Living with Autism

What did I get up to?

oh yeah 4.

I went to London when I was 18 and 1 month and worked at the 3 most stereotypical Aussie-in-London jobs there are.

A) Nanny.
A status symbol in 1980s real estate yuppie London. An Aussie Nanny was even better.
Please note: My boss was a full time stay at home Mum with 2 children. And she had a live in Nanny. Her husband was a Real Estate Agent and they had 3 company cars. One for him, one for his wife and one for his Nanny!
She told me if I ever got a parking ticket just to put the wipers on and wash it off the windscreen. It would just go straight to the office and get paid.
That's when they invented clamping.

B) Barmaid.
I went for 2 jobs as a Barmaid when I got sick of being a live-in slave to a dysfunctional marriage.
In the interviews they asked me what experience I had apart from selling Hamburgers and I said I had read Caddie.
That was enough. I had 2 jobs to choose from. I chose the one in a 4 star hotel where Mr Hammie was the Hall Porter......

what …

If you missed Part I go Here for the first 3 honest things about me and my coil perm

This; boys and girls, is why not all of the Eighties Retro fashion should be revived.

This is actually the coil perm grown out by 18 months but still persisting under an obviously home done color. Also note the nattily twisted bandana worn as a necklace. Boo wears that now. By this stage I was living with Mr Hammie in a 1 room bedsit in Kilburn. One end of our Road was NW3 which made it West Hampstead. The end where we lived was opposite Biddy Mulligans - mere metres from Kilburn High Road, where one got to experience the color and smells of the Wine Tasting Club who occupied the park by day, and slept in the doorways of the bank by night.
These Poets of the Gutter, Looking at the Stars and drinking Carlsberg Special Brew, would leave little piles of puke on the footpath that you learned to step lightly over on the way to the Tube.

How I met Mr Hammie? is the next part of the story. xx

Young Beautiful and Melbourne based Te recently awarded me the "Honest Weblog Tag".
Te has the Bachelor of Arts that I should have come home from London to complete (more about that later)

She is now, very sensibly going to do her traveling - to Spain very soon. Oh and she has worked with Special Needs kids.

So basically if Sliding Door's two Gwenyth Paltrow's were seperated by 20 years, without having to sleep with John Lynch or get hit by a van... - well, you get the idea.

The Rules:
This Award is bestowed upon a fellow blogger whose blog’s content or design is, in the giver’s opinion, brilliant.
“When accepting this auspicious award, you must write a post bragging about it, including the name of the misguided soul who thinks you deserve such acclaim, and link back to the said person so everyone knows she/he is real.
Choose a minimum of seven blogs that you find brilliant in content or design. Or improvise by including bloggers who have no idea who you are because you don…

Why suppress your child's interests and obsessions? When what they enjoy could possibly enrich your world.

And you gotta love a little Gerard Manley Hopkins.
xx

The Lovely LBR has rewarded my low level whingeing for a Meme tag called "Q & A".

This is not good behavioural management, she should have held out much longer before giving in and feeling guilty for losing all power and then compounding it by giving me a chocolate Hobnob to go with the tag.
Here are the guidelines:
1. Respond and rework. Answer the questions on your blog, replace one question you dislike with a question of your own invention; add a question of your own.2. Tag eight other un-tagged people.
What is your current obsession? Mad but nothing. And I am obsessive compulsive, so this is very poor form. I have a bit of a crush on Tom Dunne, the mid morning D.J. from Newstalk 106 who I met at an Autism Fundraiser last week. But I don't really have time to stalk him. I might manage an hour a week after Easter.
Good fika place? (That would be coffee to us non-Swedes) Insomnia in Greystones County Wicklow.
Do you nap a lot? No, it makes me feel ill. I would rather hav…

One of the hardest things about Autism is that you can't touch it. You can't put your finger on the one thing that defines it and say - this is Autism.

Instead you spend a lot of time worrying and then feeling guilty for being the one to suspect that there is anything wrong with your child - you feel you are betraying them.

So when you finally get around to seeking out some answers, the last thing you need is an 18 month waiting list for diagnosis.
Or some drongo handing out reasons like "you're just a bad parent"

"Your kids watch too much TV - particularly (and specifically in my case) - Teletubbies!"

"you must have eaten the wrong things, had too many fillings, used the wrong shampoo, had too much wine - while pregnant"
(if I didn't have too much then, I have made up for it now!)

And my favourite (at the moment) is "you do too much Facebook- that causes autism"

Autism is "So Hot Right Now" that it seems everyone has an opi…

Boo took this photo on my iPhone during one of us unscheduled access visits. (after he ripped my Sony phone in half - I banned him from cellular technology)
It is from the film "Inspector Gadget" with Matthew Broderick; the live action version which sucked as far as I can tell.

I only just discovered it and am fascinated as to why he would photograph the kiss at the end of the film. He is all about Inspector Gadget at the moment (thanks to Disney and those insidious previews that they put on all their films) and we are having some interesting role play involving removing faces, and a lot of "Go Go Gadget Airplane/Parachute/Airbag etc."
He also says "you have to visualise it" meaning, I guess that someone tells Inspector Gadget how to control his gadgets by imagining what he needs.
So I say "Go Go Gadget Parenting"
Make something pop out that will help me to tolerate being bitten (hard) and being screamed at, just for resisting stereotypical "a…