Zulu Zulu!

And I Say Hello!  


You will recall the film, Zulu; Michael Caine, hot location, lots of extras?  Well, that is how it feels waiting for the children to come back after a night at The Glen (wonderful respite centre). They tend to be at their worst when they come back and the contrast with our little window of peace is marked. But hey - could be worse, I could be behind a desk right now in some office in Wakefield (shudder)!

Yesterday - A room of one's own.

Both my children are severely and very obviously autistic and their disability is apparent as soon as you meet them. But Emilie is so much in her own world, the contrast with the more verbal Lucie is very evident. As such, we occasionally forget just how autistic Lucie is, bless her, she makes so much effort to join 'our' world. Yesterday was one of those occasions I forgot.

As a lot of you will be aware, the biggest problem we have with the girls is they don't interact well and at worst they can even fly at each other. They have not travelled in the same car for about five years. This is the cause of 90% of the stress in our house, to a point where things simply have to change, so at the end of the year we are having a 'day room' built for Lucie - somewhere her sister cannot access. Lucie is excited by this. In fairness, so would I be; peace and quiet and a lockable door is pretty high currency round our house!

So I showed Lucie where her dream home would be, it is where the garage is now, attached to the side of the house. Mistake.  Autistic children cannot really imagine something they cannot see (except Santa, they get Santa all right!). So now Lucie thinks her dream home is going to be a dark garage, with a peeling window and oil stains. Whoops.

'Lucie want day room IN house, okay?'   Brown worried eyes look into mine'

'Yes, darling in house. It will be in house because....'

'Day room in house, yes? Please dad'?

 And so it goes on. We are looking at an expensive conversion in the hope that when it is done, Lucie will no longer 'see' the garage. But it is not guaranteed - nothing in the autistic world is. We once bought a static caravan so the girls would have somewhere familiar to go, but had to sell it almost immediately because on the first visit they both exploded as they couldn't cope with the owner's grass cutter!

But then hey, a room of one's own and a lockable door, perhaps containing a lovely writing desk won't go to waste.  Not in this house. <Smile> 


Thanks for reading.  :-)


Mark