Twenty-Ten

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.