This was actually finished in August, but only just posted.
I've used the usual seed beads and bugle beads, with a few freshwater pearls and some square beads I found in a bead shop recently, plus some of my first attempts to make polymer clay faces. The charm says Be Yourself.
I don't know how good that advice is right now - myself is scared, angry and depressed while trying to deal with the impenetrable vagaries of the Victorian education department and its attitude to high functioning autistic children. Yes, he's got funding for an aide. At the moment the aide (and teacher) are accomplishing little beyond baby-sitting, and not even that very successfully as he keeps running away from school and coming home. It's not their fault - they are well trained and very skilful and have done a million PDs in the subject - it's not the school's fault, which has done EVERYTHINg imaginable to make things autism-friendly - it's not our fault, we have tried every possible technique in every book ever written. The school principal begged Region for help, and their only response was that he should be suspended every time he ran home. Er, hello....? Officially sending him home because he runs home? We are all at our wits end. We had a meeting yesterday and I almost bit the head off the school pysch who said that Wombat 'needs to learn the value of education' when he has been raised in a family that values education very prominently and always has done so.
We may be driven into the private system, which we cannot afford and don't want to use, because the publicly funded system, to which we have contributed both via taxes and personal sweat/blood/time for years, refuses to help our son - who is legally entitled to an appropriate education. So much for A Fair Go being one of the so-called Aussie values on the new citizenship test.
Rant over.
