AutismMumma

I wish today had been as simple as playing Hopscotch, not that D has ever been able to master it.

Unfortunately it hasn't been a good day for D, she bottled up her emotions until she saw me at hometime (thank goodness she got down the school stairs safely) and we had a bolt situation. Her teacher was quite surprised at that and I guess it's good that he's seen it firsthand rather than an antidote.

It took a while before she could tell me what had happened - she was hit by another child just before hometime - so understandably upset. Noticeably upset too, the lollipop lady we pass always looks out with a smile for D and usually D will bounce up and tell her something about her day, not today, she stayed firmly in her buggy, head down.

It was lucky that we had a few minutes before we met T as I could attempt to find out what was wrong and try and pre-warn him that his sister was feeling very fragile, in the hope that he'd empathise. He didn't.

This is where the hopscotch analogy comes in. We can start off at, say, square 2, think things are finally calming down and let's move onto squares 3 and 4, something then happens, D reacts and *kappow*, we're straight back to square one.

I'm not surprised, I know that it takes D a long time to come back from unprovoked events such as these, she was so fraught for so long, only really recovering in time for the evening routine.

She did say just before she went to bed "it's nice to feel happy again". Seconded and once again, I am so thankful that she is verbal, that she can articulate what has happened, even if it does take a while to piece together the information and via prompts.

Someone asked me if I had any "words of wisdom" for other parents/carers and, at the moment it would be this:

"Tomorrow is another day". Yes, I will be writing in the home-school diary about this afternoon and her bottling emotions up, but then (apart from, I hope, a parents evening discussion) we will move on. We have to, if I dwelled on everything everytime, it wouldn't do any good. I will silently request a better day tomorrow (please).

I hope everyone's had a good day, comments/RTs/shares as ever welcomed, thanks for reading Jx 😘