Living 2008

Stories are usually reserved for bedtime. Actually we don’t even call it bedtime, we call it story time but the end result is hopefully two sleeping children. It’s very rare that I don’t do bedtime stories but if it is late or if one of us is particularly tired I’ll race through them pretty quick. The general rule is one story or chapter each, occasionally I break this rule. We lay in my bed, me in the middle and a child on either side. After stories they snuggle into me for a cuddle then Master R rolls over, closes his eyes and floats peacefully off to sleep while Ms R needs reminding to lay still and stop humming. She doesn’t seem to have an off button and is active until the moment she drops. Sometimes she’ll start a sentence but be asleep by the end. Even once she’s drifted off her body still jerks as though in last desperate attempts to keep her awake.

Tonight Master R chose The Gruffalo again. It has started to annoy Ms R, in fact it’s started to annoy me slightly too but at the moment it is his very favourite book. Ms R was cross with his choice and wriggled about in bed next to me so I told her to go into her own room and read a book. She stropped off grumbling that she couldn’t read. At a car boot sale on Sunday she found four Disney Winnie-the-Pooh books for twenty pence each and when we got home I read them out loud while the R’s were in the bath. After Master R and I had finished reading our story we could hear Ms R, it sounded like she was reading one of the new books so I called out to ask if she wanted to finish reading it to us and she did. She was already halfway through but continued reading it fairly fluently. At first I wondered if she was relying on the pictures and her memory to tell the story but then she got a bit muddled and instead of carrying on she stopped and muttered the sentence while pointing at the words. Once she figured it out she read it how it was written and continued with the story. She was surprised and then elated at getting to the end of the book and as I was telling her how proud I am Master R climbed across me and flung his arms round her saying how clever she is. She was genuinely thrilled and rushed off to get another one which she started but we prematurely ended because Master R was also attempting to read out loud from a different book and it was affecting her concentration. I read her a couple of chapters of Charlie and The Great Glass Elevator and once the light was out she whispered that once Master R was asleep she’d come downstairs with me. As I snuggled Master R down he whispered that once Ms R was asleep he’d come downstairs with me. So with both of them pretending to be asleep in order to help the other one go to sleep it didn’t take too long. Of course, it doesn’t always happen this way. Sometimes I fall asleep first and then they both get back up.

Buzz

Is growing and now feels like a proper grown-up cat to stroke although I’m sure she’s still got quite a bit of growing to do. We’ve been taking her to my parents house fairly regularly and she is getting used to their dog. The little ginger kitten she is wary off and growls at, the bigger cat doesn’t get too close. She’s comfortable inside the big conservatory and the garden although won’t go into the little conservatory where the litter tray is kept and the cats are fed. It is also the only outside door with a catflap so she’d be expected to enter and leave via that room. But there is still time yet. She happily walks into the cat carrier and goes to sleep when in the car.

At home she is now venturing further than our back garden and is asking to go out to play at night time. Last night I caught her following a little hedgehog round our garden. I think she’s reaching maturity and wanting to find companions, of which there are many.

Recently Ms R has been learning her left and right. It’s not something we’ve discussed or anything that I felt was particularly important or relevant but in the last couple of weeks she’s been asking which is which. Initially she’d ask which was her right and then ‘um’ and ‘ah’ a bit before working out that the other one was her left. As the days have passed the questions have become more about confirming that the one she was holding up was the one she thought it was. She’s twigged that she usually writes with her right hand but wouldn’t know that it was her right, rather than her write. My Mum went into a long but very clear explanation of why her right hand was opposite Ms Rs right hand when they faced each other and at the end Ms R said "Yeah I knew that anyway".

We’ve all been riding our bicycles. On Sunday we went for our first family ride. The short ride to the park with Master R singing away in the seat behind me and Ms R wobbling happily along behind Daddy was pretty much what my pre-children imagined snapshot-of-family-life looked like. Of course, all those years ago I never envisaged the five or so years of endurance needed to reach that particular point but to any passer-by at least, we looked the perfect picture of family happiness. The only downside of the cycling, well it could be anything I suppose but I’m blaming the cycling, is that Ms R seems to have slimmed down to the point where her shoulder blades and spine is visible through her clothes and I’m starting to wonder what people must think.

Rainbows is a roaring success. Ms R absolutely loves it and while she hasn’t made any particular best friend (or managed to remember anyones name) she chats to everyone. Last week she said she didn’t really trust the leaders but this week she sat next to one who helped her to make a bracelet. She looks forward to the show-and-tell part although it’s not always easy to know what to take. So far she’s made (well decorated) cakes, made an instrument (shaker) and a bracelet. She’s also doing her best to learn how to hula hoop.

Activity books (or are they called workbooks?) seem to have made a comeback in our house. We have have a collection of them, most of them given to us by well meaning family and friends on first hearing that we weren’t using school. They are now all doable by Ms R, occasionally she asks me to read what it says at the top of the page but often the requests are obvious. Master R was eager to do one too so sat on my lap carefully tracing over numbers and shapes. I told Ms R that in some families the children are required to do a couple of pages of a book every morning and she said she’d like to do that too but asked if it would be okay if she did a whole book at a time. I said once she’d filled in every page of every book then I’d be happy to buy her some more.

We’ve spent plenty of time in parks. They’ve now reached the age where none of the equiptment eludes them so I’ve started taking a book. I don’t actually read much as I keep peeping to watch them play but it’s so much better than standing around feeling like a spare part. Ms R usually finds a smaller child to mother and Master R is often not far behind her but sometimes he takes himself off and will spend ages doing the same thing over and over until he has completely mastered it. I’ve also seen him just sitting and watching other children. Ms R is very proud to be able to slide down the pole by herself now.

Master R can count to ten. He counts objects and understands how many there are (rather than just being able to recite the numbers) although if one was taken away he’d need to start counting from the beginning again. Unless the objects were biscuits and then he’d just batter me. Today Ms R was playing with numbers and I asked if she could count up in twos, which she did so I then asked if she could count up in threes to which she said she couldn’t but she got a little pink calculator which is usually some magical or sophisticated item in a game and typed in three plus three equals, equals, equals etc and read me the numbers as they came up. I was rather surprised, I didn’t know she knew the plus or the equals signs or what a calculator was for. Obviously all those secret agent codes are more than just random numbers.

Master R acquired a plastic boat the other day and has fallen in love with it. He sails it in the bath.

Mum looked after them for a couple of hours the other day and with her friend she took them to the park, read them stories, fed them and let them play in the garden. Afterwards the friend said that she thought they were lovely children and almost made her want to return to her former job of working in a nursery. And today someone commented on how well behaved they were being and offered them both a sweet. It’s nice when strangers see good things in my children.

Every so often someone asks me what we do all day. Saying ‘All day’ like that makes it sounds like the days are pretty long and hard to fill. They’re not, let me assure you, the day usually whizzes by and I often feel by evening that my feet haven’t touched the ground. Some days seem full of educational content and if I had boxes to tick I’d probably have to make more for all the ticks we’d have yet other days seem to provide no ticks for hypothetical boxes.

Yesterday we had our weekly supermarket shopping to do. Master R had been up since about seven watching Cbeebies but Ms R didn’t wake up until eight. While they ate cereal in front of Cbeebies I did usual stuff like washing and tidying. They dressed themselves with a bit of prompting from me and then we were ready to go. We dropped Buzz off at my Mums house and went forth to shop. Shopping always inspires questions, I think we talked about how to tell if different fruits are ripe and compared prices of similar products. The R’s have a bit of choice over what we buy (things like cereals, crisps, tins, fruit), they like to help load things on the conveyor belt and Ms R usually chats to the cashier. It would never be our first choice of activities but we get through it.

Our next visit was to our local charity shops to source some material for a tree that Ms R wanted to make, we also visited a shop for some large pieces of card. All this took us up to mid-day and had given Buzz a couple of hours at Mums house so we went to collect her only to find that she hadn’t got out of the cat carrier. She was pleased to see us though and followed us into the lounge so we thought we’d stay for a bit. We bounced on the trampoline and then we noticed that Buzz had disappeared into the overgrowth so I went looking and calling her. Ms R settled down to a colour-by-numbers in a puzzle book and Master R played with the little kitten. I caught Buzz and brought her in where she sat and growled at the sleeping dog and playing kitten. By the time we got home and made lunch it was two o’clock and Ms R was eager to get started on her tree. She drew a trunk shape on some material, cut it out and stuck it down and made a card leaf template for me to cut leaves out for her. Master R had fallen asleep on the chair. It seemed to take all afternoon and inbetween cutting out shapes I transferred some washing from machine to line and other little jobs. Once the tree was finished Ms R wanted some photos printed to stick on so we sat together and selected some for printing. Eventually the tree was finished and Master R woke up.

While I cooked dinner the Rs rode their bikes up and down the path out the front and chatted to some of the neighbours. Daddy came home and the R’s sat down to eat and watch Cbeebies. Afterwards they played in the garden together, looked at the computer with me and chatted to Daddy until seven o’clock when we went upstairs for stories. Master R keeps choosing a Spot book because it has lap-laps (cat flaps) and I’m reading The Great Glass Elevator to Ms R. Ms R fell asleep quickly but Master R couldn’t sleep thanks to his afternoon nap so got back up and sat with Daddy.

Today Ms R was first up. Master R didn’t wake up until nine. While they ate breakfast I did some housework, organised some recharged batteries for Baby Annabell and helped Master R find his favourite trucks. They played in the garden while I bathed and then despite having been told more than once that my grandparents were on holiday this week we still drove over as fast as we could in anticipation of biscuits and creamy coffee. On the way over we talked about considering other peoples feelings, or at least thats what I talked about. After a few minutes of ringing the bell and thinking of various scenarios why their car wasn’t in the drive I remembered so we left again and visited my Dad instead where the Rs had ice-cream and we all bounced on the trampoline. Master R played with his trucks and counted them. Mum came home and we chatted to her and shared cherries and blueberries. The Rs were eager to visit a park we’ve driven past, Ms R and Master R practiced their recorder and tin whislte on the way there. I settled myself down with a book and the Rs played hapily for two hours. There was plenty of other small children there, Ms R pushed toddlers on the roundabout and chatted to their Mums, Master R got scared by a boy who said ‘Poo’ to him despite him usually thinking that word is hilarous. Ms R is very sociable and found a boy to play with, Master R played with them too but also spent quite a bit of time on his own climbing and jumping.

We had a dentist appointment early (9.45!) this morning. It’s the third time we’ve been and the first time that I didn’t shake uncontrollably and have tears gushing into my ears while on my back with my mouth open. Not that I was ever frightened or anything, I just usually have that strange physical reaction. Ms R happily hopped into the chair to be looked at and presented with a sticker, no worries there either. But this story is really about Master R and his rotten tooth. He was just over two when I first noticed the back tooth which looks as though it has crumbled in half and decayed. On both our previous visits to the dentist he has hidden into my shoulder and refused to open his mouth. In the last six months despite reading many books about trips to the dentist and discussing the importance of getting your teeth checked Master R has maintained that he is never ever going to show anyone his teeth. So I changed tactics and decided to put his defiance to good use. I explained that me and Ms R were going to get our teeth checked and of course, he immediately asked if he could come too. I told him he could come but that he probably wasn’t grown-up enough to have a turn at which point his defiance kicked in. So he climbed up into the chair and bravely opened his mouth while holding my hand with an iron grip. I stood ready for a telling off, expecting to see a look of horror on the dentists face before he embarked on a lecture about sweets and brushing. But instead of a berating for being such a bad, bad Mummy he explained that the tooth had fluorisis rather than decay. He asked if Master R had been treated for an infection when he was younger and told me not to worry about it because eventually it will fall out and hopefully the permanent tooth won’t have been affected. I’m not sure I can describe what it feels like to have twelve months worth of guilt lifted from my shoulders.

Tuesday was a busy day and saw us out of the house by 8am. The Rs visited my parents while I had a brief but timely doctors appointment (she was running late and then kicked me out half way through the consult to take a phone call). Then Ms R had her last dermatology appointment at the hospital which I cycled her to, a pleasant ride along the seafront with the sun shining on us. The wait was long but it was over quickly and the dermatologist told me that she’d only be sending the notes to our GP and not to anyone else. I waffled on a bit about how school nurses don’t want home educated childrens notes which left her looking completely baffled, I wish I knew when to keep my mouth shut.

We had lunch at Mums and did our usual array of things like bouncing on the tampoline, splashing water, and petting dog, cat and kitten before cycling home again. The Rs wanted to ride their bikes so I stood by the garages for a bit as they rode back and forth.

Buzz continues to grow but lately there has been a steady stream of male cats roaming through our garden to remind us just how small she is. Two live next door so we see them quite often. They come one at a time to sniff around and spray up the bush, Buzz stalks them and every so often pounces towards them in a way that suggests she doesn’t actually want to get too close. They mostly take no notice of her. We’ve seen some beautiful cats but something about it all has me feeling that she really must have a little operation soon. Too many big boys prowling around, and I’ve seen what cats do.

A little note about Facebook, although it’s not home ed related. When I first joined up I looked out for my overseas friends. The overseas part of my life ended before I was quite ready and I never said goodbye to anyone. At the times I last saw any of them I didn’t know I wouldn’t be seeing them again soon, I lived amongst a community of people overseas for longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere before or since and for a long time I thought that it would be my home forever. So although I don’t have much contact with them (and nor do I especially want to) it’s nice to see their profile pictures as it makes me feel a little less far away. Interestingly a couple of friends from my secondary school years have found me and that felt very weird at first because that was a stage of my life that I was more than happy to leave behind and I never expected or wanted to return to it. It seems that they are all finding each other and recreating our year group over the internet although I’m not getting actively involved in this. I have a couple of friends from the home ed scene but that seems rather pointless as they are part of my current life. And now tonight someone from my first job has found me. It feels like the gap between my secondary school life and my overseas life has now been filled. It is really strange to see faces from my different lives all together in one group, if thats not a trigger for mental illness I don’t know what is!

We had home ed group today. It takes us about forty minutes to get there by car so plenty of time for conversation or music on the way. Today we conversed. Ms R was wanting to know what a quarter of a year was. She knows about halves but didn’t know about quarters so we talked about how sometimes I cut the sandwiches into two pieces and sometimes I cut them into four. We talked about a quarter and three quarters which was fine and how we say half instead of two quarters which took a bit longer to understand. So she now knows that she is five years and a small sandwich old.

For some reason marriage came up again. Ms R is thinking that she’ll marry her best friend when she is grown up and just borrow some seeds when she wants to have babies. She’s thinking that Daddy probably has loads of seeds left over because we only used two of his and you usually get loads of seeds in a packet. Master R really wants to marry Ms R when he grows up and is quite happy to let her have some of his seeds to make babies although his not really sure where men get seeds from, maybe Daddy will give him some when he’s bigger. Ms R is grateful for his offer of seeds but thinks he needs to find someone else to grow his babies for him as she’ll be having her babies with her best friend and he needs to find someone else to marry because when you grow up you need to find a new person to bring into our family. It seemed that I wasn’t really needed in that conversation so I mostly kept out of it other than to say that usually men didn’t give their seeds to their daughters or sisters and that was why it was best to find someone outside of the family to marry. I’m not really sure where the marriage thing has come from, we are married but it’s not something I’ve been especially promoting.

Screen printing (aka putting pictures on t-shirts) was the activity at home ed group today. I really enjoyed it and the Rs loved their t-shirts. It was lovely to see the children running around in a group outside afterwards. From what I saw Ms R was an active participant and Master R was managing to keep up. I was told of their kindness for making a new person feel welcome so that was good too.

After we got home we visited my Mum. Ms R cycled her bike and I cycled mine with Master R on the back. It’s quite a long way for a first cycle ride but Ms R did really well and was clearly very proud. She cycled along mostly on the path ringing her bell everytime she saw a pedestrian and singing a made up song about how happy she was riding her bike which got smiles from everyone we passed.

Mum has a new kitten, it’s ginger and gorgeous.

At bedtime Master R is enjoying our set of lift-the-flap Noddy books and I am reading Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator for Ms R which I’m enjoying because I’ve never read before but I think she is struggling to follow because there are so many words that she has never come across before (like president and bomb) which probably make it incomprehensible. They also both requested a poem after their stories although I suspect this is more to do with delaying sleep time than a genuine interest.

Ms R learnt to ride her bicycle today. It came about because I suddenly noticed that Master R was riding on the little bicycle with stabilisers which he’s never had the strength in his legs to do before. Ms R was inspired by this and told me she was going to ride hers so I took them out to the garage compound and pushed her a little bit. It was only really a matter of confidence for her because I was barely holding the bike and knew if I let go she’d be fine. I thought she’d have me running up and down all day but after a couple of goes she yelled at me to let go and I did. She was very excited and as with everything, very dramatic. She hugged me tight while bouncing up and down, I thought she was going to cry she was so happy. Master R came running over to give her a hug too, he was as proud of her as she was herself. She practiced, riding up and down in front of the garages and before long she could set off by herself, steer round corners and use the brakes to stop.

After the disappointment of the plastic flute that none of us can make work we visited the music shop for some hope. We came out with a little recorder (soprano?) for Ms R and a tin whistle for Master R. Ms R is getting the hang of using the first three fingers and kept wanting me to teach her more when really she just needed to practice what she already knew. We’ve looked at some Youtube clips of recorder playing and it is very impressive, and Ms R is very ambitious. Master R is a very enthusiastic blower of his tin whistle but has less patience for covering the holes. In all fairness to him he’s making a lot less horrible noise than Ms R made when she was three and I had to dismantle a recorder and hide the parts in different places. Every so often I come across a bit of recorder and just for safety measures thrust it in a different hiding place.

Ms R had Rainbows again which she really enjoyed. She chatted away to various girls and seemed to really enjoy the activity coming over just once to tell me what a wonderful time she was having. She took her little recorder to the show-and-tell.

We used the seafront bus to get to the swimming pool. It was busier than I expected and we couldn’t sit all together but while Ms R wimpered and insisted on holding my hand across the aisle Master R was in his element sitting in between some senior people all independant and grown-up. It’s great being able to look out of the window instead of concentrating on driving and being higher up we can see more, it always prompts lots of conversations. They run every ten minutes and I love the idea of using them but it annoys me slightly that the prices are always different because they seem to charge us for travelling between two completely different stops than the ones we are actually travelling between. I’m not sure if this is down to human error or if they are on commision.

The swimming was great. Ms R spent lots of time swimming under water, sitting on the bottom, jumping in and coming down the slide as fast as possible. She also managed to float on her back which had eluded her up til now. Master R is eager not to be left behind and although he wouldn’t go down the slide by the end he was dunking himself under too.

Ms R started Rainbows, I sat and watched. She was a bit quiet and at one point I thought it wasn’t going to work but when given her options she chose to join in. Theoretically it ticks our box for socialisation but in practice it ticks our boxes for structure, following instructions and learning in a group. Not that I really have boxes to tick because I’m not that organised, but if I did…

The Rs have enjoyed doing a mini painting-by-numbers kit. Ms R got the right colours in the right places and was very proud of the results. Master R splodged colour all over his, not worrying about the lines but making sure he didn’t leave any white bits and he was also very proud of his. Ms R wanted to know why she had to use certain colours in certain places and I explained that she didn’t, but if she did she’d get that result. She also wanted to know why she had to do what the Rainbows leader said and again I explained that she didn’t, but if she wasn’t going to join in there probably wasn’t much point in us going. Sometimes she seems to want to be told what to do but when she is she questions it, which is great.

When queueing to buy toilet paper Ms R told me how many rolls there were by working out that there were six in each of three layers. I pointed out that it was written on the packet as well and she seemed genuinely surprised. I’m confident that she knows and understand values up to twenty. It’s interesting that once she knew there were eighteen she talked about eighteen being made of three lots of six so she can see the sum both ways. I never really got maths at school but maybe that was because when I was doing multiplication I certainly never understood that the answer divided by one of the numbers would equal the other number (and even as I was writing that I had to check that it really worked). My maths only improved once we were given formulas to work out answers, then it became easy. As long as I could remember which formula I needed for which sum I could get them all right.

We’ve planted some more flowers. They both really enjoy planting and watering and take delight in seeing them blossom. Most days they get excited because they’ve spotted another flower on the tomato plants or the peas have grown taller. We rooted some mint in a glass of water and they were pretty impressed by that.

We saw and listened to the local secondary school band playing on our beach green over the weekend. The music was awesome and we talked about the variety of different instruments. I think Ms R would have sat listening for a lot longer, I know I would have done, but Master R was impatient for the promised ice-cream. We are no closer to getting a sound out of the plastic flute which is a pity because we’d all love to play a tune on it.

The Rs have been doing a lot of dancing to Elvis Presley at Nanas house and they love his music. We’ve been listening to Queen in the car and they like clapping along to the beat. We’ve been looking after Nana while my parents are away so have spent quite a bit of time in her company. It means that they’ve had plenty of opportunities to play with the children from the flats. Ms R has a special friend there who has just had a birthday (I’m guessing sixth) and they spend some time chatting together and some time playing in larger groups. I keep an eye on them from inside Nanas house and they are often sat in a large circle playing a game or running around in a gang. I don’t know which of the women is the Mum of Ms Rs friend and I don’t even know the girls name. I feel I should find out because it would be nice for the girls if we met up in the school holidays but maybe part of the magic for Ms R is that it’s a friendship that hasn’t been orchestrated by me. There hasn’t been any tears but today a toddler was trying to hit Master R. A couple of the older children did a good job of keeping the toddler distracted and one girl came over to assure me she’d look after Master R so all was well.

One of this weeks library books is Tom and The Tinful of Trouble - Nick Sharratt & Stephen Tucker.  Ms R read the first couple of pages by herself, it sort of happened because the first word was Tom and I pointed at it and said "Oh look, you know that word" so she read it, and then read the next one and next one. She read words that I didn’t expect her to know and made logical guesses at words she didn’t. When she reads it’s clear that she sees past the words and into the story, she doesn’t punch each word out as an individual test. While reading chapter books is good for the story content and my interest it seems that reading picture books are good for helping her to read. I found a poetry book for 30p at the library, I wish I could dine with a porcupine by Brian Moses which we are enjoying and we’ve also just returned Seaside Poems by Jill Bennett & Nick Sharratt. Ms R likes the musical and rhythmic sound of poetry and is asking lots of questions around the subjects of the poems.

Buzz is growing and now has the shape of an adult cat. I heard a female cat calling the other evening and panicked a bit that it was Buzz but when I did the box shake she came running from upstairs. We seem to have a couple of extra tom cats passing through our garden and I’m aware that we need to make a decision fairly soon about when to sterilise her. She is developing a warm, soft, bulging tummy but as she’s only about five months I’m thinking that I’m probably over feeding her. We’ve been taking her to visit Nana with us which she doesn’t overly enjoy. Today we needed to have her out of the house for a couple of hours so I took her to Nanas and after carefully taping up the catflap left. When I returned she didn’t immediately come to greet me and I feared the worst when I saw the lounge window wide open. Thankfully she was on the bathroom window sill but Nana had also thought she’d gone missing at one point and had gone outside (leaving the door open) to try and find her. It would be really great if Buzz could get used to Nanas house so that she could stay there while we went on holiday but I know that Nana can’t be expected to spend a whole week with all the windows and doors closed. The other option is to try and organise someone to come to our house twice a day to feed her. Mmmm, still thinking on that one. 

While doing a few bits of shopping we saw some assistants drumming up business for the opticians. I’ve been meaning to book Ms R in for an eye test, not because I expect her eyesight to be anything other than perfect but because if she was at school she’d have one. I also quite like the idea of collecting ‘evidence’ of her welfare should we ever need to make a report to the LA. So we enquired about childrens eye-tests, got invited in, gave away all of their personal information and then added my signature to an NHS form. Ms R was feeling a bit unsure about it all but the optician was really nice, she sat and looked in a machine at a picture of a house while he measured her prescription and then went into another room where she identified all of the letters of the hang-up thing almost down to the bottom. Whilst I realise it was an eye-test it was also a pretty good test of her letters and she was amazingly unfaltering naming all the letters by name except for the ‘u’ which she sounded phonetically. She was also shown a board with various sized writing on it and could identify letters even from the smallest font. Apparently her vision is absolutely perfect.

The optician explained that he didn’t have the full range of equipment for eye-testing a three year old but he could do a basic one if we liked. We did like so he started off by writing a few letters in large thick writing on a piece of paper and asking Master R to trace them with his finger. Then he pointed at the letters on the hang-up and asked Master R to point to the matching one on his piece of paper. I was absolutely amazed, he has had far less contact with letters than dd has and I know that he couldn’t identify or name any of them but he was quite able to match the far away ones with the close ones. Until, that is, the optician started pointing at the smaller ones. Ms R bounced up and down beside him stroking his thigh and saying "Come on, you can do it"…but he couldn’t. She then expained to the optician that he could really but he was just shy. Then we looked at the close up board and he couldn’t match letters from the medium sized fonts. He just sat there quietly looking but not pointing or speaking. Ms R kept telling us he could see them really and he was just teasing us but when the optician pointed at larger font letters he matched them pretty quickly. We then sat him in front of the machine (with the picture of the house inside of it) and he looked into that managing to stay very still as required. The optician explained that according to the machine he is long sighted in one eye and short sighted in the other eye, meaning one eye (the right, I think) is doing all the work. He held a pen in front of Master R and alternated covering each eye, when he asked Master R which was clearer the answer corresponded with the machines diagnosis. So he’s written a letter that we need to show our lovely GP in order to get a referral to someone more specialised. Ms R took this all very personally and we did the rest of the shopping with her shouting loudly at me to not give the letter to our doctor and that she wasn’t going to let me take her brother to hospital. I’ve explained to her the best I can about what may happen and what the worst case scenario may be (eye patch to correct laziness and glasses to help with short sightedness) but speaking on his behalf she is pretty determined that he does not want an eye patch. But if he has glasses she wants some too.

He was a very nice optician from Singapore (so looked about twenty years younger than he probably was) and told us about his new baby (I do love Singaporeans). When Ms R told him that they weren’t going to school he smiled and said "Ah, you’re being home educated".

I’m not really concerned about Master Rs possible sight issues. As things are at the moment it doesn’t seem to be affecting him in that he can happily watch television, really enjoys looking at books and always points things out in the pictures, manages to get anything food related into his mouth and has great co-ordination and balance. But I’m aware that if he was really having difficulty with the smaller letters then without help things like reading would never get beyond the earliest reader books with the largest writing. I can picture a scenario in my head of a four or five year old child starting school with undiagnosed short sightedness, not getting very far with any of the academic stuff so standing out as being not too bright and then misbehaving because of boredom and earning more labels, I wonder how often this happens. Thankfully even if nothing can be done to help Master R (which I’m sure it can) we can adjust anything and everything necessary to make things easier.

My concerns are more with how Ms R is dealing with it. While I’ve explained that there is nothing wrong with Master R and that he doesn’t have a problem with his eyes she still can’t get passed using those two words loudly in reference to him. This I’m sure could be more damaging than not being able to read the small letters.

Ms R finished her swimming course almost able to swim. After the penultimate lesson my Mum came with us and we all got in the pool. Master R had been waiting all week for his swim and only wanted to be with me so while I splashed him about in the water and caught him while he jumped in Mum played with Ms R. She finally got the hang of ducking under water and one time came up all excited because she had managed to open her eyes. After that she swam a few stokes under water and was making good progress at swimming on top too. She can swim on her back holding a float across her chest but only if someone supports her head while she gets in position, once she’s up she’s off. On the final day Daddy came to watch too, they had a playtime in the water with large floats and she had great fun clambering on one with another boy and then being tipped off. She is now so confident in the water nothing will stop her. She recieved a certificate. Our aim will be to do another intensive course in the schools summer holidays and hopefully get a few practices in before then.

Ms Rs confidence has soared out of the pool too. At home ed group she broke away from her usual friends to make a new friend of a boy with a scooter. This seemed to give Master R exclusive rights over the usual friends which is probably great for him as he sometimes feels a bit left behind. It was also nice to see him playing with a same aged child, something I fretted over so much with Ms R when she was his age yet seems so unimportant now. At the park today Ms R made a friend to play with. Maybe there was an inset day or something as there seemed to be loads of children around. 

There hasn’t been as much writing recently, unless you count her name blazoned across the lounge door in biro which needs to be removed by next week! She is very interested in keeping a diary and has one where she writes nice things in with the spellings dictated to her. The other day I dictated ‘Daddy is a wonderful man’ for her and apparently there is one about me in there too. She’s also made a menu for the special drinks that she likes to make. They involve milk, ice-cream and either cocoa, strawberries or banana and are always topped with sprinkles. She made the menu so that Master R had something to look at to help him decide which drink to choose and illustrated it with drawings and whenever there’s talk of making special drinks the menu comes out. It was a glimpse into the future of autonomy as it was entirely her idea and doing. Every so often she tells me a couple of sums, usually things like five and three make eight. This has been a fairly long phase and I’m thinking that it is possibly quite an important step to understanding numbers. I’m not sure what will come next, if anything. And she has acquired a plastic flute that no-one has managed to get a note out of yet much to her frustration. Ms R still keeps presenting me with Beatrix Potter books to read, some are okay but others are way beyond my reading-out-loud ability. She also tried me on a Mary Poppins book but that was fruitless too after I had to stop every few sentences to explain things like what a chimney sweep is and why he’d call Mrs. Banks ’mam’, why Mr. Banks wore a bowler hat to work and what a perambulator was. So we’re back on picture books for the time being. For some reason she seems attracted to Jill Murphy. We’ve had one for ages which I’ve refused to read (dummies, bullying and derogatory name calling to name a few reasons) so she reluctantly returned it to the library only to choose another Jill Murphy book which seems to be all about being fat, dieting and sneaking bits of cake. Maybe I’m just living on a different planet to everyone else but I really don’t want to read about that sort of stuff to my innocent children.

Master R is growing taller everyday and finally seems to be easing up on his requests for food. He seems to bounce between being extremely sweet, caring and well mannered to being argumentative, defiant and aggressive. It seems ‘a temper’ runs in Daddys side of the family (doesn’t it run somewhere in everyones family?) so I’m trying to keep exposure to violence as minimal as possible. I wasn’t impressed to see him running around waving his finger at people and threatening to shoot them at a family bbq, nor was I impressed with the suggestion of getting him a punch bag. Responsibility and control need to come before fighting and weapons. He can, but doesn’t always count to ten without missing any numbers out and he has taken to ‘reading’ me stories. ‘The Gruffalo’ is still a favourite but we have now got ‘Six Dinner Sid’ from the library again.