Wednesday 1 January 2014

Back to it...

Yeah! He's finally done it again, but I'm now £20 worse off! The Christmas break has caused havoc with Joel's practising. He's got out of the habit of doing it, and so we've gone from the week before Christmas where he was clipped down in Bristol for 29 minutes, to him screaming at me, not wanting to even put the mask on. We got back to it at the start of this week. Sunday, I was determined that he would try again, but he was so distraught, he didn't want to do it. I could feel myself getting cross with him, as he has to do this, but when he cries like that, you feel bad. I had to take a moment, to tell myself to calm down. I said to him that we'd try to lie still but without the mask, and he managed it, he lay still for 32 minutes. No mask, but hey, 32 minutes, with no DVD just peace music. Ah, we were so happy x really proud of him!

Monday then, I just needed to get the mask back on him. He didn't want it. We had tears. We negotiated, he said one minute, I said ten, he said two minutes, I said five! We tried out the counting beads today to see if they would help. It's a string of ten beads they used at school when learning to count, our friend suggested them, and it seems to work. Every 30 seconds he pushes a bead along - we tried every minute but it was too long for him. He kept doing this, and restarting when he'd used them all, and he managed not 5 minutes, but 12, so again we were happy. Things were looking better.

New Years Eve and somehow we didn't manage to practise. There's never a good time. He never wants to do it. It needs to be a time when Thomas is occupied or taken elsewhere, as his little brother, being 3, is a bit of a live wire! Well, today it just wasn't going to happen.

By the time we got to New Years Day I was feeling like a bad mother for missing a practise yesterday. We couldn't get ourselves into gear today - a bit of a pyjama day, despite no ill effects from the night before - we were all asleep by 10pm, too tired for New Year celebrations! Well, it got to bed time and we still hadn't done it. Here's when the bribery started...he's mad about Ironman, and is determined to get an Ironman Lego set that he'd seen in the shop the other day. He got Ironman for Christmas, but this not only has Ironman in a red outfit, but there's another one in a silver outfit too, and he's just got to have it! I thought it was worth half an hour of mask wearing, seen as he hadn't been doing too great with his timings. I thought it would take him until the end of the week to earn it, and then it would be a toy for him to play with on the train. He agreed to earn it over a couple of days. Well, he got to the agreed time limit of 13 minutes, and he wouldn't stop. I kept saying it was too late, he needed to sleep now, but he was determined to earn his Ironman! He kept going, telling me he wanted to do half an hour, and dear of him, he did it. I tricked him and stretched him to 32 minutes (!) so we were both really proud. He kept saying to himself 'I can do this, I can do this'. A mature mantra for a 5 year old. So, I'm now £20 worse off and know I will be sent to the shops at the crack of dawn, but his confidence with it seems to have come back, so heck, who cares, it's worth it.

  

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