The novelty wears off

Over a month in and I'm beginning to feel a bit discouraged. I know it's too early to see any impact yet; indeed I was warned that my son's behaviour might even go backwards as the new stimulation upsets the status quo.

But I mean, how can a bit of jumping or arm waving or rolling a can about actually have any effect on anything?

The good news is that we're keeping it up; we've only missed one evening excercise because he fell asleep early on the sofa when I was busy elsewhere. For the most part I have been very impressed by how he has stuck with it unquestioningly and applied himself to the tasks. If anything, he is applying himself better now than he was at the start. Perhaps because he works best in an environment of routine and familiarity.

But in some ways it is sad to see how easy it is to get him to complete 10 minutes of, often, physically uncomfortable exercises - and how impossible it is to get him to do two minutes of 'simple' school-work - such as handwriting or spelling or arithmetic. He's a bright child with a loathing for anything he recognises to be 'learning'. Yet in doing these exercises so faithfully he clearly displays that he has all the capacity to focus and persist and oblige that ought to be required at school. So where does it all go wrong?

Well, we've done 2 weeks of exercises and so far son and I have been well behaved. Initially it was tricky to get him to take them seriously - expecially when the activities seemed very easy - and he just wanted to muck around. I am sometimes finding it hard to judge whether I should assess his completion of a task as 'easy' or 'hard' which is something you have to do each time and which influences which tasks you progress on to. By nature I am a bit of a stickler - so might be being a bit harsh sometimes.

Have I noted any changes at all? Well its very early days and I have been warned that it can take 3-6 months before and improvement is detected. But I've also been warned that the exercises can create a bit of confusion and disorientation initially. One evening, after we had done the exercises rather too close to bedtime, son got up out of his bed and came into the living-room rather confused and distressed. He said he felt confused, like his brain was in a mess.

But then, he had also watched a scary programme on TV and had a slight temperature - so there's probably nothing to read into this. For the most part, it's still hard to see how throwing a bean-bag onto a tea-towel only inches from your body can have a particulary dramatic effect - either positive or negative.