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Thursday 14 May 2015

How I got carried away with a holiday memory book

We went on holiday 2 weeks ago. We got permission to take Seth out of school and went to Pickering, North Yorkshire.


Normally our holidays are fairly laid back...it being holiday time for Seth he is normally flaked out. However, because this was school time and we had bigged up what a multi sensory experience the week would be for Seth we felt obligated to live up to that expectation.

So we went to York, Whitby, Scarborough, explored Pickering Castle, took a steam train ride and went on walks. It was great and apart from a couple of meltdowns, Seth loved it.

A day in to the holiday I realised that Seth should take back to school a memory book of what he had been up to, so I started taken photos to put in it. A day later I decided that if it is truly to be a memory book for Seth then a diary with photos would not be enough. So I started buying tactile items from the shops of all the places we visited; an orange rubbery penguin that lit up from Scarborough sea life centre, a leather, embossed keyring from York a wooden knight from Pickering Castle and, of course a rubber vampire bat from Whitby.  This idea was getting more expensive!

Then when we were on Scarborough beach I had the bright idea of recording the waves.

I followed this with a recording of the sound of travelling on the steam train. It was easy using my phone but how was I going to add them to the memory book? So I ordered a pack of small 10 second recordable switches, reasoning that they would come in useful one day.

A couple of days after returning home the switches arrived through the post. Then I realised what a monster I had created! It was all very well thinking up these great ideas but now I had to spend hours writing it up, sticking in the photos and working out how to stick the buttons into the book! I ended up using lots of tacky glue and selotape - it'll probably fall apart after a month! And how to write on one page when you've just stuck a lumpy penguin on its other side! Good grief - no one has ever said that being creative is one of my strong suits and yet I keep throwing myself into increasingly complicated projects. Like when I dressed Seth up as a pirate and tried to turn his wheelchair into a pirate ship.

Oh dear!

And so the memory book has been created and Seth took it into school to show it off. They were duly impressed. The sound is a bit tinny and only just recognisable, and you hear a steam train every time you close it! But hopefully I will be able to go through it with Seth and he will enjoy touching the objects and listening the sounds, and maybe remembering our holiday.