If the calculations I made with a little help from this website are correct, today is the day that Katie has spent as much of her life outside the womb as she has in it.
From here on... Actually, I can't think of anything with which to finish that sentence that doesn't sound boring or clichéd. I just felt that one sentence wasn't enough for a blog post, and the above milestone sounded worthy of at least a passing mention.
We have had the Interview Of The Three Hundred Questions, on which I hope to write a full post in due course ('due course', of course, potentially meaning anything within the next several months). However, the bottom line for now is that we have indeed managed to get official confirmation of what it has been becoming increasingly obvious for the past several months is going to end up being the diagnosis; now that the votes have been collected and the boxes ticked, Jamie has indeed been diagnosed with a mild form of autistic spectrum disorder.
I'm pleased to have that sorted out. Although in one way it's only confirming what we've already known for some time, any thoughts or discussion of Jamie's ASD have hitherto been encumbered with that untidy straggling thread of disclaimer ("Well, probably ASDalthoughwe'restillwaitingfortheofficialdiagnosis"), and it's nice to have that neatened up. On a more practical note, I think we've reached the stage where an Official Diagnosis is going to be useful. So far, Jamie has done nicely with no input more specialised than what we and his nursery provide for him, but I do think that as he gets closer to school age he's likely to benefit from having something more, and having a diagnosis is going to be an important step in looking at/choosing from whatever the possible range of options in the Something More category may be.
Libby Purves, author of the wonderful How Not To Be A Perfect Mother, says that the first few months of having two children are particularly chaotic because of (among other reasons) the differences in their developmental stage with regard to routine; one child in an age group that thrives on a regular, predictable daily routine, and one in an age group for whom body clocks are a thing of the future, who still live what Purves describes as a 'hippie, freewheeling, unpredictable' lifestyle.
While I think the first few months after having a baby are going to be chaotic regardless of the existence of any older children, I have to say that I actually found the two different sets of needs much easier to co-ordinate in the first few months. Since Katie had no body clock to tell her that she should be sleeping at any specific times or for any specific lengths of time, and was small enough to drop off easily in my arms and get the naps she needed there, it was fairly straightforward to fit her daily activities in around Jamie's. I just hauled her round from room to room after him, popping her on the breast when I thought she might be hungry and putting her down on the big beanbag in his room when I needed to change or dress him. (She wasn't thrilled about that last, but fortunately I'm past the stage of feeling it's my job to keep a baby happy every minute, and figured she could live with being upset for the time it took me to change one nappy. Incidentally, I have an endearing memory of Jamie dancing round the room on one occasion as Katie howled and I gave my hands a quick post-nappy-change wash, reciting "Oh, you want me to feed you! I will pick you up in a minute!" It took me a moment to realise he was repeating something he'd heard me say to her in similar circumstances.)
Things did get chaotic on the two evenings each week that it was my turn to give Jamie his bath, as I struggled to persuade Katie that she could interrupt her evening feeding marathon for long enough to settle quietly with Barry for a bit and then to persuade Jamie to progress through the teeth-bath-bed routine at speed so that I could get back to Katie before she started screaming to be nursed again; neither child, I might add, was at all happy to go quietly along with plans. And then there were those moments of trying to haul Jamie off things one-handed while holding Katie in the crook of the other arm. But, for the most part, it all seemed reasonably workable. Of course, I'm sure there is a certain rose tint to my glasses as I look back from a safe distance of a few months, and I doubt I was quite so sanguine about it all at the time. Still, even allowing for that... sure, it was difficult, but manageably so. And, of course, since I was also lucky enough to have a baby who was willing to take one long nap a day if fed, swaddled and settled in a darkened room, the lack of body clock came with a huge advantage; since she didn't mind when she took that nap, I could simply time it for whenever Jamie took his and thereby give myself an opportunity to take one myself. And, my goodness, but that was bliss.
Now, however, balancing their needs is a whole different matter. These days, Katie needs two definite naps plus a reasonably specific bedtime, and she's too big to sleep comfortably in my arms for any length of time. Nor is she a baby who falls asleep with great ease. Ideally, she needs a period of nursing/cuddling/general settling in a quiet darkened room prior to each of those three sleeps. Especially at bedtime, when she will fight off any suggestions of sleep with vehement howls. There's also the matter of bathtime; in the first few months I didn't feel she needed anything more in the way of cleaning than a quick sponge-down of her face and neck every day to get the dried milk off and a once-weekly bath to pick up anything that had been missed, but, these days, I really feel she ought to be getting proper immersion in a body of warm water before going to bed. And, of course, I'm also now supposed to be giving her more in the way of one-to-one interaction than just a few minutes here and there while I feed her or change her nappy; according to Sally Ward's Baby Talk, I should ideally be spending half an hour of uninterrupted, undistracted time with her a day to chat away to her about whatever she's doing, and, while I normally dismiss this sort of thing as yet another guilt-inducing gimmick from the Parents Should Be Superbeings movement, there does in this case seem to be some decent-quality evidence that this is markedly beneficial in terms of language, and general, development.
So... what do all the activities mentioned in the above paragraph have in common? None of them are brilliantly compatible with taking care of a very loud and energetic three-year-old who has not yet reached the stage of being able to grasp such concepts as "If you can play by yourself for half an hour while I get Katie to bed, you can have my undivided attention after that", and who can wreak havoc if left unsupervised for too long. That's what they all have in common.
I manage. I manage in an endless awkward muddled-together string of tiny copings and makeshifts, but that's still managing. Katie generally wakes up some time between seven and eight, whereas Jamie stays up to have dinner with us and hence can sleep later; that gives me a chance to fit in a bit of uninterrupted time with her early in the day and maybe even get her down for her first nap before going in to him. At other times he can be distracted with the computer or television. Occasionally, I have to put up with Jamie joining in with Katie's bathtime (which did get to be slightly less hassle once I thought to instigate a no-climbing-in-the-bath-with-clothes-on rule - at least now he's easier to dry off once he gets wet). I'll keep Katie up past the time she really needs to get to bed so that I can try to get Jamie engrossed enough in the CBeebies website that I can feel comfortable about leaving him. I'll rush her through her bath and take her downstairs to put night clothes on her so that I can check on what he's doing. I'll go back and forth between the two of them, Katie crying in her cot and Jamie playing on the computer or running round the living room, dividing myself up, making compromises, a few minutes for one, a few minutes for the other, back and forth, trying not to leave either of them for too long. I bend and wiggle the routine this way and that, trying to make each bit of it fit, each day. I juggle and joggle and jiggle, getting everything in.
It won't be this way forever. Nothing in parenting is; you get by, you manoeuvre your way through each stage until it's over, like a person picking his way across a floor so cluttered with toys and Lego bricks that almost no clear space is left. Eventually, Jamie will get old enough that I can routinely leave him on his own for a half hour or so. Eventually, Katie will get old enough for them both to be on the same routine. Eventually - a long time eventually - both of them will be able to put themselves to bed, and I'll only have to pop in for a goodnight kiss and Parently Chat About The Day. Everything's eventual, as Stephen King wrote. I get by and get by, until those days come. I make it through this stage, one day, one naptime, one bedtime at a time.
Although Katie first managed to roll from her back to her stomach some time ago, it took another two months before I really felt able to describe her as A Baby Who Can Roll Over - it seemed to be a matter of luck rather than skill whether she could do it at any given moment, and, even when she did manage, she invariably ended up with her arm stuck down by her side and didn't seem quite able to figure out how to move it from there. However, at seven and a half months, she finally sussed it. She can now manage the full 360-degrees-around-the-long-axis without difficulty. And she does. Combining this with wriggling, which she does in abundance, she can now make it across large proportions of the living room. Or of her cot. When Jamie was a baby (more accurately, when Jamie was a toddler, since we never actually got as far as making him sleep in the cot for any period of time until he was thirteen months old), we used to be awestruck by the degree of moving around that he could do in his sleep - hang on, surely he'd had his head at this end and his feet at that end when we put him down for the night? - and Katie is now following in his metaphorical footsteps. On one occasion I came in to find her peacefully asleep on her stomach with her bottom up against the cot side and her legs dangling out through the bars. It was a position most people would have had some difficulty manoeuvring into deliberately; Katie had managed it in her sleep. (And, by the way, if she ever makes it into that position again I'm leaving her in it. My gentle-as-possible attempt at moving her into a more conventional position woke her up and she flat-out refused to fall asleep again.)
The other event of significance from her eighth month was the Move To The Forward-Facing Car Seat. Strictly speaking we are not supposed to do this until she's either nine months old or twenty pounds in weight (the latter may or may not be the case for Katie - we haven't checked recently), but, after a long car drive during which we had to put up with Katie crying for a fair proportion of the way, Barry decided we should put her in a seat which allowed her a better view, in hopes that she'd be happier. So the seat has now been installed, and Katie now faces the same direction as the rest of us. Another Last Time - never again will I travel in the car with a baby facing me (I sit in the back seat with her) or contort myself to nurse a baby in a car seat. The latter fact is no bad thing, come to think of it, as it always was a bloody uncomfortable thing to do, but I'm still feeling the inevitable nostalgia that goes with the passing of yet another Parental Era.
I'm going to try to shoot for doing monthly updates on Katie. That strikes me as possible. Theoretically, at least.
The 'interesting' in the title is meant quite genuinely, not in some sort of quasi-euphemistic 'May you live in interesting times' sense. The interesting bit, as far as I'm concerned, is all the stuff that comes after the first six months, which I think of as a sort of rather dull but necessary prelude. As you can imagine, I looked forward to Katie reaching the six month mark; I approached her seventh month with high hopes that from this point on she would start doing more noteworthy things. I am pleased to report that she rose to the occasion in fine style.
A summary of the things she did during her seventh month of extrauterine life:
Sitting up alone. Although she is still a mite wobbly and prone to suddenly ending up supine (that's one of those delightful contradictory phrases, like 'certainly possible'), she can now sit for several minutes at a time. In fact, she can now multitask, reaching out for toys and playing with them while still maintaining herself in sitting position.
Sitting in a high chair. I had a week off in June, and used it, among other things, to finally get the high chair cleaned up from the state that Jamie left it in. (Yes, I am well aware of how badly it speaks of our housekeeping skills that it took me that long to get around to it.) Jamie had great fun helping me clean it and Katie now has great fun sitting in it, when I actually get round to putting her there (I am shockingly bad at remembering that feeds for Katie these days are supposed to involve something a bit more than simply plonking her on my breast while I browse the Internet). I give her some bits of toast, or cheese, or microwaved vegetables, or liver sausage, and she has a grand old time working her way through it (except the liver sausage, which was still fun to play with but which she didn't seem too keen on actually eating). And, as far as I can estimate from mentally subtracting all the bits that I later collect from her lap/the sides of the chair/the floor from the size of the portion she started out with, at least some of it does actually end up inside her. My mother, who predated the baby-led weaning movement (isn't it good when doing things in the easiest way possible actually has an official name and backing as something with, supposedly, positive benefits?), is extremely impressed that she's bypassed the whole business of spending months working her way up through progressively lumpier purées, and has concluded that she's a child prodigy.
Trying out the baby bouncer. Not only did she enjoy this one, but her big brother did as well. "Swing Katie!" he squealed excitedly, pulling her back for a massive push forward. Barry and I both leapt towards him with hasty yells of caution which were, of course, totally unwarranted, since Katie loved it.
Having her teeth brushed. Another item for the "Damn, I forgot we're now meant to do this as part of the routine" list. So far I have managed to remember to brush them twice in the month since they came through. Must improve on this track record before she has a full set. Talking of which, there is a certain "Wow, was that it?!" factor to brushing the teeth of a child who only has two when you're used to performing this service for a child who has the full twenty. I use some of the time on running the brush over her gums as well, in hopes of getting her used to the idea that this is eventually going to be a more extensive process than it currently needs to be. She loves it. (That sentence does seem to be popping up a lot, now that I think of it - good to know that she's also enjoying all these new developments in her life.)
Talking in syllables. Her previous vocabulary of squeals and gurgles has now been enhanced by utterances of "Ma-ma-ma-ma! Ba-ba-ba-ba! Mba-mba-mba!" This one, we love. It sounds unbelievably adorable.
(Good gracious - I have actually managed to finish this post within a mere four days of her turning seven months. This bodes well for the future.)
I just remembered I didn't get a post up about Jamie's latest orthoptist appointment. Not through lack of trying - I started writing one that same evening (it was on Tuesday just gone), and got half-way through when Typepad did one of its occasional crash-and-burns and lost the post. Fortunately I hadn't written that much so it was no more than a minor annoyance, but, as I was falling asleep in my chair by then, I couldn't be bothered to start over and decided I'd do it the next day. And then forgot, of course.
Anyway, don't get too excited (oh, you weren't? Oh, well), as I record it only for the sake of completeness; it could best be summarised as Same Stuff, Different Day. The visual acuity in his squinting eye is still not quite as good as that in the other eye, but the difference is apparently minor and Pat now thinks that, rather than continually hoping that we'll be able to correct it with enough patching, we should accept that there is going to continue to be a difference and simply aim to maintain it at the level it's at. She did float the possibility of taking another break from the patching, but, as much as I like that idea, I do have to face the fact that the last time we tried that his vision got worse and I do not want this to happen again. So, following a bit of discussion, we both agreed that the patching should continue for now. There is now some light at the end of this particular tunnel; Pat thinks that if we can stick to the patching assiduously enough now then we should be able to leave it for good by the time he starts school. So we shall hang in there.
Over the past month, I've been watching an episode of 'Child Of Our Time' which looked at gender roles in children. (As you can gather from the fact that it took me this long to watch a one-hour episode, this was something squeezed into ten-minute slots here and there, around everything else; however, as this particular episode was actually produced by my sister I wanted to get to see all the bits she's been telling me about working on. Besides, she does some of the interviewing of the children and so every so often while watching the programme I suddenly hear her voice coming from off-camera to ask one of the children something, whereupon I can yell "That's Ruthie! That's Ruthie!" Which is pretty cool.)
Anyway, the other day I was squeezing in yet another brief segment of watching and got to the bit where the voice-over told us that one of the girls, Megan, would now have to confront gender roles in a new way because "Megan has a boyfriend."
Er, no, she bloody well doesn't. She's seven.
One of Megan's many friends happens to be a boy. And, yes, she and her friends probably are getting a bit silly and giggly about her 'boyfriend', because that's the sort of thing kids do. Why on earth are the adults playing into this misnaming? Megan's mother professed herself unbothered by the whole thing because, after all, he obviously wasn't really a boyfriend and they were just kids having fun. Which is totally reasonable. But why not point that out to the children? The lesson that, just because one of your friends happens to be of the opposite sex it doesn't automatically mean they're your boyfriend or girlfriend, is such an important one to learn. Why miss the chance to convey it?
If Katie or Jamie, in prepubertal years, tries telling me they have a boyfriend/girlfriend (says she with the confidence of someone who's not yet dealt with this stage of parenting and therefore knows exactly how to deal with it), then I will gently correct them: No. You have a friend who happens to be of X gender. Having a boyfriend or a girlfriend involves more complicated stuff. There is a difference. Being friends with a boy, without making them your boyfriend, is perfectly OK, and will continue to be so, no matter what messages anyone else may give you to the contrary.
Katie's fifth month was really the stage in which she moved away from the cute-but-dull newborn period and started actually doing interesting stuff. I meant to write a lengthier Katie Update Post to mark this, but, as usual, didn't have time until now. So I'll make this an update on the whole three-to-six months stage, achievements therein, and hope I actually get it finished before needing to write whatever update I'll want to write at seven months. And, just for the record, I'm at least starting this on the day she turns six months. Half way through her first year.
I've already written about the rolling over (back to stomach is something she can still only manage with luck and a following breeze, but stomach to back is mere trivia for her now) and the reaching out to grab things (by the end of her fifth month she could get her hand straight to whatever she was reaching for without all the recalibration and rechecking, and, although she's still mastering the finer details of getting hold of whatever-it-is, she's getting pretty good at that as well). She can also now, if carefully positioned in a well-balanced sitting position, maintain it for a few seconds before she slumps. Here are a few more milestones from the past three months:
Being enormous. Well, in relative terms - last time we actually got round to getting her weighed she was only just above the fiftieth centile, so as babies of this age go she's pretty average in size. However, after having my mental parameters for her set on 'tiny baby' for so long, by the time she was around four or five months I was finding it quite startling to look at her and realise how big she was getting. And she is longer than average - not drastically so, but when I last measured her, a few weeks ago, she was on the 91st centile for length. This was no great surprise - Barry had already had to get the 6 - 9 month bag of clothes down from the attic a month early as she could barely fit into her Babygros. It was just the length that was the issue - she was still OK with any outfits that didn't require getting everything from her neck to the soles of her feet into a single garment, but she did have to go into the next size of Babygros a month early. She'll probably take after her father (6' 4") and end up towering over me by the time she's a teenager.
Eating solids. This is yet another item for the 'so much more relaxed second time around' list. With Jamie, I obsessed over following the WHO recommendations (six months! Six months! Not a day earlier! Got that, neurotic new parents? Six months!) until I actually read the report, realised they were based on bugger-all evidence, and moved on to obsessing over what I should feed him once I did start, feverishly researching the relative merits of different smushed vegetables and wondering just where the hell one got sweet potato in baby-sized amounts. With Katie, I noted the approach of her sixth month-ness in passing, so to speak, absently made mental notes that I probably ought to be starting some solids some time soon, and, when she got to around five and a half months (close enough, I figured), handed her a few random pieces of food as and when I remembered to do so. After I'd done this a couple of times, she tried tasting the piece I'd just given her (a broccoli floret, for the record), and was fascinated by the whole experience. Hey! When I put this object in my mouth bits of it come off! And it has a not-milk taste! Since then, she's had a go at eating bread, toast, rusk, courgette, banana, and plate (she had a very determined go at the latter before someone managed to point out to her that she was actually meant to be directing her efforts at the rusk sitting on it).
I'm really pleased that she's taking to solids so well - I'd assumed she'd be one of the reluctant babies who just didn't want to know and took months to be willing to try anything. This assumption was based on the always-unwise practice of comparing siblings, though in a reverse sort of way; she's been Jamie's opposite in just about every other way imaginable, Jamie took to solids really well as a baby, and from those two pieces of information I'd extrapolated a belief that Katie would drag her metaphorical feet on the matter. It's good to know that this does not, so far, appear to be so; and I have hopefully learned my lesson about making such assumptions in future.
Being on a routine. (For naps, that is - feeds she still has at any old time, usually often.) I started this when she was three and a half months old, the week before I went back to work, largely because I happened to have a few days when I wasn't planning to do much else other than hang around the house and I figured that I might as well try putting her down for her naps at the standard baby times and see how she got on. (For those unfamiliar with babies of the routinisable age, 'standard baby times' are - with usual disclaimers about variation between individual babies - a shortish nap two hours after wake-up time, a nap of a couple of hours at the beginning of the afternoon, and sometimes, for younger babies in this age range, a very short nap in mid-afternoon, with bedtime around twelve hours after wake-up time. Different baby books give slightly different routines as examples, but that's basically what it boils down to. A very nice summary, from Moxie, is the 2-3-4 rule - babies tend to be ready for their first nap two hours after getting up, then their second nap three hours after getting up from the first nap, then their bedtime four hours after getting up from the second nap.)
I read somewhere - probably Weissbluth - that, when babies start moving out of the phase of just eating and sleeping at all kinds of odd times of the day and night and into the phase of having a proper body clock and needing naps at fairly specific times, the development of their body clock starts in the mornings and only extends to the rest of the day later. I was fascinated to see that this was exactly what seemed to happen with Katie. She went into the morning and lunchtime nap routine like a hand into a glove - you could set a Gina Ford clock by her. The mid-afternoon nap and bedtime were a lot more hit and miss for the next couple of months. In fact, for some weeks the only predictable thing about her bedtime was that it would coincide with our dinner. Given the variability in our dinner time, I felt this was quite an achievement - I still don't know how she managed it, but, no matter how early or late dinner was on any particular evening, it always seemed to clash with that crucial window between 'not yet tired enough to have much chance of falling asleep if put to bed' and 'tired enough to go into horrible meltdown if kept up' and I would have to excuse myself from the table to sit upstairs feeding Katie and trying to settle her. I say 'trying' because she seemed to have a much harder time getting to sleep at bedtime than she did at naptime and, with a baby that young, I struggled to know when this was just due to her having difficulty dropping off, when it was hunger, and when she genuinely wasn't sleepy. So I spent a lot of time going back and forth between nursing her more (and then changing her clothes when the extra milk that she hadn't, in fact, actually needed made her spit up) and trying to settle her without nursing, frequently ending up bringing her downstairs again just in case lack of tiredness was the problem (and, almost as frequently, discovering that this wasn't the case and that I now had an overtired and fractious baby to deal with).
Going to sleep at bedtime. The journey from the state of affairs described in the above paragraph to this particular milestone took place at my instigation, not Katie's. After a couple of months of muddling along as described above, I felt it was time for a change. Besides, her body clock development seemed to have reached evenings (at any rate, the chances of her seeming tired and irritable rather than pleased when I tried the bring-her-downstairs-again strategy were much higher than when this process first started). So, when she was five and a half months old, I started what probably wasn't organised enough to count as sleep training, but comes to about the same thing; like it or not (she didn't), when it got to bedtime, she was now expected to stay upstairs and go to sleep in her cot. I was quite happy to stay with her and comfort her through as much of this as feasible, though this did have to be balanced against the fact that I have another child (not to mention a husband who appreciates my occasional presence), and so I did often leave her for a few minutes at a time while I went downstairs to see how the other members of my family were getting on, but I tried to keep those periods brief. When I was with her, I alternated between picking her up for cuddles, bending over the cot to snuggle with her, and doing other things like the laundry. (Fold one T-shirt, pick Katie up, put her down, fold one T-shirt, pick Katie up, put her down...)
Sure enough, after about a week or so of this, I had a baby who would mostly sleep through the evening. (Well, she usually wakes up for a feed or two at some point - what I mean is that she'll sleep through the bulk of the evening, settling back to sleep quickly and easily after her feeds.) I've always found this to be a far more important milestone in practical terms than the much-touted Sleeping Through The Night. Although Katie isn't even close to sleeping through the night, that isn't even an issue any more - she's now old enough for me to take her into bed with me without worrying about increasing the risk of cot death (in the interests of public safety I had better point out that this is only true because both Barry and I are non-smokers and because I'm careful about doing things like keeping the duvet away from her, so don't try this at home until you've read up on safe co-sleeping), and so I simply do that and go back to sleep myself while she feeds. But getting a bit of baby-free time during the evening so that I can do stuff like wash the pump parts and have a shower without having to juggle these activities with soothing a fretful tired baby - now that's a milestone I like.
Doing without Mummy during the day. Oh, boy, did she not like that one. For weeks and weeks, she screamed her head off nearly every afternoon when left with Barry. (I work all day, but she seemed mostly OK in the mornings - she was obviously prepared to put up with a certain amount of my absence but by afternoon had had quite enough of that business and expected Mummy to put in an appearance again.) This was, as you can imagine, just a mite stressful all round. We stumbled on the solution purely by chance; we had some of those little cartons of ready-made formula and I noticed one of them was about to run out of date in the next couple of weeks and mentioned to Barry that he might as well use it up rather than waste it, and, thus, Katie had an afternoon and a following morning of drinking formula instead of the milk I'd been assiduously pumping for her, and Barry discovered that it made a remarkable difference. She actually seemed happy without me. So we bought a tin of formula and tried it a few more times, and, again, it seemed to work wonders. So, now, she's on formula during the days that I work. (Deliberate formula-feeding and leaving my baby to cry? I look forward to seeing how much controversy I get in response to this post.)
One last mention-worthy milestone was discovered by Barry on the day after she turned six months, when he let her grab his finger and suck on it. "She's got a tooth!" he exclaimed.
"Really?" I stuck my finger in to investigate for myself. "Two teeth!" I amended a second later. Two teeth, poking through the middle of her lower gum.
So, that's Katie six months down the line from the day she emerged. Toothier than on the day she was born, more than twice as heavy, with a body clock and a rudimentary collection of skills that she didn't have then. (And I finished writing this when she was only six and a half months! Good going.)
This post is in reply to Sidheag's query, which I was pleased to get as it gives me a handy excuse to blog about a couple of things that are not the stuff of which nail-bitingly thrilling blog posts are made but that I like recording for myself. (I haven't forgotten that I also promised to write another post on autism, by the way - but that's a little way down my list of planned blog posts, and a long way down my depressingly long to-do list in general.)
Jamie's hours at nursery have increased - as of a few weeks before the recent Easter holiday, he's now there for a day and a half each week instead of just a half day. I'm delighted about this; I've thought for a long time that he was ready for more time there and would benefit from it, but, unfortunately, the only free sessions clashed with Tumbletots, which I didn't want him to have to give up. I'd resigned myself to having to wait until September before he could extend his hours, but then another child left and Manda, the supervisor, had already arranged for Jamie to be at the top of the list for any free places that came up. So now, once a week, he heads in with packed lunch in his backpack to spend a stretch of almost six hours engaged in exciting pursuits such as planting a mini-garden, cooking gooseberry crumble, or making a sandwich. Then he goes back the next morning for more.
The other thing worthy of passing mention is that Jamie had his IEP (a sort of action plan thingy that children with special needs get - I think it stands for Individualised Educational Plan) last Easter. I'd anticipated that this would be worth a post, but in fact it was a bit of a non-event, as it happened. It just means that the stuff Manda - the nursery supervisor - had already been talking about trying with him is now written down on a complicated-looking official form. Manda stayed behind after the nursery session just before the Easter weekend to discuss it with me and we chatted about it while I changed and fed Katie and Jamie played with some of the toys. She'd picked two goals - I think the first was building up more of a relationship with Jamie herself by doing things like chasing games and the like, which he enjoys. The second was encouraging him to get to build up a bit more of a relationship with other children there, and she was going to start this by getting him to hold hands with the other children during activities like singing or going for walks. She'd left the space for the third goal blank so that I could put one in, but I couldn't think of any current short-term goals I have (my long-term goal, of course, is the ongoing and constant one of getting him to turn out as a decent, moral, productive, happy person, but that seemed a bit complex to put on an IEP) so we just left that one blank. We spent a bit of time discussing all this in between dealing with nappies and finding Jamie stuff to play with, and then I signed the form and took Jamie home. That's about it. I haven't actually seen her since as I'm now back at work (I had the day off on that day), but they've been great about letting us know when there's anything they want to discuss, so I'm sure they'll alert Barry at drop-off or pick-up if they feel there's anything else we need to know.
