Vladimir PUTIN Are you going to ruin our economies again Barack?
Barack OBAMA Might do.
Whoopsy, it’s been seven months since my last diary extract but, as usual, it feels like an eyeblink. All this time Eva’s school has been making a fantastic effort, with 20 hours a week one-to-one support, a social group to teach her the basics of interaction, strategies to help her engage other children at playtime, and always plenty of lines for her to say in stage [...]
Eva, like most kids, is endlessly inventive. There’s rarely a moment when she isn’t drawing, or painting, or building, or generating a new world around her in which she speaks Tamil, or Thai, or her own unique language featuring words like ‘Tobrando’ and ‘Tobisher’. She wraps herself in a leopardskin slanket and claims she’s a muslim woman. She writes her first [...]
Eva will be five on Wednesday! Five! So to celebrate, here are some pictures from a steam railway we visited last month. Eva loved it, and it took me right back to my first job down the local pit back in ’89, when I would smell the steam from the mine’s tank engine as I walked up the lane every morning. Bliss. Within [...]
Sorry it’s been six months since I updated this diary. Immediately post-diagnosis there seemed so much to assimilate and explain, and, although a lot’s happened in the intervening period, I’ve been tackling it on a day-to-day basis that hasn’t left me a lot of time for major reflection. I wanted this diary to have a fairly rigorous level of analysis, self-awareness, and self-criticism, but [...]
I guess I should be surprised that my diary’s made it this far without confronting the issue of treatment, because there seem to be two types of parent working with the Spectrum: those who accept the diagnosis as a lifelong fait accompli and who solely rely on behavioural techniques, and those who seek a solution through alternative therapies. The first type believe their children [...]
When Eva kicks off, particularly in public, right now I find it hard not to respond as a ‘typical’ parent to a ‘typical’ kid throwing a paddy. I huff n’ puff n’ cajole n’ fume and don’t try hard enough to look beyond her behaviour, which often isn’t a question of pure ‘naughtiness’. Like any kid with ASD, she’s making up for [...]
For the first time this weekend Eva saw me cry, because I thought her little brother Tomas had died while I was busy chivvying her all the way home from the park. Of course, by ‘chivvying’ I actually mean grabbing her scooter and pulling her along while she wept bitterly and cried ‘help! help!’ to passers-by as if [...]
Eva is 4 years old and has more spark in her big toe than my wife & I can summon between us. She’s just started school, having been in full time nursery from 9 months, and it’s been 5 months since she was diagnosed with an Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD.) I’m writing this for all those daddies (and mummies) dealing [...]