We tend to forget that what we talk about as adults has a very different meaning for young children. We might be thinking about a holiday that we have in August because it’s June and it’s raining. It’s so easy to want to share this and get excited about it, but we forget that young children don’t have the same sense of time, and particularly our lovely Trudy.

At the beginning of Trudy’s life when she was desperately trying to communicate, we had to focus on the ‘here and now’. ‘Oh look, Trudy, a ladybird’, ‘Is that yummy spaghetti?’ ‘time for bed’. It’s a developmental stage for all children but for a child with Down’s Syndrome, this goes on for longer. We were eager to see her grasp the concept of past and future. Christmas seemed to take on a whole new meaning when there was no build up to it. She could not understand that it was coming. It was just a strange word that everyone talked about or sung about, all the time! Obviously, the day itself was incredible for her but I’m not sure how much she equated with the word back then.

This changed and we moved onto ‘now and next’, a firm favourite of speech and language therapists that I picked up from my work and Trudy’s therapist at the time. We did this for a long time, with visual aids or signing so that she could understand what was coming directly after the activity we were in. ‘Walk first, then lunch’. This is essentially the premise of a visual timetable. At this point, it was really important not to jump ahead and say we’re going to grandma’s at the weekend. Trudy would look at me strangely and say, ‘go to grandma’s?’. I’d then get into a real muddle and have a string of ‘now and next’s; ‘first school, then home, then tea, then bed, then school again…’. This wasn’t going to work. As ever, the things we push in theory are never very straightforward in practice.

Back to the holiday, I am dying to think about sunnier times with all this rain and look forward to the holidays, but the danger is that Trudy thinks it’s happening tomorrow. I’m trying really hard to work in the ‘here and now’ and I’m thinking that this might be a good move for all of us. We sometimes talk about the healing powers of Down’s Syndrome, and I’m wondering if this is one of them. They force us to be mindful, think about what we have right in front of us and stop yearning for the next best thing.