Swimming · Wednesday April 25, 2007 by Abbie
Why is it that when you want them to sleep in they don’t, and when you want them awake yearly they can’t open their eyes?
The power outage of yesterday must have affected the wireless broadband in our village, so I had no email access this morning. I would have liked Ram to wake early as I was at a bit of a loose end, but he didn’t. Then just when I had found something to do, he did wake up!
We had our usual morning of reading, both in bed and out, then an early lunch and off to swimming.
When we got there, we found that the usual person on the desk that knows us well wasn’t there. The new person was a bit of a jobs worth and wanted to see our memebership cards, which weren’t up to date because everytime they tried to print them off the machine wasn’t working. So she went into the computer and claimed that we hadn’t renewed them, which I clearly did as I had the discount card with me. Then she started making about fuss about no photo on the system for Ram and picked up the camera. I firmly but gently pointed out to her that he was autistic and that she wouldn’t be getting a photo, and that was why there wasn’t a photo.
By this time Ram was getting really anxious. Then another home educating family came in, and had to stand there waiting too. Finally she took our money, then over charged the family behind us!
When we got into the pool the mother in the other family remarked on how Ram’s behaviour changed, and how noticeable it was that he was getting really upset. Sometimes it is nice to hear that, because it shows that we are not just making these things up!
We had a great swim and a much longer one than usual. There were two other families there, and Ram seemed to enjoy it, despite one little incident. But even that one was over very quickly when I took him away from everyone in the shallow end and went back down to the deep end.
However, it just goes to show how sometimes on the outside these kids seem to be coping and enjoying things, but they are only just holding it together on the inside. While we were driving home, I asked if he had enjoyed it and he said no. Ram said, ‘There were all these kids there and they all wanted to interact with me and I didn’t want them to!’
Luckily next week we will be going to the disabled swim session again so we won’t have that problem.
We got back much later than usual as we were two hours in the water, and then to the shops afterwards. So we went straight into after school telly, then supper with the Radio 4 funny thing at 6.30.
We watched Thoroughly Modern, part of the Edwardian season which was about cameras. It is intersting that they are saying that because of digital cameras there won’t be as good a record of what life is like now in 100 years time, as there is now of the Edwardian time. I will have to remind Ram of that next time he complains about going into the photographic shop to have our old fashioned films developed, especially as it is the only place that we can still get black and white film developed!
