needs: Mid-January is for undercover getting ready.
They are still salt washed, windswept babies. Their cuddled forms sleep heavily as the summer breeze whips through my house. They have plans for LEGO and swimming and puzzles and craft and kitchen dancing. There is argy bargy for the remote, to avoid a bath, at the incredulity of shoes. Scratching their heads, they navigate a peach or an egg.
The pin pricking to do list of last week has settled into a gentle hum in me. As the lists get too long in my head, I flip a page of my notebook. The last entry is the Christmas Present list. I begin quietly making a back to life list. Lunchboxes. Even as the recipes crash my Facebook page I resist. Last year’s school stationary idles in corners and uniforms have settled at the bottom of the washing basket.
I yawn and click, click, boom some name labels as a baby step. A soft start that eases the urge and puts a down payment on the organisation required later, later, later. The smug glow of that order buys me a day or two. A couple of picnics masquerade as family fun while I collect intel on where her gross motor sits. In the park, under trees and on sand, I watch her fingers decode things to be opened, closed and connected.
Too intense, it’s summer just let a picnic be a picnic, but if she can’t eat, she can’t concentrate and take her meds… While the angel of summer and the demon of the YEAR wrestle my attention, the just right lunchbox becomes a thing for me. Or is it just the thing to satisfy my hum?
And somewhere I begin to collect stickers and tabs, anything to mark a book spine so her brain can recognise what she needs while the rest of the class puts pencil to paper. I adopt the car park method: pink – level 5 – kangaroo, my family always remembers where we parked but each do in a different way. It is her way to remember differently each time. I know it’s pot luck. I’m fishing for the thing that velcros to her day.
It’s all undercover, it’s in the gaps because it’s mid-January and I want the sunsets long and lasting and the sunrises slept through.
means: My undercover list:
- I do a mix of online orders, or get a permanent marker and some masking tape.
- I check the booklist and cut off dates – last minute saves summer, but too late is too hard.
- I settle in the meds.
- I fish out last yeas school shoes, runners and uniform- ditch or stich.
- I try for some new snacks, old, new, borrowed recipes and nothing blue.
- I move the bedroom around, clear out the crap, donate the unused, hang a picture or a photo.
- I make a GP appointment for the last week for mental health plan, chronic med plan, asthma plan…
- I make a cuppa, on an early quiet morning, find a nice place and think about the sports, activities and specialists, and the coming term, just to have a list to add things to as they pop back into my mind.
