Hosta la vista, baby....

I'll get my coat ;-))

D was up and away by 8.30am as he was meeting Keith, Mairi, Ross and Alan at The Renaissance Club, North Berwick, for the pro-am practice day at the Scottish Open.

I was up and organised fairly early myself as wanted to finish my acrylic painting of the thistle, as well as get my shopping list written and online Tesco order completed.  With a bunch of pals descending on us at the weekend I couldn't afford to fall asleep and miss my order deadline this week!  

DW, the garden guy, messaged to say he'd managed to get out to us yesterday afternoon to finish pressuring washing the path to the Gin Palace, as well as the decking outside the Gin Palace, so after lunch I went out to check it all and it's looking great.  

The sun was shining on the hosta when I went out and as it's one of my favourite plants in the garden, it gets to be my blip today :-)  The weather was quite strange.  Sunshine then thick cloud with light rain showers but by tea time the heavens opened and we had a couple of really heavy bursts.  Still warm though.

Spent the bulk of the afternoon on my painting.  I made myself stop as I was just fiddling with it by the end. I'm not sure what I think about it.  If I'm being positive, I learnt a lot from the process of painting it, which was the actual point, so I can't complain.  I will put it away now and forget about it for a while.  I suspect it will be painted over at some point and the canvas reused when my skills with acrylics are much improved. 

Alan's support worker B came to talk to me today to tell me he really enjoyed my talk to the team on their training day a few weeks ago (when I talked a bit about Alan's childhood experiences and our parenting experiences raising a baby and child with a significant disability) and to thank me.  

His eldest son has been diagnosed with autism (he's only 4) and he said his instinct is to wrap him up in cotton wool, which is entirely understandable, but says my talk made him open his eyes a little to how damaging that could be in the longer term, both in the kind of restricted childhood his little boy would have, and how it's not good preparation for adulthood.  He's at that stage of complete bewilderment of not knowing what to do for the best and my heart goes out to him.  I remember it well.  He has no peer group to chat to, even just about parenting in general, as none of their friends have children yet.  It's my mission now to try and link him up with other families for support and information sharing, and I know just the woman who might be able to help me with that :-)

Up sharp tomorrow for my third hormone injection that's supposed to put me into menopause. So far no side effects and I can't decide if that's a good or bad thing.  I feel if the injections are doing their job I should have at least had a hot flush by now.  Maybe I shouldn't speak too soon!!!