The colour red Thurs 14.03.2013

Red would seem to be an important colour in our house. I’ll give a few examples:

Football shirts: Hubbie and T support a blue-shirted team. A friend of Hubbie’s – who supported the same team – refused to talk to someone if he wore a red football shirt. Extreme, but he stuck to what he believed. Luckily T (and Hubbie) do not hold this belief.

Love: just checked the date to put in the title and it’s one month since Valentine’s Day. I don’t go for the blatant commercialisation around 14th February, we – as a family – tell each other we love each other very day. Life is too short not to.

The colour red: it’s D’s favourite colour, if she had her way every item of clothing would be red. Her coat, fleece scarf and fleece mittens (she finds wool too itchy) are all red – her choice.

I was googling “colour red and autism” just now, wondering if there was a link, I seemed to remember hearing something and found this:

“Neurologists who work with children living with autism have learned that they can sometimes be helped by using colour. Red especially seems to help because it counteracts the over firing of the high and mid brain.

Coloured Glasses for Autism

If the child has an angry or emotional reaction to loud noises such as a dog barking, colour may help. If there is just emotion and no anger, red seems to help most. However, if there is anger, orange or yellow seem to work better.

Colour therapy glasses are sometimes used by child neurologists to help these children. Simply wearing a pair of red, orange or yellow glasses may quickly change an autistic child’s mood and make them calm and peaceful. Coloured glasses are inexpensive and easy to use. And children love wearing them. They can be found at ColorGlasses.com.”

I also found something that indicated autistic people disliked the colour red, so..swings and roundabouts..red makes D happy, so I’m happy.

Red is also for Red Nose Day tomorrow.. Something which caused D a great deal of anxiety this morning.

She doesn’t cope very well with any change to the routine at school, as yesterday’s post demonstrated. She is worried about people dressing-up tomorrow and she has decided she does not want to wear red – which surprised me.

She was reluctant to go into school, very reluctant to go into class but did seem happier when I explained to her teacher why she was anxious. Lots of reassurance given, happier D went in.

I didn’t get a body-slam at the end of the day because she was very eager to show me her world book day book that they’d all been and got from the bookshop. Our local bookshop is lovely, they are very used to children visiting from D’s school and D said “the lady wrote my name in the book and I didn’t have to tell her what it was!”. That’s the kind of personal service we get.

That’s the book she chose, she liked the cover (just like her Mumma..chocolate!!).

This afternoon and evening has been full of giggles and laugher. T has been wearing his red noses in a variety of ways – as only a 10-year old can – D has been laughing away, trying to make up her own particular brand of jokes, we all join in because she’s happy, whether they’re funny (in the normal
sense or not).

A complete contrast to this morning, hopefully there will be no further anxieties tomorrow, but if there are, it’s okay. There’s nothing better than hearing your child laugh – really laugh – she doesn’t get the giggles that often so it’s been wonderful.

I hope everyone’s had a good day too, comments/RTs/shares as ever welcomed, thanks for reading Jx 😘