Notes on the life, times, and development of Miss Zoë Bromage, as recorded by her mother. Also includes minor notes on updates to this website.
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Just in case you're unaware, Zoë is mildly autistic, so a lot of what is written here has to do with her development and therapies and so forth. More information on Zoë's autism and a number of helpful links can be found on the About Me page of this very website.
Boyfriends and uniforms
Zoë is going to a birthday party this weekend, for her friend, Charlie. They've been in the same class at school for three years now, so she really knows him well. She informed me today that he's her "boyfriend". I checked, and that's pretty much what she meant. She didn't mean "a friend who is a boy" she actually seems to have meant that he's her boyfriend.
I'm okay with that. Charlie's a good kid, and I like his parents. We'll see how they're going when they get to high school or so.
Today I gave her a skivvy (note to Americans: turtleneck sweater) to wear to school. Normally, she wears a short-sleeved sport shirt with a collar, with a windcheater (note to Americans: sweatshirt) over the top, but it's been quite cold and so I put out the skivvy, instead. I asked her just now if she likes wearing it, because it looks quite good on her.
She informed me that she doesn't really like it. Why not, I wanted to know. It is, she tells me, "too sleevey".
So there you go. Too sleevey.
Bits of paper
Zoë is still making very clever paper sculptures, but lately she's taken to cutting out dozens of bits of paper and wadding them up and ... I don't know. She has a collection of them, and she won't tell me quite what she imagines it to be, but I think maybe it's a bug kingdom or something along those lines.
And while we applaud and appreciate her creativity and like to encourage it, we're getting pretty tired of there being bits of paper all over the house...
I don't know where she learned it, but we approve
Tonight we had reason to go to the customer service counter at the grocery store. As we were standing there, Zoë said, "Oh, I'm so scared!" I asked her why. She said, "I'm scared of the poison smoke."
She was looking at the cigarettes.
School and cats and changes
Well, a great deal has been going on. Here's a recap.
Zoë started in an integration programme at one of the smaller primary schools near her specialty school. She has two other children from her group with her (both boys), and two teachers, so it's a very good student to teacher ratio! The kids are under constant supervision (even on the playground). Zoë seems to be really enjoying the new school, which has free range chickens and a science room with reptiles and a human skeleton, among other things. She's also still participating in the "Girl's Friendship Group" run by the speech therapist (she goes back to her specialty school for that) and she's having swimming lessons every other week still, except now it's with the two boys in her integration group and the teachers, rather than with her other, bigger group. (Hope that made sense...)
In other news, we've moved house. Zoë says she likes "our new home". She was somewhat unsettled at first, as were we all, but she seems to have gotten most of it sorted out now. The good thing is that her bus comes later in the morning and it comes home earlier in the afternoon. This is good for her, but for me it makes the schedule a bit tight in the afternoon, as I now have to drive Miranda to school and I have to be very quick to get home in time to meet the bus!
In more sad news, Zoë's grandparents' cat died over the weekend. It was quite an elderly cat, and she was quite unwell and in a lot of pain, but it was still sad, as it always is, to lose a beloved pet. Zoë was quite deeply affected, though we didn't know just how deeply at first.
When we told her that Miffy had died, Zoë was very sad and immediately went to find our cat and pet her and make sure she had food and water and was well. We assured Zoë that Missycat is fine and healthy and will probably be around for some years to come. We also had a talk (as we always do when the subject arises) about how everything living eventually dies, and that this is part of the natural cycle of life.
On the weekend, we went over to the grandparents' house and Zoë was there for a while and then suddenly it hit her that there was no Miffy there. She started to look for her, almost frantically. Then she started to cry and was saying, "But there is no Miffy here! What have you done with Miffy? I want to pet her!"
Nanna gave Zoë a big cuddle and told her it was okay to be sad and to cry, and encouraged her to talk about happy memories of Miffy. Miranda joined in the conversation, and we were all talking about Miffy and what a nice cat she was and how we would miss her, but that she had a long, happy life.
We were somewhat surprised that Zoë took it as hard as she did, but she seems to have weathered the upset, as well as the move.
New School
Zoë will be attending a new school in a few weeks. This is through her current school, which, as I've mentioned, is a specialty school for autistic spectrum disorder kids. This is an integration program, which is why the new school. Three of the children from her class are going to participate, though others may join later. Two of the teachers from her class will be in attendance all the time, even on the playground, so none of the kids from Zoë's school will ever be unsupervised on the playground or anywhere else.
I went to visit the school yesterday and it's pretty remarkable. They're a bilingual school, and all the signs are actually in German. This is good, because Andrew did four years of German (he went to Lutheran school!), I lived in Germany for three years (my German isn't very good, but I'm at least familiar with the language), and Miranda's school has German as their second language.
You might think that kids who have trouble learning language at all would have even more trouble learning a second language, but there are other autistic kids at this school (mainstreamed, rather than on an integrated program) and apparently they do catch on without too much trouble. One of the kids even says that German is his favourite class.
The school also has free range chickens! There's a nice, open air chicken coop big enough to walk into easily, and the chickens can get out and go in as they wish. The chickens, I'm told, all come out at break times to look for food. Smart chickens.
In the science room, they have all kinds of reptiles, including lizards and a long-necked turtle. There's also a garden patch that the kids are cultivating, and they'll use the produce in the science lab for various projects and possibly to feed the reptiles.
And this won't bother Zoë at all, but the school has a ton of stairs. Ugh. The school is built into a hillside, and has lots of different buildings that go right up the hill, with stairs to connect them in various places. If you're able-bodied, I'm sure it's not a big deal at all, but I've got bad knees (one more than the other, but they're both pretty much shot), and I found the stairs quite exhausting. There's absolutely no way that a physically disabled child could attend that school, and I suspect that a blind child would also have a lot of problems, which is probably why they have provisions for autistic kids. (Most schools can take some kinds of special needs kids; the one where Zoë's Nanna taught had a program for the deaf, for example, and Miranda's school is ramped and mostly on one level and can take kids with physical handicaps easily.)
So, this will be a big change for Zoë. I don't know how long she'll take to adjust to it. I think in the long run it will be really good for her, and I'm sad that her best friend isn't going to the new school (yet, anyway), but one of the other kids who is going has been in her class since the start of school. She'll also be able to continue with the "Girls Friendship Group" which has five little girls in it (including Zoë's best friend) and which is run by the speech therapist. Not sure about the logistics of that yet, but the two schools are pretty close an they have a small fleet of buses so it's not hard to transport kids back and forth.
Being a person who doesn't really like change much, I'm still a little bit apprehensive about this, but it is my genuine belief that after the initial adjustment period, this will be really good for Zoë's development. One of her biggest challenges, now that her speech is on track (she's still behind and needs speech therapy, but she can now speak in full sentences and tell lies and answer and ask questions and demand to be taken to McDonald's and lots of other good stuff), she really needs to get some of the social interaction going. She does well enough in an environment with just specialty teachers and other auties, but around neurotypical kids with age-appropriate social skills, she still sticks out like a sticky outy thing.
All in all, I think this is a good step forward. I'm in no hurry to see her mainstreamed, and we can take her out of this program if it seems to be too much for her or it's just not working out. Now all we need to do is buy a bunch of new school uniforms. The new school has completely different school colours...
Gots my jewelleries
We went to church this evening for a sausage and pancake dinner (well, it is Shrove Tuesday, after all). Before we went, I went into my room to have a poke through my jewellery box. Zoë came to see what I was doing and then went to her own room and got her jewellery box. She emerged a few minutes later wearing a bracelet, a ring, a necklace, and, of course, earrings (she has pierced ears now and wears sleeper hoop earrings most of the time; she knows not to try to change them by herself).
Announced Zoë, "I gots my jewelleries for to go to church!"
And she put her "jewelleries" away when she got ready for bed, too!
Hooray, school is here!
It's been a long summer/Christmas break. We didn't go away on holiday, and while we did have a number of crafty type activities and a bunch of new DVDs, the kids were understandably bored and frequently fighting with each other, presumably to alleviate the boredom and drive me up the wall (also good for a laugh, ha ha, let's drive our mother insane with our incessant, pointless bickering, it's so funny when her eyes pop out of her head and the top of her head blows off and steam comes out of her ears, ha ha).
We had a lot of the usual physical stuff like sitting on each other and taking things away from each other, and a couple incidents of kicking, hitting, pushing down, and so forth. We also had a spate of spitting (ugh), this from Zoë. At one point she climbed up into Miranda's bed (Miranda has the top bunk) and spat on her arm for no apparent reason. Another time, I gave them each a drink of juice and Zoë leaned over and spat right in Miranda's drink! (I made them switch drinks.) Some days I wondered if there were any circuses around that had need of a fat, nearsighted, formerly American geekwoman with bad joints and a missing gallbladder, so that I could run away (I couldn't think of any act I could do, other than writing mildly amusing blog entries, and I didn't think the circus would hire me to do that, so I gave up on that idea).
Now, however, thankfully, school is back on, and things are better. The routine is back, they're asleep by 8:30, they're not perpetually bored, they're starting to seem like happy children again, and they're not beating each other up or spitting or making my eyes pop out of my head as the steam shoots out of my ears. They are still being pests to each other, arguing over whose turn it is to play on the computer or (this is worse) standing behind the other who is on the computer and telling her what to do and how to do it (don't you love it when someone tells you how to play your game of Solitaire?), but overall, they're much happier now, and so am I.
School is good. It exercises your brain and you're tired when you come home so you haven't got the energy to torment your sister. Very much.
Zoëspeak
For the past couple of days, Zoë and Miranda have been playing pirates, which mostly means they've been searching for treasure. This, happily, is some trinket or the paper treasure chest Zoë constructed of pink paper and sticky tape (she's extremely clever that way), and they're not rummaging around in my jewellery boxes or the closets or anything.
Today, Zoë was playing with a tall, blue duster. You know, a stick with fuzzy stuff on it that you use to dust. One of those. I thought she was using it as a "feathersword" (like Capt Feathersword of The Wiggles), but as I watched her, she was holding it in front of her toward the ground and making a beeping noise. I finally asked her what it was. She informed me it was a "hunting finder". I then observed that when she "found" the treasure, it would beep much more rapidly. Yes, she was pretending it was a metal detector, but I kind of like "hunting finder".
I'd also like you to know that the earphone headset for the girls' computer is "a computer helmet".
And a final Zoëism for the day, we had a shower and I was doing my hair, which is currently fairly short. I put some gel through it and was running my fingers through to get it a bit tousled. Zoë asked me what I was doing, I said I was just fixing my hair. Then she asked, "Your fingers is pretend to be a brush?"
Toothy stuff
Zoë was complaining of a "hurty tooth". I had a look and there was what appeared to be a huge hole in one of her upper teeth. It looked like the filling had fallen out to me. Naturally, this happened over the holidays, so it's hard to find a dentist, and our family dentist is always booked weeks in advance, anyway. We did manage to get a local dentist who could see her and was good with children, and I took her there yesterday.
Turns out she did lose a filling, but not only that, she's got a lot of other small but growing cavities. Ugh. We're very conscientious about brushing teeth around here, honestly! We also limit sweets and so forth, but it seems not to have been enough... I fear that Zoë has inherited my acidic mouth and my tendency to dental caries. I hope she doesn't also inherit the tendency to gum disease...
Anyway, while in the waiting room, Zoë also pointed to a spot on her lower jaw, on the side (opposite where the tooth with the missing filling is). That was the first I'd heard of it... Turns out she had an abscess! It was so swollen that it had spread into her jaw, and there was a very large lump on her gum! ACK!
The dentist drained the abscess (Zoë didn't like that much, but she was very brave throughout) and we got a prescription for antibiotics to take the infection down, and Zoë has an appointment with our family dentist for later this month (we needed time to get the infection out of the tooth). She may end up losing that tooth, which can cause problems later on when the others become loose and/or the adult teeth grow in, but perhaps when the infection is gone there might be some other option other than extraction. She also got a temporary filling in the tooth that had lost the filling, and that will be taken care of at our dentist.
So how does this happen? I have no idea. I suspect that the abscess came up rather suddenly, although, of course, it had been "brewing" for some time.
There was an amusing Zoë-ism at the dentist. The dentist seeing her was a woman, who told Zoë her name and that she works with children a lot. This pleased Zoë, who was extremely cooperative and very brave, as noted. Later, another dentist came in to offer another opinion and provide the antibiotic prescription. He was a big, swarthy-skinned bloke with a beard. He came in and said hello and Zoë sat up and looked at him and demanded, "Are you a kid dentist?" He laughed and answered, "I work with children a lot, yes." She responded, "Okay," and lay back in the chair again. (You've gotta sort these things out, you know.)
And later, when telling Nanna about the visit to the dentist, Nanna asked, "What did the dentist do?" expecting to hear about the quite uncomfortable draining of the abscess or similar. Zoë, however, answered, "The dentist helped me." This is exactly what we want to hear. Yes, there was a bit of pain involved, but it was helping. I'm glad Zoë understands that.
She did score a helium balloon, a bag of goodies (including toothpaste and a toothbrush), and while there I picked up a couple of electric toothbrushes for them (the dentist suggested that it might help), so as far as she was concerned, the trip was mostly for the purpose of acquiring goodies.
I know you love Christmas
Zoë had a splendid Christmas. She got what she wanted from Santa (a small Mushabelly dog, which she has named "Fred", to be the puppy of her big Mushabelly dog, who is called Spot and is Fred's dad, or so she informed us), and a lot of other stuff, too, including some new doll house furniture and people, books, a new blanket with ponies on it, the usual assortment of pretty dresses (Nanna, you see, has three sons...), new building magnets, a Lego kit to build what she called "Future Car" (i.e., it looks just like the Delorean in Back to the Future), and various other goodies. A favourite is the small shopping trolley which she built herself, and which she now uses to carry her many "pets" all around the house. We were also amused when we asked her if she knew what the toy lawnmower was. She replied, "It's a... a grass machine!" (and so it is, too).
She was quite well-behaved at mealtimes and in the company of visitors, and when she had enough of being around people, she just removed herself to a quieter part of the house (a tactic I also employ).
She is also convinced that today is the first day of Christmas, and tomorrow is the second day of Christmas and so on. I'm wondering what she's going to do when we actually get to Twelfth Night (we're not planning a costume ball or anything, although it would be fun to celebrate Twelfth Night, I think, with, as the tradition goes, "much merriment").
At one point during the day she came up to me and gave me a big cuddle and said to me, "You say, I know you love Christmas." And I did. And I do.
Visit the archives for past Zoë Notes
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