Tag Archives: space

Messy Play for Matilda Mae – by Gabriel Azoitei, age 6

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Yesterday, I woke up early in the morning, and straight away without having any time to eat my breakfast, I started making a bottle rocket. Materials: 1 empty – plastic Coca Cola bottle, 4 paper triangles, some pens, 1 coloured pencil (yellow), some paints, and, some tape.

First, I made a blueprint. On the blueprint, I drew, ‘the keys’. The Red line, is the key for, ‘cut’, and the Green – dotted line, is the key for, ‘fold’.

Then, I painted the windows blue, and I went out in the street with mummy to get a haircut, while the paint dried. When I got back, I painted the rest red. The next day, (obviously, the paint would have dried by then)…(again). Next, I painted a door onto the rocket. Can you guess what colour the door was? It was green!

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So, then my rocket was finished, and ready to blast off! 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, BLAST OFF!!!

I hope you enjoyed reading this blogpost.

 Oh, and don’t forget to leave a like!

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– Gabi xxx

[This blog post is all Gabi’s own words and own typing, completely unaided… He had already made the rocket and painted the windows on by the time I got up in the morning! The only thing I did was to help him spell “obviously”… Think he’s a better and quicker blogger than me. He even knew to ask for likes, which I never thought of! LOL. -Ed. aka Mummy]

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Lucian’s New Room

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It being 2015 now, and therefore the time of new beginnings and makeovers, I’m finally committing to an idea I’ve been toying with for months now: Splitting the boys up and putting Lucian in his own room. In case anyone is new here and hasn’t met my 3 year old, Luci (Loo-ch-ee!), this is he: IMG_8462

He shares a room – at least, theoretically although he often sleeps with me – with Gabriel, 5 who is completely obsessed with Space and is responsible for their bedroom looking like the Cosmos projectile-vomited all over it:

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Luci quite likes Space so he doesn’t mind too much, but only because he goes along with whatever Gabi does really. They don’t do much sleeping in there, it’s really hard to get them to sleep because they play and jump on their beds and get each other all riled up, or argue. Basically if one is sleepy the other is wide awake and their infectious energy wakes the other back up. It was my mum who had the idea of turning the playroom upstairs into a bedroom because when they stay with Nana Pip and Grandad in Cornwall, they sleep in separate rooms really nicely and seem to love it, and not miss each other at all.

I ummed and ahh-ed about it for ages, feeling too emotional to split them up when they’ve been joined at the hip both as brothers and best friends all of Luci’s life. I shared a room with my sister until I was 15 and I feel that it’s really bonding and I wanted that for my boys too, but gradually I realise they are already so bonded, they are the best of friends and now the differences in their personalities are starting to come to the fore and their different tastes and playing styles mean their own space would be good. Luci is obsessed with Jubilee line trains, cars and Brio train track and is the only one who ever plays in the playroom which is constantly an absolute bomb-site. Whereas Gabs reads constantly, draws and writes stuff, almost never plays with toys and really wants his own desk and quiet area to do his crazy physics stuff and play minecraft.

But mostly it’s the sleep thing. I want them to go to bed earlier and be calm at bedtime, and I’m pretty sure their own rooms is the way to go. Not that I won’t cry when they finally go their separate ways at bedtime. It will be the end of an era:

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So, anyway, *sniff, sniff..* enough of that soppy shit. I know, me and my first-world problems! We are very lucky to have enough space to give them a bedroom each and this just doesn’t seem a good use of it right now: IMG_4486 Plus, it takes me about two days to get it looking like this: IMG_4475 and precisely five minutes for them to make it like this again … IMG_7137 … after which no one goes in there again for ages. So, I’m decided and I have big plans to make it a lovely room for Luci.

Lucian’s Room

To start with, safety first, Remus has to fix a safety-catch onto the skylight window because Lucian can and WILL climb out onto the roof, and it’s freezing now, but in the Summer it gets boiling up there, and the landlord company has to put a new black-out blind in. We’re also getting shelving made for inside the toy cupboard (see above). Then, in goes his lovely wooden bed and bedside table which we got when we moved in last year, from Taurus Beds on the Finchley Road. I just ordered him this camper van bedding e6b9b8fa83d678146661e13ceef04816 I ‘ve got my heart set on this Rainbow star rug from notonthehighstreet.com because Lucian’s name means ‘light’ and he’s my little star. But it ‘aint cheap so I don’t know if I’ll convince Remus!… and I’ll put stars around his bed like this:

I already bought this poster from store.greatlittleplace.com and alphabet letters to spell his name (and for Gabi too) and some number transfer stickers.

I can’t wait to get him his own room in his own style and see if I can get him to sleep any earlier. Night, Luci… x

My FB Post about Gabi & Aspergers

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Wednesday 2nd April was World Autism Awareness Day and in fact the whole of April is Autism Awareness month. I happened to post something on Facebook that morning about my Gabs and his aspergers and was completely staggered when it went completely nuts, getting over 400 likes on my own page, some 300 on a mum group I shared it on and was shared by nearly 100 people so I have lost count now of how many likes it has on all those pages combined but it must be over a thousand! I was also inundated by private messages all day thanking me for writing it and also contact from other mums of aspies or suspected aspies basically reaching out for some company in this crazy journey that is parenting an aspergers child! or just some advice or pointers to other support resources. 
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2013 Review

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I remember the 1st January 2013 very well because I spent a lovely, happy day with my boys watching DVDs at home and out in the park in the mild sunshine and I thought at the time it bode well for a good year ahead… which for the most part it was, despite tiredness, some sadness and plenty of challenges. Here’s a quick look back at the highlights of life at Casa Azoitei through my eyes…

January

Gabs had been given planets and planet decals and a globe for Christmas and from the moment they went up in his room, his Space/Astronomy obsession ramped up a notch and hasn’t come down since. The boys played a lot of violin and we had a lot of snow:

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February

On 2nd February, my heart stopped when I read that a fellow blogger’s baby had died of SIDS. The blogging community rallied around her and somehow Matilda Mae’s brave mummy Jennie and I became friends and supporting The Lullaby Trust in Matilda’s memory became a new passion. My obsession with work, and indeed anything else fell away and all I cared for the whole month was spending quality time with my two beautiful boys and counting my very many blessings every day. We spent most of the month in the park, on the swings and painting…

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March

My March started super-well with two nights in Paris with Remus where we got snowed in and did zero sightseeing but had a wonderful time. I worked as a violinist a bit mostly with BBCCO, did a concert in memory of Matilda Mae for Mother’s Day and raised £200 for her Bliss Charity Precious Star Fund and Classical Babies turned 3 years old. Remus found out he was to be decorated Officer of the Order of the Royal Crown (a kind of Romanian MBE) by King Mihai of Romania! But mostly my theme of amazing time with my boys continued, the firsts signs of Spring appeared and Lucian’s terrible twos kicked in.

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April

I spent a week in Cornwall at my parents’ with the boys having fresh air, R&R and some amazing Reiki sessions which put paid to my cluster migraines. April continued trickily for us, with a major errm, I shall call it ‘misunderstanding’ (!) with a family member in Romania whose privacy I’ll respect because it’s not necessary to name them and anyway, said relationship looks to be going forward positively in 2014. But it happened to occur just before we left for a family trip to Bucharest and caused stress and sadness for all of us, not just at the time but subtley in the background for the rest of the year. However, we did have incredible weather over there, the boys had a brilliant time bonding with their cousins and Remus played some great concerts. In the end a trip I had to literally force myself to take ended up being pretty great! This was also the month Remus played an amazing Lalo ‘Symphonie Espagnole’ with the George Enescu Philharmonic and was decorated by the King.

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May

On 2nd May I drove down to Kent to meet Jennie, Matilda Mae’s mummy for the first time at the Matilda Mae Mile in Memory Walk and I played and took little violins. Lucian and I reached an emotional end to our breastfeeding journey when he had his last ever feed the day he turned two years old, 18th May. He also had a wonderful Winnie the Pooh party and got a scooter. Generally the combination of his terrible twos and Gabs’ above average naughtiness just about gave me a nervous breakdown for most of the month, yet somehow we still had a wonderful month.

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June

Nothing much happened in June. We took a lot of sunny walks around my favourite streets in our lovely neighbourhood and enjoyed what we didn’t yet know would be our last month there. We all stayed up late to watch the Super Moon. Gabs enjoyed his last month at the nursery he loved. June was sun, playgrounds, ice creams, lollies and Regent’s Park. The boys ran, and ran. It was just perfect.

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July

July was just NUTSO. The 1st was my birthday. Remus was away but hid my new violin case in the wardrobe, I had my last acting class before  a 6 month break and did this scene from ‘The Graduate’. The 3rd was Gabi’s last ever day at nursery and the day we found out we had to move. The 4th was our Gabi’s 4th birthday, his first morning at primary school and the day we found our new house! We threw Gabi a kick-ass Space Party, went for a holiday in Cornwall with my parents – got detoured to N. Ireland when my Grannie died, then back to Cornwall. Remus and I spent our 5th wedding anniversary apart while he packed up our entire flat in London and I holidayed with the boys on a Cornish beach. I was attuned to Reiki Level I, by an old family friend in the village before travelling home. I took the boys and the violins down to Jennie’s for the twins’ Gruffalo Party and also played at the BBC Proms in the Concert Orchestra. Crazy, crazy month.

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August

August. Moving month. Emotional upheaval. Endings. Gabi’s nursery ‘graduation’ on the day we moved. We explored our new home and garden, Childs Hill and Golders Hill Parks and Gabs and I had a series of “Mummy & Gabi Days” before him starting Holy Trinity Primary in September. I pretty much “love-bombed” him (as I later found out it’s called!) and loved every minute of it. I also played a second Prom with the BBCCO.

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September

There’s only one event that stands out for me in September and that’s Gabriel starting school. He was so, SO excited and really loved it. Because of his Aspergers traits we started to have more and more trouble with him as more and more children joined the class until it was full (they stagger the start dates with the youngest first) and he got overwhelmed. It took him a long time to settle but the school were fantastic and proactive about getting him assessed and on the special needs register. The month was full of meetings, form-filling and ‘incidents’ but somehow his enthusiasm hasn’t waned. We threw Remus a 42nd birthday party with the biggest violin-cake you’ve ever seen! and I played solo in the Vivaldi A minor double concerto at St. Martin-in-the-Fields with Remus in the audience watching me for a change!

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October

With Gabs at school I started enjoying some time alone with Lucian which I hadn’t really had… ever! He’s a cheeky little monkey when he’s out of Gabi’s shadow. I was out a lot playing with the BBCCO and working incredibly hard for Classical Babies. The excitement of the month was two days in Reykjavik with Remus seeing his recital and one of my bestest old friends Silla, who I miss so much. I love Iceland, we will go back soon. We celebrated Halloween.. some of us enjoying it more than others. 😉

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November

The 1st was the end of half-term and I took Gabs to Tower Bridge. It was a wet but wonderful day. We got soaked but he absolutely loved it. 2nd November was a special day. I went with the boys and some wonderful friends who agreed to play in a quartet with me at the Matilda Mae Welly Walk at Beale Park in Reading, to honour 9 months since Tilda died and to raise money for The Lullaby Trust. It was a truly fantastic day. We filled most other weekends with trips to our local park and messy play like Leaf Rubbing, painting and playing in the garden. On 28th Nadine and I went, as Classical Babies to the Theo Paphitis #SBS Winners’ Event in Birmingham and met the man himself!

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December

My first school nativity! Gabriel was an angel – “double irony” as Mrs Pillay and I both said … Oh how we laughed!! Despite his struggles to blend in to the class this term, he sat nicely, did all the actions and sang all the songs. I was most proud. I bravely took both boys to the school Christmas Disco and started to really feel part of the school community and felt truly at home and settled in our house for the first time all year. We got a kick-ass Christmas tree and posted a stupid number of photos of it on facebook and ate a hell of a lot of sweets. The Classical Babies Christmas Concert and Party 2013 was a great success with 56 people turning up with kids attached (that’s over a hundred bodies in the room!) … coincidentally the same number of times we watched ‘The Snowman and Snowdog’ on repeat. We had an amazingly quiet and happy Christmas at home just the four of us and I nailed Christmas Dinner. Yeaaahhh! What a fabulous end to the year.

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Happy New Year 2014!

Gabriel’s Planet Faux-Pas

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Those of you who follow my blog will already know about my – probably Aspergers – four year old, Gabriel and his gigantic obsession with astronomy, planets, stars, anything vaguely space related. But specifically our Solar System and the order of the planets and the sizes of the stars, from ours right up to the biggest known stars in our Universe. In fact, the only way they are managing him at school currently is to allow him to draw and label the solar system over and over for half the day while we’re waiting for him to be “statemented” and they can get an extra person in the classroom for him. He then comes home and does exactly the same thing for around two hours after school. Oh, and did I mention every second of every day that he’s awake he’s is talking at us, constantly telling us facts like “Mummmeeee? Pluto’s orbit crosses Neptune’s… Dadddeeeee? VY Canis Majoris is a red hypergiant… Riegel is a blue supergiant, Titan is yellow, did you know our Sun has hydrogen and helium?” He barely stops to draw breath from one end of the day to another and it is exhausting to listen to but we kind of love it. He is so completely passionate and his little face lights up with glee reminding us of those crazy super-animated physicists talking on the History channel’s ‘The Universe‘ programmes who we find really sweet! “Obsessed” doesn’t quite cover it.

So, I was delighted and amused when Gabs came home from school with something he had written which wasn’t planets-related and which I’m pretty sure – judging by the spelling – he had done all by himself:

I had to get him to translate it for me. It says,

“To my Gabriel..”

(he wrote it to himself in the manner of little love letters I write to him sometimes!)

“… and I love my Lucian (his little brother) and I love my mummy and my daddy and my cousins. Actually the most I love my mummy but daddy does silly things. Why does Daddy do silly things because he does..”

Sounds spot on to me! 🙂

So, back to planets. Gabs spends a lot of time watching his favourite learning videos on youtube and he often gets me to type things like “Space videos for kids” and “Sizes of the Planets” into the search bar as those are his favourites. He particularly likes one where they start with a closeup of Earth and then each frame zoom out showing the relative sizes of bigger and bigger planets, the whole solar system and then the bigger stars like Pollux, Aldebaran and VY Canis Majoris. This pen comes down and circles Earth to draw attention to how tiny it is in comparison! I’ve never watched it all the way through but I know he finds it hilarious because eventually Earth becomes invisible in the scale and I hear him snorting away to himself…

Anyway, I should have paid more attention to this particular video because here’s what I found when I came downstairs from bathing Lucian last night… Gabs had drawn the “Earth is Invisible” video frame by frame, sounding out the names himself and missing out most of the vowels in the process, but I knew what he meant and he showed me Oh, so proudly which order they went in…

Earth, Venus, Mars, Mercury, Pluto

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Earth, Venus, Mars, Mercury, Pluto

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Earth, Venus, Mars, Mercury, Pluto

Sun, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus...etc.etc..

Sun, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus…etc.etc..

Arcturus, Pollux, Sirius, Sun, (Earth)

Arcturus, Pollux, Sirius, Sun, (Earth)

“Ahh, how sweet!” I thought.. “He’s remembered the video exactly  and tried to ‘sound them out'”! And then I saw the last one:

Antares, Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Riegel, Arcturus, Pollux, Sirius, Sun, and WTF.

Antares, Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Riegel, Arcturus, Pollux, Sirius, Sun, and WTF!

Antares, Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Riegel, Arcturus, Pollux, Sirius, Sun, and WTF!

Errr, wait a minute…. “WTF”?!!! Wtf?! 

A quick look at the end of the video revealed all (skip to 1:05):

OOPS!

He was very excitedly telling me,

“Look Mummy, that’s Rigel, and that’s Sirius, and that’s the Sun, and that’s Whatoof! Hahaha, Whatuff! Where’s the Earth gone!“

He was so delighted by his discovery of this new word – which from the context he understood perfectly to mean something along the lines of “OMG!” – that he kept holding his hands out to the side and pronouncing it dramatically,

“Whatuff, whatuff, whatuff Mummy!”

And then he went back to his drawing:

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*Sigh!* I had to take his little collection of artworks into school and explain what had happened in case he decided to write it while he was there, but he hasn’t… yet! If your kids have done anything similar which has got, or nearly got you in trouble I’d love to hear about it!