This is going to be short update – BuddyBoy is in his fourth week of the flu, I’m in my second and now most of the other children have been blessed with it as well. So life has pretty much come to a screeching halt in our household, and if anyone feels like coming over and doing some heavy-duty cleaning, please let me know! I must also admit to not being as regular as we should be with our footbaths. For the eight of us doing them, it takes 3.5 hours of cleansing time alone, plus time for changing over the liners and water, setting up the next child and so on. So there have been days where we simply couldn’t get everyone’s footbaths done, or we had no energy left to do any at all.

Since the last post, these are the changes we’ve noticed:

• An aide in his class who had been away for a while, commented on how she was amazed at the changes in BuddyBoy. She said he was using a lot more words, and was so much calmer and doing activities that were previously an issue for him. Nearly every day we’ve had a notation in his school diary, saying he’s had a calm day. He’s even started eating at school, which is wonderful, as previously he would not only go without breakfast, but not eat while there, so the first food he would eat would literally be at 3pm when I picked him up, with a snack in the car.
• BuddyBoy wanted some more bikkies (we still use them as rewards during the footbath). He came in and tried to drag me to where he knew we stashed them, and I said, “no more bikkies buddy, sorry”. He was upset, but instead of hitting me (his usual response) he just cried and threw himself at me for a cuddle. I consider this progress! Since then, we’ve had repeats of this, and he’s just looked resigned and walked away without any fuss.
• BuddyBoy’s OCD is getting rather out of hand. He will only wear his nappies with the truck pictures on them, all the other ones get refused – he stopped wearing disposables when Huggies decided to change the picture on them. We’re once again seeing a lot of toys that have to be arranged just right and he will get most upset if they get moved. He gets very upset and will cry or scream if we drive a different way home from school. So now I’m having to listen to that every weekday, as we need to teach him in babysteps that it’s okay for the way to be different, we will still end up in the same place.
• He received his third award this year at school. This time it was another Student of the Week Award, for finding the ‘break’ card and giving it to a teacher to get a time out. He did this independently – something he’s always struggled with.
• At school he waved goodbye to Daddy. This is the first time he has ever waved to anyone! The next day he did it again, this time with a big grin on his face, looking from his hand to Daddy – he was obviously proud of his new skill. The teacher and aide were amazed, and Daddy was in happy tears. 🙂
• He’s been getting much better at fetching his bowl from his room when we ask him to, without getting as distracted.
• He wanted some chips for dinner, and while they were cooking, he went to the cupboard, said “get a bowl” and got his own bowl out of the cupboard and put it on the bench. Wow! Later on he wanted sauce with his chips, but couldn’t find it in the fridge. As he closed it, I heard him say, “need sauce”. I did a doubletake on that one!
• I didn’t have any clean truck nappies left so he went in search of trucks ones and said, “trucks” without my having mentioned the word at all.
• His fine motor skills have improved – he started drawing some pictures some time ago, which we interpreted as dinosaurs. Last week, he drew another one – all over his older sister’s school diary. 🙂

I shall leave you with all that news, while I try to clean some of the masses of paper out of his room! We’re once again having to collect brochures from our local supermarkets to keep up with demand – thankfully they know us and don’t seem to mind our strangeness too much.