Chicken Pox

My littlest had chicken pox yesterday. I think. Having seen it 3 times before, I am fairly sure that it was, although it was so short lived she only got red spots, they didn’t go up into blisters. I expected her to be covered this morning, but they had all gone.

You see, about 2 weeks ago I took her to play with a little boy who had chicken pox. Deliberately. So she would get it mildly. While waiting for the boy’s mother, my other daughter and her friend also played with him. They’ve both had chicken pox, or so I had been assured. But when my daughter phoned her friend yesterday to see if she could play, she was told she wasn’t very well. So I thought, Oh dear, I bet it’s chicken pox. I was not surprised by the phone call this morning confirming that. Poor little lamb is coevered in them.

But at least my littley didn’t have it too badly.

Without Hope

I know it’s no real excuse, but I have been sooo busy. And I haven’t really had anything to write about. There is stuff I could write about, but friends and relatives read this blog, lol. I should start an anonymous one and spill all the family secrets, shouldn’t I? I really do feel like I’m living in a soap opera at times. Quite a lot of the time actually.

 And I have been pretty unhappy too. I feel as if I am waiting for things to happen before I can do anything. There is my daughter moving out, having the baby, this school year ending, the next beginning. I am sitting around waiting for the future to solve all the current worries and problems and I just realised the day before yesterday that this is not going to happen. Tomorrow, as a wise man once said, never comes. Living in the future means I am missing the now. No wonder I have been so miserable.

Hence the title Without Hope. I am sitting here hoping everything will turn out alright, and this has become all-consuming to the extent that all of my hopes are pinned on the tomorrow. Which means I spend so much time hoping for tomorrow I am actually missing today. So I have to stop hoping. This doesn’t mean that I have to be hopelessly pessimistic, just not live for tomorrow all the time.

I have been trying this for a couple of days, this living in the moment business, and actually I am feeling a bit better. It’s pretty good really. Because although I  know that there are things in future to worry about and things in the future to look forward to and enjoy, I have also made the discovery that there are a good many things that are around me right now that are good and fun. Also things that need dealing with. Of course. But I am not sitting here waiting for the worst to happen and missing out on all the fun.

Well, I probably shouldn’t say that exactly. I mean I’ve only been doing this for a couple of days. It’ll probably take a while to get the hang of it properly. But it seems to make sense. It seems to be working.

I’ve got to let go of all these big issues, too. I mean, if they come up on a personal level I will have to deal with them of course. But do I need to sit here in my own living room fretting about what is going on in the wider world? Does the legal abortion limit directly affect me? As I would never have an abortion, then no it does not. On a personal level it is a non-issue because I have my own far stricter rules about it. I think it is a great shame that this happens. Next time it comes up for debate I will probably say the same things I always do when it’s debated. But to get so emotionally involved. To allow it to make me so miserable – not a good idea, really, is it?

So that’s it, the new me, living in the moment…..well, I’m trying to anyway. Wish me luck.

The Abortion Debate

Well of course this is in the news at the minute, with the potential for a reduction in the limits for abortion; so called “social” abortions, at any rate. And I do have VIEWS on this. Really strong views. As many people do in this particular area.

I did find it disappointing that the hybrid embryos have been allowed. It is a dehumanisation of which we should be wary. If you take a hazelnut and put it in a walnut shell, it is still a hazelnut. Putting a human embryo into an empty animal egg does not alter the fact that it is human. At the very least, a potential human. It is unknown whether these hybrids could ever implant and grow to full term. That means that potentially even the act of putting the “material” into the animal egg is in fact basically fatal to any potential life that could come about. But we should remember the definition of life. Growth, respiration, feeding. These are the basic things that we all agree make something alive. These are things which occur in a developing embryo even from the time we choose to call blastocyst. Whatever it is, it is alive.

That is a different debate from the abortion one. The arguments for cutting the limit include the fact that babies born prematurely are now more likely to survive than they were 15 years ago. On the pro-choice side, they say that rates of survival have not improved below 24 weeks and so that is a reason for leaving the limit alone. But if we look at this argument more closely it is easy to see the flaws.

For a start: babies born prematurely are not the same as babies who are aborted. At least 90% of babies (yes, I will be sticking to this emotive term rather than the dehumanising “foetus”) who are aborted would in fact have been carried to term. They would have been born healthy. They are healthy babies, their mothers are healthy mothers. On the other hand, babies born prematurely usually have problems. This is why they have been born prematurely. In some cases it is the baby itself that has or develops a problem, and is effectively ejected by the mother’s body as non-viable. Mostly this happens by 12 weeks, but can be later depending on when these defects cause a problem. In some cases it is because of a problem with the mother, often causing a dysfunction of the womb or cervix. So some of those babies will in fact be healthy but the mother’s body has failed in mid-term, or some will be unhealthy because the mother’s body has failed earlier, resulting in poor development of the baby. Depending upon the nature of the problem and the health of the baby itself, it can be possible to save their lives from a very early stage.

Another point to bear in mind here is the very fact that the limit is currently 24 weeks. After 24 weeks, the survival rates have increased dramatically. Before 24 weeks they have shown no great change. But one of the reasons for that is likely to be the fact that 24 weeks is the limit. Doctors have an obligation to do everything they can for a baby born at 24 weeks plus. They have no such obligation for a baby born at 23 weeks and 6 days. So this fact in itself will mean that babies below 24 weeks are far less likely to have the interventions seen even just a day or so later, thus reducing the survival rates which could quite possibly be higher.

To simplify, and sum up: aborted babies and premature babies are actually 2 different sets of babies. At least 90% of abortions over 12 weeks would in fact have resulted in a healthy, full-term baby. Premature babies are likely to be born because of the problems they have and it is an amazing thing that so many of them are able to survive these days at all. Finally, the cut-off of 24 weeks affects the treatment of babies born prematurely before that time and so reduces their chances further by it’s very existence. If the limit were reduced I would expect survival rates for at least another 2 weeks’ worth (ie, from 22 weeks) to improve, purely because babies were now considered viable from a younger age.

I have done my best to try to describe the way I see this argument. Personally I think abortion is wrong full stop. I can see the difficulties and understand why people do it, but that doesn’t make it right. Thankfully I have never been faced with this situation myself. At the end of the day, whatever I may believe, I don’t know what I would do in a given situation. I can take the moral high ground, but I know that reality can throw us a curve ball, so I never judge people by their actions. Well, I try really hard not to anyway. 

Problems at School

Perhaps this would be better titled as “Problems withSchool”, but now that I’ve said that it’s covered either way, lol. Seriously, though, I am not happy about the state of State education. You can probably tell this by the fact I have an entire page dedicated to the subject. Also the whole thing about sex education as posted a couple of weeks ago. My son has now got over that trauma, but a lesson of sitting with his ears plugged and his eyes closed is not the way a 9-yr-old should be spending any part of his school day.

#2 hates school with a passion. He will look for any excuse not to go (this morning he banged his hand on the push chair, which hurt a great deal, and said, “That’s great. Now I can’t write with this hand. There’s no point in going to school if I can’t write.” Good one. I took him in anyway). He says it’s boring. He says he would rather break both his legs than go to school. He would love to be ill – but just ill enough not to go to school, not ill enough to actually suffer in any way. His dream would be to go in for 5 minutes, collect his work and come home with it, dropping it off the next day for marking. This is not how it should be.

Sadly, for a great many of our children, this is the way it is. Okay, #2 has slightly more difficulties than the average child, what with his Asperger’s Syndrome. But he is an intelligent lad with a joy of learning. Just not a joy of being educated within the established system. But I have had problems with #3 as well, and she started out loving school. Well, nursery school anyway. She used to cry every weekend, every holiday, every time I went to pick her up, because she loved it so much. Shortly after she started proper school she realised that it was quite different. “It’s not the same as nursery, Mummy,” she said to me.

However, moving her, as I recently did, to the local independent school, has worked wonders. She is happy again, enjoying every minute thoroughly. She tells me about what she has done. She seems to be learning things. She is keen to go in. Her behaviour at home has improved. There has been no mention of “tummy ache” since she started. She was getting daily aches and pains, which was one of the reasons I was looking around in the first place. Also, a conversation with her teacher hinted to me that there were problems. For a start, the teacher seemed to think a conversation we had had 2 weeks before had actually been 4 months ago. That concerned me. Also, I was a little concerned that #3 was showing possible signs of ADD or ADHD, but my concerns were not taken seriously. “Well, she’s just…her really. You know her. She should be blonde!” Which is all very well, but not an altogether helpful attitude.

I have had no hint of problems at the new school, but then they don’t seem to expect 6 year-olds to concentrate for excessive periods of time on very boring things. This is  refreshing, but could equally be addressed within the state system. Literacy and numeracy hours are not good. It is too long to spend on one subject. Even at secondary level, it has been found that the ideal length of a lesson is 45 minutes. Longer than that and you lose concentration and interest. If 15-year-olds can’t cope with an hour on one subject, how the hell do we expect 5-year-olds to do so?

Of course, I have been here before, with my eldest. #1 is nearly 17 now, and she started school full time at the tender age of 4 1/2. She loved it and did well despite moving through 4 different school while still in Infant school. We moved around a lot when she was younger. This was before literacy and numeracy – back in the day when they did English and Maths. It was before cursive writing too, and her writing was always legible. It started to change gradually while she was going through the system, never affecting her as they were working from the bottom up. So I know that they can do it.

It was secondary school that caused the real problems for #1. She had done well in her KS2 SATs (11+), getting 5s despite the fact she was only 10 when she sat it. (Her birthday being in July). Her first year at secondary school wasn’t too bad, although I was a bit concerned that she wanted to be popular rather than a “swot”. But in year 7 it all went horribly wrong because that was when she started being bullied.

It took a long time to find out what was going on, although I did notice a change. For a start, she started getting out of her uniform within seconds of being home. This was new, but I put it down to her age. But we started getting moodiness, abdominal migraine (“tummy ache”!!), although never any overt wish to stay off school. It was months before I found out she was being bullied. I spoke to the school time and time again. I learned that the school had been put in special measures. I spoke to the new deputy head. He could find no record of any of the contacts I had made with the school. They had been covering up the fact that they had a serious bullying problem.

In the end I changed her to a different school, but it was too little, too late. She was in a serious emotional mess by then, so very angry at every one and everything. Her behaviour at school reflected her distrust of adults to help her in any way. She was in fact on the verge of being excluded when I decided to withdraw her formally from state education. 

My reasoning was based largely on her SATs results. At 14, she had only got the same grades (5s) as she had at 11. She was an emotional wreck and things were not going to improve. She was going to be excluded, labelled a bully and a problem child and treated as such. It would have been the beginning of a terrible down-ward spiral. I knew that if I taught her nothing for the next 2 years I was still not doing worse than the State education had done in the last 3. That was exactly what happened, as it turned out. She was in no state to be learning anything, having been turned right off the idea of education. So I let her regain her equilibrium, which took about 18 months. Then we looked at other possibilities, like college.

She got straight in, and is gaining distinctions in all of her essays. She should pass her year-long animal care course with flying colours. It is a shame that she will not continue on next year to convert it into a diploma, but as she will be a mother in the summer it would be hard for her to juggle things in September to get back to college. She has time, and a family willing to help and support in whatever she wants to do. The important thing is that she has shown a willingness and an ability to learn, to study and do well, despite her difficulties at school.

I hope I can get #2 sorted and settled before things get into such a state. That is my task for the next 2 years, organising my son’s educational needs. Wish me luck.

One Extreme to Another

So if you’ve read any of this blog you already know my son is “on the Autistic Spectrum”, as they say. A useful label, which will get him more help at school. Not that he needs it academically, as such. Well, he could do a lot better than he is, but he’s in the top set for everything anyway. I realise that it could sound rather boastful, and I do try not to be, but I am rightly proud of my children, who are all very intelligent little beings. Of course, that isn’t really anything to do with me, I suppose. Lucky genetics probably play a larger part in intelligence. A few points one way or the other can be gained or lost through the nurture side of things but it’s not something I have ever really bothered myself about.

Anyway, there he is, a little bit odd, quiet, shy, obsessive, etc. Washes his hands a lot at times. Doesn’t like the bus because it’s too noisy. Has to have the labels cut out of his clothes. And then there’s his sister….

#3 is a bull in a china shop. She is busy. She is loud, gregarious, accident-prone, demanding, absolutely full to the brim of beans. Bounces off the ceiling a lot. The word “brash” suits her very well. She acts before she thinks, has no consideration of consequences and her curiosity frequently gets the better of her. She is always scruffy, often filthy, flits from one thing to the next constantly. Her work at her old school reflected this very much. I was talking to a school nurse (about my son actually, but #3 came into the chat somehow) and she suggested that #3 sounded hyperactive.

This was one of the things that prompted the move to a new school, because where she was didn’t really take my concerns seriously. I did tell the teacher at her new school that this had been suggested, but teachers rarely trust the judgement of parents – years of experience teaches them to ignore us as many parents really don’t know their own children that well! So I let it be. I decided to give her a few weeks and then see what the teacher thought.

So I asked on Friday. “You’re right,” said Mrs T. “She is a bit hyper isn’t she?” Very busy, very scruffy, and as for art lessons, she wears most of the paint. None of which I was surprised to hear. However, I was fairly surprised to learn that she is working with an 8-yr-old for spellings and is doing year 2 maths. This is the level she has been assessed at. In her old school she was in a special group for “the children who aren’t quite keeping up.” This tells me her basic problem was under stimulation. No wonder she loves her new school. No wonder her behaviour at home has improved. She was being treated as if she had learning difficulties at the old place, where in fact she has none!

I have made some dietary changes too, on the advice of this school nurse. I am learning which food additives are no good. The change in her behaviour is fairly subtle – until she has any of the banned additives; then it is easy to see why she shouldn’t have them. The list is surprising. I knew that artificial colours and flavours were bad news. But some natural colours are bad too. Paprika being the main culprit. It is extract of paprika, mind you, so a processed thing even if it isn’t artificial. And the biggie – artificial sweeteners. Saccharin and aspartame. I have been feeding her a steady diet of “crazy making” foods to try and protect her teeth. Of course we all worry that there is something sinister about aspartame, but I had never heard of them being linked with hyperactivity before. It hasn’t worked for her teeth either, she is having 9 out next month (we have very bad teeth in our family, not helped by the fact that the children are grazers. Any carbohydrate turns to sugar in the mouth, even the good ones).

The trouble is, aspartame and saccharin are universal. Pick up a bottle of lemonade. Ordinary lemonade, not the diet kind. It has sugar andartificial sweeteners. Why? It’s crazy. Look at any bottle of fizzy drink, they are all the same. The only fizzy drink she can have is 7up. Many squashes are the same. She can’t have “no added sugar” drinks any more, because they have the artificial ones in too. Other things have suspect colours in. There is one drink she can have that seems to be okay. And it’s not Ribena! I don’t know what it is, but Ribena makes her loco too.

Another thing, although this has had mention in the papers lately, is the preservatives. In particular Sodium Benzoate. This is in calpol, amoxil, in fact pretty nearly all children’s medicines. No wonder she perks up! What with the colouring, flavouring and sweeteners…do you know how hard it is to get calpol with sugar in it these days? No other brand even makes a sugared version. But the calpol still has all the other baddies in. Nightmare.

It’s no wonder that #2 and #3 can’t cope with each other. They really are polar opposites. It’s a shame but what can you do? They are siblings but I can’t force them to be friends. I can only hope that as they grow older they can come to understand and accept each others’ differences.

 

Walking Disaster Area

 Ever known one of these? There are some people to whom accidents happen. It is a constant, daily feature of their lives that something untoward should occur. There they are walking along, minding their own business, when all of a sudden life jumps up and slaps them in the face. Or drops on their head. Or opens a hole in front of their feet. These are the people that you and I know as walking disaster areas.

My dear little girl (#3), who is 6, is one of these people. She can barely get through a single day without something happening. Very often she will trip, slip or fall over and simply get up and carry on as if nothing has happened. Many times these minor accidents will involve sending drinks or plates of food flying. Toys are easily damaged. Her brother and sisters are frequent victims of her accidents-prone nature. It is not safe to put a cup down any lower than her shoulder height and certainly not on the floor. She is drawn to hot coffee the way moths are to a flame and we have just had laminate put down.

Often her little accidents are quite funny really but we try not to laugh or say things like, “Typical #3,” while rolling our eyes heavenwards. It upsets her, makes her very self-conscious and makes her worse. (Of course we never actually callher #3 either, as she does have a name and besides the # is very hard to pronounce). The other day she raced through the living room at full tilt, skidded at the end and slid into the door, but bounced immediately to her feet with a cry of “I’m OK” and carried on her mad dash to the kitchen. I am sure that most parents of 6-year-olds are familiar with this kind of scene but I do have to stress that  this is continuous. I have two older children so I know that they are not all like this!

Sometimes things take a far more serious turn. When she was 2-and-a-half she fell off the arm of the sofa in the living room, breaking her arm in the process. The doctor at the hospital didn’t believe there was anything wrong with her and only x-rayed it because I insisted. She implied I was wasting her time but sadly had gone off-shift by the time the x-rays came back, clearly showing a lovely green-stick fracture. I  knew she’d broken it, despite never having broken a bone of my own, because my husband had often described what it’s like. He broke lots of bones as a child.

If you want to know how to recognise a broken arm, well, sometimes it is very easy. #2 broke his and it was bent. His hand was bluish-white and he couldn’t move his fingers. He was also screaming in agony, but small children will do that for a tiny cut so it isn’t necessarily a clue. #3 didn’t really have pale fingers, but she screamed for 20 minutes, at which point the endorphins (natural painkillers) kicked in and she fell immediately asleep. Straight from full-blown shrieks to sleep. Dear Hubby had told me that after about 20 minutes a broken bone will stop hurting, so at that point I knew for sure that her arm was indeed broken.

Similarly when #2 broke his other arm, which was above the elbow, at first I wasn’t quite sure as he was making more fuss about the nettle-stings he had encountered on his fall down a 12-foot bank onto the road. I decided to get him checked out, thinking he was probably just bruised, but as he had started shaking violently and was very pale and sweaty (a bit of shock methinks), well, best to check him over. He might have banged his head. On the way to the hospital he fell asleep in the car, something he hadn’t done for years, and when we got out he had a lump like a grapefruit just above his elbow, so I knew then that it was indeed a fracture.

This takes us a little away from the point, which is #3’s general clumsiness. Or carelessness. Lack of body-awareness in general, I think. The other day she saw her friend coming up the path and ran to meet her at the gate. Right past the mini cricket match that was going on in the garden. Right, in fact, into the path of the cricket bat which was being swung by my son’s 11-year-old, tall, strong, sporty friend.

It hit her in the face.

Quite hard.

There was a lot of screaming. We were all nearly deafened, in fact. She was rather quiet for the rest of the day, but I didn’t take her to the hospital. I have had the little card that tells you what to look out for in the event of a head-injury quite often enough, and there was no serious swelling or anything. In fact, thanks to my friend’s Arnica cream, she didn’t even get a bruise in the end. She is still a little pink looking on that cheek, four days later, but does not apparently have a broken cheek.

Her front tooth, which she banged on the radiator valve last week after tripping over a washing bag in the kitchen, is hanging on by a thread and will soon fall out, several months earlier than it would have naturally done. She had a splinter in her thumb on Friday which she managed to get out by herself in the end. She’s getting to be quite an expert at that and it’s a good job too. The bump on her head from falling off the swing has just about gone down. She managed not to actually scald herself (somehow) on a cup of fresh tea she knocked onto herself. Her broken toenail recovered quite quickly. SHe’s always got ragged, horrible toenails because she catches them on things so often.

Her legs are permanently scabbed and bruised. So much so, in fact, that I sometimes worry what the teacher makes of them. Mind you, spending any time in #3’s company would soon make anyone realise than she is not an abused child, she is merely the most accident-prone person anyone has ever met. Like wotsername off Desperate Housewives. Susan, is it? The one played by that Terri thingy who used to be Lois Lane. Yep, her, that’s it.

Well, I’ve just realised I have rambled on for almost 1100 words, so it’s about time I stopped.

See you again soon