Lily wins GOLD

Noah's school let him have this afternoon off so he could come and watch Lily swim her finals at Special Olympics. This means we all saw her win gold - Paul was there as first aider, Hannah as a timekeeper and Noah, Isaac and I as spectators.
Paul has made a video of her race and medal ceremony.


Noah told me after school that it would soon be the "clothes, shower, mouldy" - this is an approximation to what he was saying with me trying to make sense of the words as his speech is sometimes not great. He got quite frustrated with my questions like "Is it on TV? Is it a person? Is it a shower of water?" He told me it was 'close' like a door not 'clothes' you wear but we didn't get much further until I remembered he'd shown his pass for special Olympics at news time at school and realised he meant "closing ceremony"! Ceremony is obviously not a word in his lexicon so he replaced it with words he did know!

Our local newspaper had a wonderful editorial about special Olympics yesterday. The full text is here but these are the opening paragraphs..

"The arrival of the 2009 Special Olympics National Summer Games to Manawatu is a chance for us to embrace the true essence of sport and celebrate the achievements of hundreds of athletes who have had to overcome more than most in their pursuit of success.

We all have our physical limitations, yet only very few of us have the courage and strength of character to push those limits and break through into new realms of our own potential. In the coming days, more than 1000 athletes competing in the games will push themselves to their limits, confound all those people who only ever told them what they wouldn't be able to do, and strive for glory. "

Isaac is still having a lot of trouble with his gastrostomy stoma, I was a bit over optimistic yesterday that it was closing. We've read some stuff on the Internet and because he's had it for over 8 months it means he has about a 60% chance of it closing within a month. As I'm not happy for Hannah to be looking after a boy who needs morphine for the pain and constant baths to clean up the leakage, it looks like I won't get to Auckland with Paul next week after all