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Its been a long week! Henry is so worn out he asked to go to bed at 5.20 pm, bless him!  We have done some serious hours this week and I have got over my 2 hour mental block! We have done about 16 hours so far this week which is the most we’ve ever done and the longest Henry has spent in the playroom. Its working out well with me and Henry staying in the playroom from 11-3 (with Warwick bringing our lunch in ’cause once he is out its very hard to get him back in, which is what happened on Monday and Wednesday!) and then Warwick doing 3-4.30 ish so that I can go and pick the girls up.

Henry has been great.  He has really started to show his imaginative play this week and he is quite the little actor!  This is great for working towards the attention span goal but also for the fact that he is understanding the concept of imaginative play. 

We have been on a boat (the blue gym ball) and fallen into the sea and had to splash and swim to the beach, we’ve had a pretend dentists mirror stuck under my leg which he has to pull out (he rolls over a few times fantastically when I finally let go!  I think a job as a european footballer is calling!) and he has made a pretend spider from his hand after we’d sung ‘incy wincy spider’ and ran it over me and up and down the slide. 

He has also counted so well today!  He has to count before he pulls me up when we reach the beach (and I’m not actually acting!!) and when he pulls the ‘dentists mirror’ out!!  He only misses 8 out at the moment but can do the rest to 10!  He has also taken a great liking to his ‘scary sid’ puppet book (thanks Nanna!) to which he feeds the mini animal puppets!  It has been great for working on language, he has been saying ‘open mouth’ and ‘let go’ (obviously always useful vocabulary!).   He did actually say ‘let go’ when I was sneeking a cuddle so it seems to be working!

He did ‘ism’ (his repetitive, exclusive behaviour) for the last hour of our session today but he had done some really fantastic, imaginative, interaction, so I do think he was tired and probably a bit bored with me because he livened up when Warwick came in! Although some of our successful games have come from his isming, which is great as I think it really shows how powerful it is to join them when they repeatedly doing the same thing and you get the chance to make it in to a game which they actually like more!

I know now that I can do 4 hours a day with him but I think it would be better broken up by some of our volunteers (of which quite a few have come forward – thanks guys – so we are looking forward to starting to work with them and explain the techniques of the program.  It will be really interesting to see how Henry copes with different people in his playroom).

His diet is, well, really its just toast, rice milk and apples with a few crisps that he can have thrown in. Not quite sure how we move forward from this but at least what he is eating is better for him at the moment.  Reading into the diet I need to exclude aspartame and MSG (mono sodium glutomate) as well, which I’m finding is alot harder to remove that casein and gluten as it is not clear on the labels, especially for a novice like me! 

Hope you are all well, love a worn-out Penny & Henry x


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