education education education...

September 1st 2009 Slept a whole 10 hours last night which was just the very thing... This morning was sorting bits of papers and post for a while then looking at sons' courses. We'd given up on several courses for the summer just gone after my diagnosis - well, more 'drifted away from' them until it was too late to cram the work in. So I spent hours trying to fit those into what we'd thought of doing this year - and it wouldn't fit. I thought of 'encouraging' them towards a life of chimney sweeping and busking "God, I'd left home when I was their age!" featured at one point. Grumbled myself into a headache reading course outlines / costs / cut-off dates and then it dawned on me - "Don't try to fit them all together - do something different!" Well, duh... 'something different' made far more sense and I'd cobbled together the breadth I wanted in about 10 minutes on a post-it. Now today we can have a look and they can tear it to shreds and then we can put it back together and order the stuff! I've already moaned about having to 'give in' and buy stuff off the shelf - but maybe it won't be as bad a I'm thinking. If I do end up hanging over a bucket from next week, at least they'll have something to focus on and I won't be holding them back any more. They're pretty self-motivated but it's the chats round stuff or the deciphering of the hoops they need to jump through which is my job. Anyway, "If they really want to learn, they'll do it themselves!" will be my fallback position :) What bothered me most with all this though was the total 'block' in my thinking which took ages to get through. Now, normally I'm thinking of loads of stuff at once and if something gets in the way, I work round it pretty quickly so it's not a problem (sometimes by ignoring it but that works too!). Today, I was not going to be moved - and it was a bit scary. Even when it looked like they were going to be studying 60 hours a week, I wasn't moving - totally ridiculous! Am I going to regress down the food chain to some amoeba thing that doesn't (need to) think? Maybe I'll stop at 3-toed sloth which is sort of appealing and not much of a leap given current activity level - go to kitchen... find food... return...repeat... The thought of trying to plan for and teach 30 odd disparate egos in a classroom (31 odd including mine) makes me Laugh Out Loud today... Also decided to point a few people in the direction of my blog on the basis that I have about 15 people that I email with treatment updates and although that doesn't sound much, I don't like to send a generic message to all. Some are relatives I haven't seen much of since I was a kid, some are from work and for some reason I like to swear in those (!), some are friends who I can let rip with the black humour with and so on. But I'm going to be spending a fair bit of time in hospital over the next few months and I don't know if I'll be able to keep in touch...hence the blog. Now I'm thinking "I shouldn't have done it - I'll scare them away. I don't know them as well as I think I do. Oh b**gger. I could have cut and pasted!" If any of you are reading this, please don't think you have to reply or even read this! See, what I mean - my faculties are failing me. Hope they return. Or hope that I don't notice if they don't, haha hope you're all ok (and a hug for Leigh!) xx