PD'ed out and Ability day.

Today I spent listening to some passionate presenters on the various strategies for assisting people with disabilities to reach their optimum quality of life. There were pyramids and triangles and graphs, sensory toys and online gadgets, things that pinged and things that rattled, microphones which were off, on, too soft or too loud and a lot of sitting. The audience was terrific, the best behaved I have seen in a long time except for one who would not stop whispering and played on the ipad. The morning tea was paltry and I wonder why they bothered, I would have suggested participants pop down to the canteen on the ground floor rather than put out an embarrassment. You can take the girl out of the kitchen but the kitchen stays entrenched. I sometimes think I have stainless steel in my veins.
There is a national celebration of disability day next week and somehow the wording of that bothers me. I am all in favour of celebrating anyone reaching milestones if they have put in the hard work but fundamentally we don't give the gold medals to the last person in the race. No one would choose to be disabled or celebrate being disabled I don't think. Celebrating ,'ability' day might be better. Celebrating the hard work people with disabilities put in to achieve what may seem little increments but are really giant treasured moments, celebrate parents and carers and other advocates everywhere who have put in enormous amounts of time and effort to ensure that people with disabilities are treated with dignity and their human rights respected. Let's celebrate that. Let's celebrate that since the disability act was gazetted it became illegal for teachers and medical people or any other service to discriminate against a person with a disability. Lets celebrate the amazing changes in how early intervention can vastly improve a persons quality of life and let's celebrate care and love and tolerance and learning, understanding and education and celebrate the valuable contribution people make to enrich our society no matter what their abilities are.

Ability

My PiBoIdMo idea today was to do with washing machines. As I tried to fall asleep last night listening to the machine in its agitated state, a poem started to form in my head all tumbling and spinning around and around so I got up and wrote it down. :)

Oh one of my skadamo sketches has gone into a published work. How exciting is that. I am excited anyway.

I am off to try and add 5000 words to my novels.