Flu shot. We all should get one, but as an social event it doesn’t rank up there with the big ones.

In such a mood we headed over to the local mall. The local mall is pretty much at its nadir right now. A Home Depot is moving in very soon, and there are promises of fanciful things in the future– like a public elevator to the second level, which is where the Public Health Flu Shot Clinic had planted itself in the present.

Instead we page security, and a team of monosyllabic young studs escorted us deep into the backstage mall bowels to an unlit freight elevator. From there to a dusty ex-store where they hide the mall’s Xmas decorations, with a few public health nurses herding injectees or filling syringes, and a mass of folks, some lining up to register for shots and some doing the required 15 minutes of post-injection loitering. Did I mention that Jon quite dislikes rooms filled with people? Their acoustic crush tends to overwhelm his ability to see and focus.

But the service was quick (to which my lad only said “Hey–ow!”) and landed Jon with a lollipop, and as we sat on a corner of Santa’s risers, doing our time, we noticed that the up-til-now quiet Jon was having a hoot.

From his perspective, he had just had a ride on a really cool, jerky elevator with manual doors and no light and big clunky sounds, and he knew another ride on it was in the near future. Then the lollipop, which he savoured uncharacteristically (no crunching), letting it take up our entire post-shot wait, its taste overwhelming the less than impressive visual surroundings. As for the crowd: there was barely any noise from the pre-needle agitated and the post-needle bored. He could look around with abandon. And happily chat with his parents. Are you kidding? This was fantastic!

So there you have it: An entirely worthwhile outing. He’d go for a flu shot weekly if he could. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Jon’s teacher called us this afternoon in a high state of excitement. A few weeks back she started doing creative writing exercises with Jon, meaning he looks at a picture and comes up with a few sentences about the picture. His first story, upon seeing a photo of a cow was:

This is a cow.
It is black and white.
It is saying moo.

Keep in mind that he dictates the sentences to the teacher, who writes them down. Later Jon types up the dictation.

On Monday Jon was so excited about Hallowe’en that his teacher decided to try something a lot more advanced, as an experiment only (she originally wasn’t going to try this until after Christmas). He was using Intellitalk, a software program that reads a word aloud after it’s been typed. This allowed Jon to type out his own words, see how close he came, and self-correct if necessary. This is what he typed out all by himself, punctuation and all:

Hi mom and dad ,
I liked haloween . Trick or treeting was fun. I went to lots of hoosis. Are sed the pirat. Then I went home .
Jon

(He meant “Arrrrrr said the pirate.” So how the heck are you supposed to spell “arrrrrr” anyway?)

He was only prompted “what would you like to say?” or “what happened next?” by the teacher; otherwise he maintained full sentences in his head as he typed them, spelling familiar words correctly and trying to phonetically spell out new words. He remembered to put spaces between words and only had to be reminded about putting capitals at the start of sentences. Wow – This certainly blew everyone away big time!

About three weeks ago, Jon announced he wanted to be a pirate for Hallowe’en. Bachan had brought him some pirate gear (hat, hook, eyepatch–standard pirate issue).

So, in true nautical spirit, we went a little overboard to incorporate his wheelchair. Puffy shirt fashions by Laura (she created the pattern and sewed it), and the shortened sails too.

Our previous Halloween wanderings have always been short–large groups of people are always hard for Jon. But this year he had been counting down the days and hours and we ended up hunting for swag for slightly more than an hour! Jon had several catchphrases memorized, too: who would not be terrified by the dread pirate chirpily yelling: “Arrrrr!” (which came out more like “Harrrr!”), “Shiver me timbers”, and the ultra-cute “Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Pop!”.

In order to win a little “free time” in the half hour remaining in the school day, Jon walked around his entire school in his walker in just 15 minutes.

And here is the unconscious lump that was deposited on our sidewalk an hour and a quarter later…

His head was bobbing ever so slightly as he sawed away. He slept all the way home on the bus, and about 15 minutes outside in the fall air before coming to.