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.