Living with Autism

The Delightful Seeker of Searching the Inner Me, Super Kawaii Mama and Cal of Sidenote all gave me some blog awards a few posts ago (quite a few posts ago) and it is my honorable duty to pass them on.

From The Seeker and Super Kawaii Mama
From Cal of Sidenote and The Seeker I will announce the nominees shortly, but first I am going to take the opportunity to say why I love these 3 blogs, right back at them.1. The Seeker: Because she is living quite literally a second life and is blessed to be living it beautifully. She always makes comments on my posts that make me think. And she makes me feel very loved when I need it.2. Super Kawaii Mama: Who could single handedly be responsible for the downturn in velour leisure wear and jeans for stay at home mums. If it is true to say that you should dress for the job you want, then I owe this lady a commission for getting me back into the workforce as a "creative" but respected communicator. You don't have to be rich, you don'…

It’s so incredibly hard to love you
But I love you anyway

And every time I try too hard not to love you; I love you anyway


Have you ever been trying to "give out loads" to a child for some recurring misdemeanor only to find yourself being shmoozed?

Boo has an extremely annoying habit of chewing keys off his laptop, and it happened 3 times in one day last week. I was apoplectic as there are only so many times you can ring Dell-hi to go through the whole "my enter key is sticking" process and get them to send out a new keyboard.
And the third key he damaged was on Bratty's laptop; after the 3 of us had gone for our walk while an Angel watched the Boo.

So was pretty durned angry. I am not a smacker. But I do give out quite a telling off when Boo has done the wrong thing.
I had brought him up to his room for a "Time Out" and removed privileges like his mini- DVD. You see, Everything in our house gets broken! It can be extremely frustrating and expensive too. I was…

Keith Duffy of Boyzone

With Boo and Bratty

This was the view outside my bedroom window today, while I tried to get some work done.

I have 2 kids on the Halloween Mid-term break this week and it is making me think about contrasts and finding a balance. As you can see from the photograph there is a real beauty in contrast. We are having a really cold autumn, with short sunny spells that are bringing out the best in fall colours on our trees. Today it was cold, rainy and eventually snowy. But the crisp light of the afternoon showed up Sugarloaf Mountain looking stark and snowy, with the contrasting warmth of the trees in the foreground. The recently planted shrubbery of our fast-tracked-developer housing estate are putting in quite a good effort I think.
Staring at this late autumn scene one day, I thought about the contrasts and how they exist within us. They could make us seem a bit scratchy and jumpy, like a bad mixed tape that jumps from one song genre to another, but they can also make us more interesting people.
And yes, thing…

The walking path on Greystones Beach, looking north towards Dublin.




After a week of Doom and Gloom from our recent budget, I have decided to try and cheer myself up with a reminder of what will not change in a "recession" economy. You see, after 10 years of Celtic Tiger boom times, Ireland has joined the rest of the world in progressing from a credit crunch into 4 quarters of negative growth (shrinkage?) which I believe dumps us in a recession.






A lot of people are not working, the banks are being guaranteed by the government as people panic about their savings, and there are still a lot of "For Sale" signs around as people jump ship from mortgages that they can't afford.


And the Budget, brought forward to shore up an ailing exchequer, went after the very people civilised society is supposed to protect; The Elderly, Children, The Disabled and People with Special Needs, and they threw in a 1% levy on People on Low Incomes.


But I talked about that already in my pos…