5:04 and it is dark, but on the up side there is a bit of light when Julia gets on the bus in the morning.  I put on the flannel sheets today and as soon as a store the wheelbarrow, I will be putting the car in the garage every night.  Ummm . . . winter.

I don’t think I wrote about the re-emergence of Julia’s scratching on her arm.  The summer’s intense healing pretty much destroyed within a few days.  This time, however, I am on it immediately -- creams, ointments, bandaids and gloves.  Oh, and lectures.  And some pleading and rational discussion too.  I have no idea whether I can stem this tide but I am not ready to give up.  Whether it is change of season, release of trauma with Ellen or something else, it doesn’t matter.  I believe her when she says it itches -- after all, she doesn’t scratch her other limbs or other parts of her body mindlessly.  What is so concerning is the compulsion and her inability to stop.  I don’t think that pain is an issue -- she scratches way past that.

I wonder about the line between stimming and compulsion.  Do they overlap at times?  Can some behavior start as one and morph into the other?  

Julia is typing -- hunt and peck -- her weekly paragraph.  I didn’t think she would get here this year but it takes her only a little bit longer to type than it does to write, and she doesn’t erase typing.  Talk about compulsive!!  Letter perfection is a killer.

We worked on is/was, are/were in this paragraph.  She mixes tenses all the time and she seems to have gotten down first letter capital and period after the last work.  Time to move on to tense agreement although I did not tackle all of it for this assignment.  Talking about past, present and future was impossible two years ago -- maybe even a year ago.  This small step for most kids is such a big milestone for her.  

This week’s paragraph: 

Bottle Hunt

One afternoon Judy and Rocky were going out bottle hunting to save the world. The third grade kids were recycling the bottles to buy a tree to plant a tree in the children’s rain forest in Costa Rica. Rocky found old bottles in his garage. Judy found some milk jugs in her house. Judy’s classmates piled all the plastic bottles on top of each other. Mr.Todd said that the next day they will find out how many bottles they had collected. I wonder what Judy was thinking about planting a tree.

These are supposed to be reflective paragraphs and this was the first time that we were able to work in the “I wonder” beginning to the last sentence.  She needs lots of support to produce this and lots of time.  We decide on what she will write about on Sunday and she begins to fill out a story format sheet.  She usually writes the topic sentence that day as well.  On Monday and Tuesday, she adds two or three sentences each day, and on Wednesday, she types and edits.  I am not always as patience as I should be, or that she needs, but slowly we are tackling this.