Hi Guys!
 Here in New Zealand, summer turns into autumn. We’ve been enjoying unusually hot temperatures. They say that the planet is getting colder rather than warmer. To me, it seems the opposite is true. This week, the temperature actually dropped low enough one morning to prompt us to break out the sweatshirts. By 8.30 a.m. though, we were sweltering! The sweatshirts have been retired again for the meantime.



The stone fruits have finished. We’re picking our tomatoes, one-by-delicious-one. These are beefsteak tomatoes and grow to a decent size.



Yet our feijoa tree is outdoing itself this year, and producing fruit that is bigger than the tomatoes! I love the abundance.



And last but by no means least, also growing in our garden at the moment, is our very first ever watermelon! Which I've been tempted to call Herbert.
 

 
All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it. ~ Samuel Butler
 
Special Needs Kids!
 
Life with Sam-the-man, my thirteen-year-old with Down Syndrome has pitched lately. I think it may be his way of expressing the frustrations of adolescence. However, now that he’s getting into basketball, and attending the weekly practice and game with his peers, he’s settling down again.
 
The thing is though, life never settles down fully. You always have to be on your “A” game. These kids still have their individual quirks. They have “ticks,” or certain things that need to be a certain way, otherwise they will have a meltdown. We, the parents and caregivers, learn pretty quickly which are their trigger points and we learn how to avoid similar situations, or we develop coping mechanisms for their meltdowns.


 
With Sam, one of his quirks is if he has started to “do a certain thing,” and he is focused on it, he gets this intensity of “this must be done,” then he cannot be disturbed until he has seen it through to the finish.
 
This week, on Wednesday morning, the taxi beeped his horn at the gate. I went to get Sam. At that moment, he’d decided to get both his tablets in sync with the same Taylor Swift song on YouTube. He fiddled around with them, going back and forth between one device and the other making minute adjustments. Our boarder, my nephew, was in his van honking the horn also, unable to go to work for the taxi blocking the bottom of the driveway.
 
I said to Sam more urgently, ‘Come on. It’s time to go to school.’ He went on adjusting the videos on the screens, staring at them fixedly. Two minutes later, I tried to intervene, forgetting that he needed to see this through to the finish. I took the tablets off him and grabbed his hand, saying, “Let’s go.”

 

That was when I discovered that my “little” boy is now officially stronger than me. I was wearing socks, standing on a wooden floor. Though I tried my best to pull him in the direction of the door, he effortlessly dragged me the entire length of the hallway down to the playroom, with me holding on, saying, ‘No, Sam, you have to go to school.’ To a fly on the wall, it must have been hilarious.
 
He plonked himself at his desk and started writing.
 
This prompted a song and dance session from me, while I tried to cajole him out of his stubborn “writing lines out of a book into a notebook” routine. The taxi driver and boarder were still stuck outside. Then I hit upon the idea of offering him an ice-block. I checked with the taxi driver. Yes, Sam could eat one in the taxi.

 

I said to Sam, “Do you know how, when you’re in the taxi waiting for kids to come down and get in, you get really bored when they take a long time? Well, that’s what you’re doing to me, the taxi driver, your cousin, and all the kids sitting in the taxi. You’re making all of us wait for you.”  That was the first break through. He stopped writing.
 
I immediately swooped in upon the opening with, “Would you like an ice-block to eat in the taxi?”
 
“Yes.” He smiled.
 
Meltdown over. We were off to the taxi, him with his ice-block, and everyone got on their way, albeit 15 minutes late. One thing is for sure, with Sam around, life is never boring!
 


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“To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.” Eleanor Roosevelt
 
“Three SimplePimples” ~

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post on the conglomeration of online rules of conduct or “netiquette” these days. In the post, I conjured up a list of three rules of my own, which I called Three SimplePimples for Netiquette. I thought I’d share them again here. In a nutshell, my feeling is this, why complicate things when life is very simple.

Number One: Be true to yourself and treat others the way you want to be treated.

Number Two: The same rules of respect and tolerance we'd show each other face-to-face should apply online.

Number Three: spread the love!

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An act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted. ~ Aesop

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'The Sasori Empire ~

In answer to everyone’s questions, Book Two is underway and coming along well.
 
This week, I was telling my friend, Shona, at Toastmasters, about the editing process with the book. I seem to be adding more words in than taking any out. Shona coined the term on-the-fly, “Ad-iting!” I love that new word so much I’m conjugating a blog post on the subject, as we speak!

“The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne.” ~Geoffrey Chaucer