Another Day at the Office!

Yes since last blogging I think there have been a few more days at the office, the only disadvantage is I'm not getting paid for any of it but boy do I do my fair share in life each and everyday and then some.

No I'm not talking about working in a real office but here at home as a full time carer for not only hubby Tim and our 2 youngers kids because they are visually impaired but for our 17 year old son Lance who is autistic and is 24/7 both in every way you can possibly imagine and then some.

Today we tried to go out, just a small trip to the Chinese Museum and gardens and lunch in the park. It took some time to get ready as it does in a family of 6 and Lance managed fairly well.....or so we thought. The very reality of living with autism and a severe anxiety disorder (just too name a few) hits home every minute of our lives when our son can barely manage to get ready to go out let alone walk out the front door into a world that just hasn't been created for him. He had a meltdown went to bed and stayed there and then Tim and I have to try and still focus on taking the other kids out but we do even with the mental anxiety both of us feel leaving Lance home in the state he was and on his own.......grrrrrr to be torn so many ways so many times is exhausting. So we just do lunch at subway and manage looking in the old post office and all it's history and then home, yep cut short once again. Welcome to the Turnbull world and our lives.

We are learning more and more not only about Autism itself but different anxieties and co morbid diagnoses in our son as well. We have been borrowing books from the library but recently we started purchasing books because we need those books here at home to book mark all the things that we need to have with us all the time.

Our little collection is growing and so far we have All Cats Have Asperger's Syndrome - Kathy Hoopmann (although our son has autism NOT Asperger's Syndrome this is a beautiful picture book I fell in love with), Nobody Nowhere, Somebody Somewhere, Like Colour To The Blind, Exposure Anxiety - The Invisible Cage and The Jumbled Jigsaw all by autistic author Donna Williams who was born in Australia in 1963. She grew up hearing words such as 'deaf', 'disturbed', 'crazy' and 'spastic' and wasn't formally diagnosed with Autism until adulthood. Yep one amazing woman I reckon with trying and succeeding in making sense of our world within her own.

Monday Tim and Maddison had an appointment at our optometrists and Tim now needs to wear reading glasses, yes he wears glasses full time anyway but with this genetic eye disease Tim, Stephanie and Maddi has, it just doesn't make things nice and easy for any of them. Maddison now also needs to wear bifocals as he needs to have reading glasses and his left lens has to be stepped up twice. But that's not all as after lots of thought and making the right decision as to whether or not Maddi would cope with 2 pairs of glasses....the ones he wears all the time and then a pair of reading glasses for reading, computer etc etc and the fact that progressive or graduated lenses could possibly allow his peripheral sight to be distorted which is not good seeing as what they have is a rarer form of macular degeneration and they rely heavily on their peripheral sight to see what we would normally see looking through our central vision, that the best would be indeed bi focals and so long as they will work for him. Not a cheap exercise as we have to pay for all these pairs of glasses and Maddi's old ones are only a year old and his new pair are another $600 and if they don't work for him then we have to go with plan B and he goes back to wearing the old ones but then we still have to pay for another pair of reading glasses as well. Yikes these bifocals had better work. Clear as mud?! Yep thought so!

Now you can understand a little as to why I scrap....many reasons apart from memories and capturing all those moments in life. But for me it's about letting my creativity unfold and taking some much needed theraputic time just for me.....yep my time to zone out from everything going on around me.....well at least try to a little. While I'm on the topic of scrapping....look below, gorgeous isn't she. Yep that's Stephanie who is 15 next March.....oooh now that's hard to imagine but she will be. She actually took this photo herself and I just love it and as a dedicated scrapper I just had to scrap this one.

Credits

So that's it for now and if you stop by please pop in and say hello. I know so many of you come this way and I would love you to say howdy in your own special way. So till next blogging stay safe and take care. Hugs Chris xoxo