Tri4Joe

Donations update

If anyone was to tell me a few months ago that I should try and raise 20,000 Euros I would have laughed at them.  Not in my wildest dreams could I have ever thought it possible.  I thought maybe 2,000 Euros.  Colette was more optimistic and told me to shoot for 10,000 Euros.  But I don’t believe in targets for this sort of thing - how can you set a target for something you have no control over?  It all depends on peoples’ generosity.

Well people: I apologize.  I completely underestimated how much good there is in the world.  It sounds a bit cliché but it’s true.

We’re not quite at 20,000 Euros yet, but I believe we hit 15,000 Euros today and the total is climbing fast.  20,000 Euros no longer seems like a silly idea.  So far we have raised at least 4,000GBP for the Myelin Project UK, and the rest is in Euros and destined for the ELA (before all my fellow British compatriots out there get competitive, the Euro has an unfair advantage in that there is more than one country involved!).

Joseph’s progress this week…

Joseph made some very noticeable improvements this week.  Physically he’s not at his best, but he seems to be going through a mental phase at the moment.  He’s making new sounds and has suddenly got a very cheeky sense of humor.  He currently finds his mother’s eating behavior highly amusing and laughs like we’ve never heard him laugh before, so much so that we couldn’t help but laugh with him.  I tried to get some of it on video (Joseph laughing, not Colette eating!), but he’s also turned into a bit of a poser and stops everything as soon as he sees a camera and just smiles!

Some of the progress is not just Joseph’s progress but also his own parents’.  This week Colette bought Joseph a bunch of musical instruments: maracas, a tambourine, and a xylophone.  Last night I thought I’d try and see if he would try and play the xylophone, thinking that all children like making a noise and perhaps Joseph would too and that this would encourage him to try and hold the xylophone stick and stimulate his hand-eye coordination.  It worked!  We couldn’t believe it.  Obviously this is not a skill he’s just acquired - he must have had it all along, but we just didn’t know.  It seems obvious really, but it’s very easy as parents of a disabled child to get trapped in your own ideas of what the child can and can’t do.  Colette’s probably much better than me since she spends much more time with Joseph watching the professionals stimulate him.

Tomorrow we go to Zurich

So it’s midnight here and I’m typing a blog post.  We haven’t started packing yet, so I guess we won’t be leaving early tomorrow.  We have a 5 hour drive ahead of us so it’s not too bad.  I’m pretty excited and nervous at the same time.  While we’re in Zurich we’ll make every effort to monitor and update the blog.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 12:11 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.