning, either sitting outside the back door, napping on top of the woodshed or stretched out sunbathing on the garden table. I feel very privileged to have been adopted by her.

I have been knitting a little too and making bodies for many of the dog heads that I knitted up for the pattern photos. I’d like to have a giveaway with some of those, so I’ll be taking some pictures and posting about that soon. And tomorrow I’m off to Surrey to spend the day with Amy – she went back to her uni accommodation last month after spending the winter lockdown here with us while she finished her final pieces for her degree. While she’s waiting for her results she’s getting herself sorted out for the next stage in her life, which will hopefully include a job soon.

Thank you again for allowing me to share a little of life beyond the knitting here, I’m never fully sure before I click ‘publish’ on such a post how it will be received, and am quite overwhelmed still at the enormity of the kind response, you have my deepest gratitude x

autism · countryside · wildlife

Some personal thoughts on the effect of lockdown

June 15, 2021September 15, 2025 Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)101 Comments

If you’ve been a regular visitor here for a while, you’ll know that my blog posts sometimes become a bit less frequent and that it’s often a sign that things are not going too well with my son Toby. The truth is that I am struggling a little at the moment due to the accumulative effect of lockdown on Toby and our family. I’ve gone into more detail below but I don’t expect everyone will want to read that. In part it helps me to write it down and I think it helps others in the same position – I know many other parents who regularly experience violent behaviour from their special needs child and it does help to know you’re not the only one going through this.

Anyway, there’s no requirement to read further, I do however hope that everyone will enjoy the pictures here of the English countryside in early summer 🙂 Walking on my own with my camera lifts my spirits – quietly paying attention to the sounds of birdsong and the wind in the trees, the smells of earth and flowers, the feel of the sun on my skin, and clearing my mind of everything but what I’m experiencing in that moment. And I truly hope that you have something in your life that brings you a similar sense of peace and pleasure, whatever struggles you are or have been going through xxx

PS: I may not be blogging as regularly as before but normal knitting service will resume soon. I have got more patterns planned and I have all those knitted dogs that I’m slowly finishing off and, because it’s been so long since I last did one, I think a giveaway is on the cards.

The effect of Lockdown on Toby, a non-verbal 19 year old with autism, severe learning difficulties and extreme behavioural issues:

At the moment Toby is actually fairly well settled, he’s back at school and that has helped him enormously. However at the beginning of lockdown last year things were very different. It was a tough time for him (and for us) as all of a sudden every routine underpinning his world stopped at once.

Toby is non-verbal and has severe learning difficulties along with his autism, which means he could not ask what was happening or understand why he could no longer go to school or his respite club, or go swimming or eat in McDonalds. We couldn’t help him to understand for how long this would last, nor could we lessen the extreme anxiety that this change brought him. As a result his behaviour deteriorated badly and he started having big dramatic meltdowns and self injuring much more frequently. He also started being violent to us, and let me say that being afraid of your child hurting you is a very difficult thing to deal with. We’ve been through a patch like this before when he was 10, but he was smaller than me then and not as strong. Nowadays he’s 6 ft tall, 14 stone and very strong indeed, and once he gets a grip on you there’s no breaking free. Everyone who has worked with Toby knows him as a gentle giant, and when everything in his universe is predictable and familiar he really is, and although he is very sensitive and easily upset, he is usually most likely to hurt himself when he is distressed and not others. So the fact that he has physically hurt us numerous times is an indication of the depth of his distress caused by the monumental changes to his daily life.

One of the things I’ve found hardest is trying not to react to the physical pain and emotional hurt. If I cry out in pain or burst into tears Toby becomes even more distressed and his self injuring then escalates, biting his hand with all his might and punching himself in the head – perhaps indicating some understanding that he’s done something wrong or that he feels bad in some way at causing pain and distress. So after he’s lashed out at me I check that he’s safe where he is and remove myself from the situation, go off for a little cry and rub some arnica into my bruises, make a cup of tea and try and supress my emotions so that we can dissipate the intense situation and move on with our day. In this kind of daily crisis you just do what you can to get through it and you try not to wonder about how long it will last. You close off the day at bedtime and open a new one each morning, trying to stay positive and hopeful that the day will be a better one. And I am relieved to now be able to say that the days are much better recently and now that he is settled back into the routine of school again, he’s much calmer overall, despite some of his favourite activities still being off limits.

But, the experience has taken it’s toll on me and I’m feeling less resilient, less hopeful about the future and rather worn down and depleted. It’s making daily life hard some days and even knitting has lost a little of it’s pleasure for me at the moment. I know that I’ll be OK in time but that’s something we no longer have much of, as we’re now in the last ever 5 weeks of Toby’s school life – he leaves towards the end of July, after almost 15 years in the same severe learning difficulty school and frankly I am terrified about the change that this will bring. I feel that life has taken on the ominous quality of living in the eye of a storm – the stresses and difficulties caused by the lockdown mostly behind us, and ahead of us the uncertainty and adjustments of a whole new routine, as Toby leaves the safe familiarity of school behind.

There is hope however. In September he will start a 2 year college course for young adults with severe learning difficulties, called Learning for Living. He’ll have 1:1 support there and will go 4 days a week in term time. Once he has settled there (and we know it will be rocky to start with) we hope that we’ll have a little more calm time before the biggest challenge of all, which will come after he leaves college.

I was once so very certain that after school and college Toby would stay living with us for as long as we were healthy enough to care for him and that we would fill his life with everything that he enjoys and takes pleasure from, forming our daily routine around his needs as we always have. I think that lockdown has frightened me so much because it has shaken my faith in that certainty and introduced the possibility that we may not be able to cope if factors outside of our control remove our ability to provide what he needs. My aim for now is to try and leave thoughts of the future for when it arrives and try to focus on finding small and fortifying pleasures in my days so that I can get myself back on an even keel and be useful to Toby when he’s going to need me most.

Thanks so much for reading x