It was crisp & cool this morning, from the heavy downpour last night. Great for exercising in his Neurosuit in the park. He's been quite bored stuck at home, as I'm minimising his going out due to the H1N1. Brought a bun along to feed the fish as I expected him to be less active in the suit given that we stopped suit therapy for a while.
We were greeted by a friendly elderly couple when I was fixing his arm bungee cords at the park. Turns out the wife is a retired midwife trained in UK, who loves kids. We chatted briefly as they were curious about the suit.
It's always nice to encounter strangers who encourage you & give you a 'pat on the shoulders' rather than those who fire away a million questions a second on what's wrong with my son, can't he walk, have you seen a doctor, what did the doctor say, is he going to school, he should go to school, and then proceed to draw unrelated parallels to their grand-kids or so-and-so's kid who upon starting school began talking a lot, or on how a certain nutritional supplement did them good.
Sure, they might mean well, but I'm too tired with everything else going on that I've stopped trying to explain things about my son to them. I used to try explaining, which was for me, a form of coming to terms with my son's condition. Nowadays, I'll let other parties raise their awareness of disabilities and therapies. These days, if I do encounter such strangers, I just gently excuse myself & walk away if I can, or appear busy & make a phone call.
As expected, he was very quick to ask to be carried, saying that he's tired. So I went slow. Started by feeding the fish at the bridge. Being the school holidays, there was a family with several kids at the playground. So that got him interested & he managed to do the monkey bar slide 5-6 times & sit on the swing before leaving. It was a bit tricky on the swing with the suit on. He seemed to be leaned too far back & just couldn't get the positioning right. He coped with it for a while then wanted to sit with me on the same swing.
Surprisingly he asked for the horse carriage ride when I asked if he wanted to go home (as it was getting hot). I thought he was still afraid of horses. I was really tired by then from carrying him in the suit. He seems to add on 5kg with the suit on! I felt faint carrying him part of the way back to the car for the drive to the horse track. I was so tired that I almost drove the car up the kerb at the corner. I must remember to either bring his bubbles along or my helper.
