Managing Autism - A Personal View

We travelled to Melbourne last weekend to spend an evening out on our own (Steve and I) and to have a farewell lunch with my brother Mike and his partner Elien who are heading back to Belgium in a few days time.

We left home on Saturday afternoon in the pouring rain (unusual here as we have been in severe drought in our part of Australia for a very long time) and made a slow trip to Melbourne, struggling against the weather along the way.

Thankfully Annie slept in the car, but Jack was too interested in all the rain to even think about resting!

We arrived in Melbourne a little later than we had planned, but Steve and I still managed to head out for a few hours on our own - savouring the quiet and calm around us!

Sunday was spent with my Mum and Dad, and Mike and Elien.  Elien prepared roast lamb for us (her first ever attempt) and the kids spent much of the day playing with Mike (Jack had Mike building Lego creations with him).

Here are a few snapshots of our day together:

Little did we know when we had left 24 hours earlier that the worst of the weather was still to hit our part of Victoria.  We later discovered that the storm had been at it’s heaviest Saturday evening - resulting in flooding to our garage, and water damage to everything in it!!

Now, our garage stores many of the normal things that you would find in garages, but due to the fact that we are in the process of selling our home, we also have quite a bit of furniture stored in the garage, as well as many boxes of books and other items that we have started to pack away in preparation for our move.  So as you can imagine, not a pretty picture to come home to.

The kids hit ‘hyper’ state within moments of being home, simply because of the uncertainty of everything around them, but once darkness hit and we had done all that we could for the time being we managed to quieten things down and they eventually went to sleep.

We have spent the last couple of days mopping up, drying things out, and putting together a list of damaged items for the insurance company.  Certainly not a pleasant task, but at least we can be grateful that it was only the garage that was flooded, and not the house!

So with the storm having passed, the sun shining and the temperature starting to soar yet again… we’re finally returing to normal, and we’re finally back and blogging.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 4:23 am and is filed under Personal Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.