school holidays

We are now reaching the end of a relaxing two weeks of holiday. The two boys and I accompanied Paul to his two day clinic in New Plymouth and even though I was initialled concerned about how we would fill the time between needing to leave the motel at 10am and Paul's clinic finishing at 3pm we coped well, spending well over half an hour at the tourist information place where Noah played on the interactive map and Isaac watched the 12 screen TV. We also went to see the Lorax at the movies and Isaac behaved relatively well and was luckily surrounded by many young children not behaving much better. I said I would practice driving on the way back and drove from Egmont village to Inglewood (possibly 2% of the journey) not exactly sharing the driving! In Inglewood a lady opened the toy museum for us that was supposed to have closed (this is why I like NZ) very interestign to see how they made lead model cars in atiny cottage industry based on the toys the owners kids liked.
Back to school tomorrow and I am hoping I cleared out Isaac's lunch box at the end of last term and will not find it going mouldy in his school bag tomorrow morning!

further relaxation

You can tell life is more uneventful as yesterday I wanted to wear my favourite T-shirt (pink with 'it's a small world' logo from Disneyland) and I took it out the packed hospital bag! At the same time I took out Noah's two pairs of pyjamas, one of which was bought specially for his last hospital trip. I think the new definition of whether or not a child has a significant medical condition should be whether or not parents have a packed hospital bag ready to go!
I have two Massey assignments to do over the holidays, one is a task based job analysis of Paul's work (I chose him as he is the only person in full time employment I know well enough to interview) this is quite hard as a lot of the tasks he does as a consulatant are 'thinking' or 'adapting' so hard to describe. I also have to do a literature review for somethign that's been in the news and is related to abnormal psychology. I decded to choose PANDAS (those of you who know me from long back will remember the PANDAS project of 2000 when I was involved in trying to get a Palmerston North development assessment and support centre for preschoolers with special needs, so I thought the title was apt) paediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorder related to group A streptococcus, this should hopefully up my medical knowledge of immunology and microbiology too. Its an interestign disorder (if it really exists) where after a throat infection children develop sudden onset OCD and tics. I am pulling out news reports from New York where multiple teenagers in one school developed tics and some parents insisted it was PANDAS not mass hysteria and got Erin Brokovitch in to look for toxins (presumably not related to sore throat).

Happy Easter

Although I hardly dare say it life has been fairly peaceful and uneventful (and long may it continue). The Massey uni break coincides with the boys Easter break from school and Paul has been off all four days of the Easter holiday, we went to see the Dr Seuss art exhibition on Saturday and today we went for a long walk - Isaac walked a lot of it and is now absolutely exhausted.

Easter itself seemed very quiet as we had no extra family members here - Sam and Anika have now moved to Sydney where they will be flatting with Beth and James. They have just found a lovely house to share. Hannah and I are going to visit at the beginning of June and are already quite excited.

Isaac is suddenly making progress with his speech which is amazing after so many years of plateauing - he tries to copy everything we say (especially whatever Noah does or says). In the esplanade today he repeated the same word four times until I eventually understood he could hear the little train and was saying 'train'.

Noah is trying to write a bit which is also good as he used to hate even holding a pencil. He came to ask Paul how to spell a word as he was writing down the names of some of Lily's songs. I heard Paul first spell 'birthday' then when Noah said that was wrong 'version' finally Noah told us it was a song by Madonna - I think I'd prefer him to sing"like a birthday' than"Like a virgin"!