A great day out at the garden centre

The other week was not a good one for Tom as he caught a rather nasty tummy bug which resulted in him vomiting for 48 hours.
Jo WorganJo Worgan
Jo Worgan

This is obviously stressful for any child, but for a child who is autistic and cannot tell you where they feel ill, it is even more distressing.

For the two days he was off school, he lay on our bed, on the couch or on me. On Sunday we wanted to get out and about in the fresh air, so we asked Tom where he would like to go. To our surprise he told us he wanted to go to the garden centre. We go to a lot of garden centres, so we had to try to decipher which garden centre he wanted to go to. When Andrew asked him which one, he told us, “the one with the water.” So off we set towards Woodlands Nurseries in Crooklands.

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He likes the Koi Carp in their large pond as he likes to stand on the wooden bridge and watch them. However, what we should have realised with Tom is that the garden centre we were heading to was the wrong one.

The thing is because Tom knew in his head where he wanted to go, he automatically assumed we also knew from his vague description. He was wrong.

As we went sailing past the turn off on the A6 towards Bay View Garden Centre, he started to shout. “No that way, that way, you’ve gone the wrong way.” So while I started to reassure him we would need to turn round, Andrew turned the car around and off we went again in the right direction.

He loves Bay View Garden Centre, but the strange thing is he hasn’t been there in a long time. We couldn’t remember the last time we took him.

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But he had remembered the outdoors bit with the water features and this was what his reference to water was all about. Unfortunately, he also found their collection of wind chimes!

To our surprise we actually spent an hour there, and even enjoyed a coffee and juice sitting outside the café. I really think the highlight for the boys though was watching the chickens running around in the sunshine.

We eventually did go on to Crooklands Garden Centre, so Tom could see the big fish.