How she's doing.

Jade has continued to make great progress.

Back in July, the same week that she first answered the register at school and danced in the school production, she conquered another big fear. Anybody who knows Jade knows she is pony-mad (like mother, like daughter). She has loved ponies and riding since the age of 4, had her first ride on a pony at 4 and had her first lessons at age 6. She has had regular lessons for about 3 years, has been highly praised by all her different instructors for her natural seat and skill, and can ride beautifully ... but only at walk and trot. Canter has been way too scary for her to try. She has wanted to do it, has driven me mad asking what it feels like, has read about it, thought about it, pretended to do it ... but always refused to try on a real pony. Earlier this year I thought we were going to get somewhere because she agreed to try a canter in her lesson. She was scared of being run away with, though, so wanted to do it on the lunge rein rather than on her own. This means she was going round in a circle instead of a straight line, and although she did manage a few steps of canter, she unfortunately but gently fell off. She then refused to go back to those stables. Instead she wanted to go where her friend E goes, so I asked E's mum, who turns out to have been a qualified riding instructor in a previous life(!) and she recommended Turpins Lodge near Banbury. It's a good 20-25 minute drive from our house and I never would have gone there of our own accord, but they've been absolutely brilliant with Jade. And on about her 4th or 5th lesson, she took us all by surprise. As usual, at canter time, her instructor said "Okay Jade, it's your turn. Trot to the corner, then do sitting trot and kick on and canter round to the back of the ride". And blow me down, she did! I was astonished, and so thrilled! And more importantly, so was she! Check out the video:



So, in the space of a week, she had done her first public performance, said her first word in front of the whole class, and done her first successful canter on a pony. It felt like all the walls were coming tumbling down! Fantastic!

Then came the summer holidays, and a bit of a lull. Having pretty much always spoken to her Grandpa (my Dad) she went all quiet and stopped talking when he was here, for most of the summer.

In early August, the girls and I went for a 3-day camping trip to the New Forest. On our last morning, we all went to a riding stables for an hour's hack. Shannon was in front on a leading rein, then me, and then Jade and another girl behind me. Shortly after we set off, I thought I heard Jade's voice and turned round to hear what she was saying to me, and almost fell off my horse when I realised one of the ride leaders had asked her a question and she was answering!!!! Honestly, that is one of the best moments of my life. And later on when we were talking about it, she told me that when she was wandering round the campsite one day stroking the wild ponies, a man had asked her a question and she had answered him.

Then, of course, it was back-to-school time, with a new teacher and a mix-up of classes, so some old friends and some new classmates. I had a lot of confidence in her teacher, though, because at the end of last term I went to have a chat with her, and discovered she is studying for a Masters in Special Educational Needs, had already read up about SM and her Mum is some sort of SEN trainer who has taught and advised others on selective mutism. However Jade told me she was not planning on answering the register in her new class so I did not know what to expect. Here's how it went:

Sept 2nd - Day 1 of term - Jade did not answer the register but did read out loud to her teacher.

Sept 5th - Day 2 of term - Jade asked her teacher for a maths sheet that she needed. (Initiating speech - quite amazing!!)

Sept 6th - Day 3 - called out the score she got on her maths test in front of the whole class.

Week 2 - answering the register, calling out her maths scores, talking in circle time, answering questions, and volunteering to go up and write stuff on the white board.

Sept 15th - She stood up and explained the third stage of the water cycle to the whole class.

Early Oct - has put up her hand to answer questions in class. She is 'Star of the Week' in her class this week because of her progress with talking, so gets to wear a badge all week which she was presented with in assembly in front of the whole school.

Oct 7th - along with 2 friends Jade has performed a puppet show (with speech) to the whole class.

To say I am proud, relieved and joyful is an understatement. There have been so many dark times when I truly doubted we would ever see such progress, times when I berated myself for not doing more, noticing earlier, helping her better and more consistently, when I felt I identified and empathised too much with her anxiety and didn't help her conquer it. We have not dealt with this perfectly at all. We have muddled through, sometimes pushing forward, sometimes just leaving things be for a long while. We have held back for fear of pushing her too hard, and not known what to do. And yet, imperfectly, slowly, we have helped her along and the results are beginning to show.

She still has a long way to go. She is still silent in every other social situation. She doesn't want to go to any groups or join in after-school activities. She has never asked for what she wants in a cafe or restaurant, is silent while buying things in shops, hides behind me when we meet new people and hates family gatherings and doesn't answer people's questions if we (parents) are there. Nevertheless, we can at last see signs that she is truly on the road to recovery, that it may take time but we can see a positive and normal future for her. Fantastic.

'The Triplets'

The Beans (Petits Haricots) have posted a lovely series of pics of the girls we call 'The Triplets', which includes Shannon, here.

Usborne Books for Sale

All titles are brand new. All cost £1 each unless otherwise noted.


The Amazing Adventures of Hercules – Usborne Young Reading Series 2

Penguins – Usborne First Reading Level 4

The Ugly Duckling – Usborne First Reading Level 4

True Stories of Heroes – Paul Dowswell

The Usborne Detective's Handbook £2

Knights and Armour (Internet Linked) £3

Alice in Wonderland (Hardback padded)

Lift-the-Flap Night-Time

Playtime Activities £2

Pirate Jigsaw Book £2

Farmyard Tales Treasury £3 (Hardback)

Princess Treasury (x 2) £3

A Thief in the House of Memory – Tim Wynne-Jones

The Boy in the Burning House – Tim Wynne-Jones

Usborne Discovery – Trains (Internet Linked

What's Happening to Me (Boys) (x 2)

Bible Tales – Moses in the Bulrushes

The Usborne Flip-Flap Body Book

The Story of Heidi (Padded hardback)

Starting Soccer

The Pony-Mad Princess – Princess Ellie to the Rescue
The Pony-Mad Princess – Princess Ellie Saves the Day

True Polar Adventures – Paul Dowswell

The Snow Queen Book and Cassette tape – Usborne Young Reading Series 2

For the record

Will I ever get the blogging bug back? I don't know, but I know that I regret it when I don't record the important steps as well as the day-to-day stuff for future reading.

Jade had such a good week last week. The girl who, last year, wouldn't even take part in rehearsals for the class production despite having said she wanted to play a percussion instrument, and who wouldn't take part in Sports Day just a month ago, danced in a group on Monday and Tuesday nights in front of a big audience, without a hint or flicker of dropping out or tears or anxiety. We were so pleased!

However, I did notice that during the songs when everyone sang, she wasn't even attempting to take part and therefore stood out (to me anyway - she was at the back) as the only person who wasn't singing. So when, on the way home, she asked me if I would give her a 'prize' for taking part, I said I would if she would even just move her lips during the songs the following night. Maybe I was being a bit ungenerous, but I knew she could do it and I wanted to give her a bit more of a push while things were going so well.

On Tuesday lunchtime, the class TA who worked with Jade a lot last year and is the only person in the school she can properly talk to, rang me to say she had answered the register verbally for the first time! For the past two years she has responded to her name with a thumbs up. But she had said to the TA that she really wants to be a prefect. She's talked about this with me before and I'd said that it was unlikely to happen because she wouldn't be able to tell kids not to run in the corridors, for instance. She'd thought she could just go and tell the TA each time she had something to report. Anyway, as expected, she was not announced as one of the new prefects, but staff will be keeping an eye on the kids and making more prefects of those who deserve it over during the first term. So on Tuesday, the TA said she knew what she had to do to be able to be a prefect, and perhaps now would be a good time to start with her first word by answering the register. The TA suggested she say 'yes' to her friend sitting next to her, but in the event, she gave a very clear 'yes' which the whole class and the TA standing in the doorway could hear! Nobody turned a hair or made her feel uncomfortable. She said she wouldn't do it the following day because they had a substitute teacher who she knows and doesn't like so much, but actually she did, and continued to answer the register all week.

Then on Tuesday evening she took part in the second night of the production and sure enough, I could just about see her lips move during the group songs. It was obviously quite difficult for her as it was quite a small movement, which I found interesting. Strange that it's harder for her to even look as though she's singing (i.e. move her lips clearly) than to dance in front of the audience. We went out the next day and she chose another Breyer horse as her reward!

30DC result

Okay, so I suppose I should report back. It's after midnight, though, so I will be very brief.

I dithered a great deal about my subject matter, lost motivation, decided to give up, changed my mind and wanted to keep going, and realised I couldn't possibly manage a proper Cochrane review in the time available, so with only a short time to go till the end of the challenge, I decided to re-visit my dissertation subject from my degree to see what had happened in the meantime.

I didn't finish - in fact I didn't get an awful lot done at all - but I did confirm to myself that I do still love to get stuck into some academic research, and I met an amazing bunch of people and we have a closed group on Facebook where we continue to encourage each other to 'Screw Work, Let's Play'. All sorts of ideas and thoughts are flowing from that and once I'm back from 2 weeks in France I might let slip what they are....

In the meantime, I started a new blog for my research results (such as they are, very unfinished) so you can take a look here

Screw Work Let's Play 30 Day Challenge

I feel like I've been wandering in the wilderness for a long time. I'm not sure what I'm meant to be doing in life, what my purpose is (apart from raising my family) and how to make the best use of any gifts I may have. I'm sure I ought to be having more fun than I am. So when I came across Screw Work, Let's Play I was intrigued and fascinated. And when I saw they were starting a 30-day challenge to run from 1st-30th April, I was tempted. The Challenge is to actually take action and do a 'play project'. So many of us think of things that we *might* like to do, but we're not sure enough that it would lead to a job/money/a future so we hold back, stay in our secure but unfulfilling jobs and never break out and try something different. So the SWLP idea is to just play! Find something that I would love to do, that would be fun, that uses my skills/talents/personality, to explore whether I really do enjoy it and want to do more of it, to find out which bits work and which don't, which aspects inspire me and which don't, and see what comes out of it.

I only joined the Challenge on 31st March. I kept reading the e-mails about it but felt I wasn't 'good enough' to do this kind of thing. That everybody else would be high-flyers, go-getters and confident extroverts, whereas I have largely been a 'go-with-the-flow' kind of person, maybe a bit lazy, unfocused, unsure of what I wanted or where I wanted to go, so not really going anywhere much. And anyway, I didn't know what project I wanted to do. But at the last minute I realised I really didn't want to let *another* opportunity slip by; that I could change my image of who I am and what kind of an impact I can make on the world. That I can *make things happen*! Wow, how cool is that!

So, without letting myself think about it too much further, I signed up. I watched the video on how to choose a play-project, and wrote a list of ideas. I came up with several - there are all sorts of things that interest me - but there's no doubt about the top two.

Idea 1: Move forward with my 16-year dream of working in academic nutrition, by writing a systematic review for the Cochrane Database on an area of nutrition related to pregnancy/maternal/infant health. I drool over academic jobs such as working at the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit, but I am the parent of 2 young girls, one with special needs, and don't want a full-time out-of-the-house job. I think in the end I might like this to lead towards editing a nutrition journal of some sort, but that's too far in the future to be sure yet.

Idea 2: Go and do a horse-whispering course, to learn Monty Roberts' methods of training and helping horses. I don't think I want to work in this field, i.e. I don't want to be outside all the time in the freezing cold and mud (been there, done that), but on the other hand it totally fascinates me, uplifts me, inspires me and I just want to be able to do it! No idea what the outcome would be there, except that it does feed in to how I deal with my daughter's particular issues. But it would need around £500 to go on the UK-based training course, and I just don't have that right now. So while I would still love to do this, I can't do it on the time-frame for this project.

So Idea 1 wins, for now. I'll give it a go, see how it turns out and whether I still enjoy it like I used to.

Interesting memory from Jade

Jade has just told me something really interesting. She says she can remember being 4, and on holiday in a tent with us somewhere (could very well have been our first Kessingland), and having the selective mutism feeling when somebody wanted to talk to her, but if she had known then what she knows now, she realises she would have been able to push herself to talk and got over it. She said she thinks we should have helped her more. She was struggling to explain herself, so I asked if she meant that it was a smaller feeling then than she gets now, and that with a bit of encouragement or help she would have been able to get over it then, and she agreed.

I told her that I absolutely agreed with her - if we had known then what we know now, we would have treated her shyness/silence a bit differently and maybe we wouldn't have got to where we are now. But I said that it's also encouraging because she can see quite clearly that what she has now is just a strong habit that has built up in her brain over the past 5 years, and that's all. (Which chimes in nicely with the Linden Method which we have started to use consistently this week.)

She also drew a lovely series of cartoon pictures (which she has done quite a bit of recently and shows something of a talent for) depicting herself hiding behind a parent when another child approaches, but gradually coming out and moving closer to the other child, and the parent stepping back, and her own expression changing from worried to relaxed and talking as she gets closer to this other child. I've asked DH to scan it in and maybe I will upload it if Jade lets me.

Organising and decluttering

I've always been messy. As a teenager I had the sort of room where you couldn't tell the colour of the carpet for all the stuff all over it. As I've got older I've got less and less happy about living like that. I hate having anyone over because I'm embarrassed about the house, and I've been irritable and grumpy with the children when I wanted to declutter and tidy and they just made more mess. When I was home-educating I thought it was lack of child-free time that made it impossible for me to get the house clear and tidy, so when Jade started school in April 2009 I knew I wanted to make it a priority. After a year-and-a-half of intermittently trying to do it myself (between spending vast amounts of time with Jade in school and other interruptions) including taking (excellent) online courses and reading decluttering books, I have realised I'm just not going to be able to do it. For whatever reason, I just can't see what to do or how to do it. I can't decide where to put things and I can't decide what to get rid of and what to keep. I was just getting paralysed with indecision.

So I decided it was time to call in a professional. I Googled and found the Association of Professional Declutterers and Organisers, and from there found Kay Julian of Welcome Space.

She came on Monday. We spent the first hour exploring the extent of the problem in all of the rooms, and then we got to work. We decided to start with the girls' rooms so that some of the stuff downstairs that was theirs could find a home upstairs instead.

The 'before' photo below shows a worse situation than normal in Jade's room, as we had just got new-to-us beds for the girls in the past month and the chest of drawers from Shannon's room was being temporarily stored in Jade's room, along with the zip-and-link beds that used to be our guest beds but now need to be got rid of.



It's not all that clear how much has changed in this next photo, but at Kay's suggestion we moved Jade's chest of drawers to the other side of the room near her wardrobe, so there is a 'clothes' side of the room and a 'toys' side of the room. Kay found the most efficient mixture of containers to go in Jade's toy cupboard to store things away so that her home-made stables, tackrooms and other horse paraphernalia could all live together in one corner.


There wasn't as much to do in Shannon's room, but the pile of toys and 'stuff' that was piled in one corner all got tidily stashed away in containers and homes found for them on the various shelves and spaces. She now has a clear floor and a proper home for everything.

The living room doesn't look drastically changed either, but everything was cleared off the table. We reorganised the drawers in the bureau to the left so that the bottom one became the tidy and organised craft drawer, and the top one became the 'to-do' drawer, where active projects and things waiting to go to other people can be stored. I also put a 'to do' note on my calendar so that I have a visual reminder of what I need to get done.




The basket that can be seen on the right-hand-side of the sofa has been re-purposed from a book basket to a 'toy-tidying' basket. At the end of the day, if the girls want to leave any of their toys downstairs ready for the next day, they can do so as long as they fit into the basket. Anything that doesn't fit has to go upstairs.

Kay took away the unwanted chest of drawers and a great pile of other stuff destined for the charity shop, and some rubbish that needed disposing of.

Today I have got rid of the majority of the stuff that was on top of the bureau (seen in the 'Before' pic), chucked some away and relocating some to the craft drawer.

Kay is coming back next Monday to tackle the worst downstairs room. Already I feel lighter and more free to think about other things. I am looking forward to discovering that my house can be nice!