I never expected myself wanting to be living life in the slow lane, choosing a quieter, simpler life is really working out for us. It's nice to be having some quiet family time, time with the fella and Christmas. What an amazing, fabulous time we had. The fella came up for a couple of days and left on Christmas Eve, for a guy that claims to be rubbish at gift buying, he did remarkably well, I loved every single gift, he bought the kids a lovely gift each too and we loved watching him open his huge photo collage of me, my kids and his lovely kids too. Spending time cuddled up watching the kids play, all sat together playing a board game or watching a film was perfect. The smiles were infectious.
Christmas day was manic as is to be expected with 3 very excited children, their grandparents came round and spent a good majority of the day with us, was lovely watching dad joining in on the PS3, not having a clue what he was doing, or hearing him and my princess singing to queen (very badly). Once they left we had some quiet time, reading books, playing games and eating the left over party food. We have still not fully cleared and tidied, the dining table now has various jigsaws, puzzles, paint your own trinket box and airfix cars on it. The decorations are away, apart from our one piece of tinsel that we leave out all year, just cos we can!
Christmas can be a little overwhelming for kids, let alone kids with ASD, but the joy of home ed has meant we can relax and do calming things when anyone has felt manic, our education style relaxed a good month before Christmas and we have been chatting this week about how we want to start the new year, the kids have decided that because we are so busy that we need a schedule of some sort. So today whilst the younger 2 were with grandad, me and Einstein (his new nickname courtesy of his best friends) waited at the car garage (bloody MOT repairs) and came up with a loose plan. It includes a list of subjects/projects we'd like to do, and also a weekly plan, it's very flexible but might be enough to encourage us all to do more together.
Over the holidays we didn't have many days where there weren't extra children in the house, one day there were 5 boys aged 9-13, wow it made the house feel small lol, was lovely watching them kicking a ball about, or playing the ps3, or running around playing spies, all the time making sure my princess was joining in. She often had her friends in to play, they baked or played with the dolls. There were many nerf gun battles and i was the target many times :)
I have more time with the kids now, so we want to use it wisely, I have added more admins to the FB groups, a wide variety of lovely folks, all with different outlooks and different home ed stories, so I am able to step back a little, I have also chosen to hand over some of the larger LA cases I was working on, as Doncaster LA is about to release it's draft policy for consultation and I have a feeling we could be in for a bumpy ride, luckily we have lots of local families wanting to be involved in the process. So with all this time I am reading more, cuddling my babies more, catching up with friends and generally smiling more.
The kids are thriving and happy and its such a difference from 4 years ago. We have some amazing things planned for this year, we can't wait to take the caravan out lots, a trip to London, and they're already making plans for their birthday outings, even the wet weather isn't going to dampen our spirits.
Happy new year to you all, it's wonderful to see so many people interested in reading about our lives. Feel free to leave a comment.
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