Fall Festival

On Friday night I was able to secure some respite time so I could take Eric to the fall festival at his school. It was a great chance for me to spend some one on one time with Eric. It's a good thing I didn't have to take the other 2 boys, we would have never even gone in. When we got there, the line for the tickets went out the door. I never expected to see this many people. I was very tempted to just to leave, but I didn't want to waste the respite hours and wanted to give Eric a chance, and to see how he would deal with this. I bought $5 worth of food and game tickets, the line went faster than I thought it would. The food line wrapped around the cafeteria the whole time we were there. Forget about buying supper for me there, Eric would never tolerate that line, nor would I...

We looked around some more and saw activity in the gym. They had different contests there, one was a hula hoop, there was a basketball one and a scooter race. Eric could not hula hoop. That's OK, so we went to the scooter race. The kids had to sit indian style on the scooter and one of the volunteers pushed them. Eric wanted to ride his own way. I pushed him along with the race, but he didn't count. This was the highlight of the evening.



We were able to do this twice before another child asked if he could have the scooter. Next we tried the cake walk. He was antsy at first waiting, but once the music started and we started walking he got the hang of it quick. He was even following the lead of the other kids. The lady running this was Eric's para, so she was nice enough to let me walk with him. We did this twice, didn't win anything but that's OK.



After this we tried a beanbag toss, but he wasn't interested after the wait. All of this lasted an hour, the whole time with lots of people, noise and activity. He held it together quite well until this point where he was just done with it. Not that I could blame him. The food line was still long as ever, and I had enough with all these people myself. He kept leading me to the door, and so we went. As you can see, he had enough.



I'm very proud of how Eric handled himself in this very busy, and unexpected situation. An hour for him in this is excellent. The school put together a very nice event. They did make the best effort to accommodate to Eric. I wish we could have stayed longer and done more, but this was still an awesome time for me and Eric.