School’s out for summer

 

We’ve had one week of the summer holidays, five to go.

In common with many children with autism Archie finds school holidays hard. His routine disappears and he finds it incredibly difficult to fill spare time. Archie has been relatively calm, although we had one awful 20 minute period where he had a total meltdown. It came out of the blue and it took me a while to work out the reason. It was the anniversary of us starting out on our trip to Ireland (first Thursday of the summer holidays) and Archie is desperate to go again. Of course I had forgotten exactly which day we had left for Ireland, but Archie with his elephant memory hadn’t. His memory can really go against him at times and he has talked about our trip to Ireland a lot for the last three months. Interestingly since the Anniversary passed (with no trip) and post meltdown he has hardly mentioned Ireland. Instead he has moved onto talking about handbrakes in cars, and how they go off when the car moves. He can say handbrake on his talker, and he has, a lot. Luckily he doesn’t seem to get quite so emotional about handbrakes; we’re enjoying the calm.

We go out somewhere every day, but the beautiful weather of the last week has made visiting the beach with Archie difficult (too busy), although we have started to explore Dartmoor again instead. I’m planning a few trips, including one to War Horse Farm for middle son Joseph and a trip to some fabulous standing stones. That one’s for me. I love ancient standing stones. Louis wants some swimming trips – he learned to swim without floats this week (in the sea no less) so I may search out a few pools on Dartmoor as well. Archie’s started shutting his eyes in photos, I have no idea why. This was lunch on Gutter Tor. A beautiful day, it was completely deserted, we did find some spent ammo, I presume it was a blank.

 

On Friday managed a trip to the beach for a surf with Downham House. It was a bit flat for Archie, although he became very relaxed at surfing by himself, and by the end of the session wasn’t even holding onto someone as he was pushed onto a wave. One of the boys, Zak, who last year wouldn’t set foot in the water, was very hard to get in at the end of the session. He seemed pretty keen to take the surfboard with him. Again, it was a fun, relaxed session. We videoed using the GoPro so have some fantastic footage. This is being passed onto Plymouth Music Zone, and next week the five surfing boys will be paying a visit to add music to the footage. Can’t wait.