Gavin, Rachel, Matthew and Peter's Diary

OK, this blog doesn’t do very much any more, but to prove we are still here I’ll do a quick review of 2011. The overall synopsis: calm; moderate or good, with fog patches (mostly relating to work). Nothing exciting happened this year. In the light of 2010, we are, on the whole, profoundly grateful for this.

January: Snow snow snow. I can’t really remember anything that happened in January other than getting cold. I can’t remember anything exciting from March either – will come back and fill in if I do.

February: round about now Cyrilla the large ovarian cyst grows, causes severe pain, is named, and retreats a week or so later leaving no trace. Not fun, but not there any more.

April: Matthew hardly goes to school, because of the way Leeds school holiday dates interact with a very late Easter and someone’s wedding do. This means inter alia that we can spend a sunny week in Studland enjoying peaceful sandy beaches before most people’s holidays have started.

May: Mummy and Daddy escape for a long weekend, walk on Ilkley Moor without hats and survive.

June: Peter acquires a scooter, and the pace of his life increases rapidly. Sometime around now we briefly live in a Flanders and Swann song: the gasman comes to call, summons his friend the kitchen fitter, who tells us there’s a problem with the drains and summons his friend the builder, who tells us the joists are rotting. Before anyone paints over the gas tap, and in the middle of the Great Mouse Invasion (in the face of which Copernicus is no use at all, other than in locating the dead mice and presenting them for inspection), we decide to get the kitchen redone.

July: Matthew learns to ride a bike; no stopping him now. Yearly Meeting Gathering in Canterbury; vast numbers of Quakers in the sunshine, in family and friend reunions, in earnest conversation about sustainability, in animal masks (Peter’s age group), in trees (Matthew, Peter and all their new friends), and in meetings for church affairs in a very very large and very warm tent (the grownups). Gavin gets appointed to agenda committee, so for the next few years all the YM-related things we’ve been moaning about for the last many years will become his fault.

August: We get used to washing up in the bathroom and cooking in the dining room while the kitchen disappears and reappears. Then we go away to relive some of my childhood holiday memories by the Solway Firth. Sure enough, it’s cold and rainy most of the time and parents can still almost persuade children that it’s fun to run round the lighthouse in the rain. But there’s also a mini swimming pool nearby, where the boys increase noticeably in confidence. And they spend some time with their great-grandparents, which is a rare and important thing.

September: Matthew’s sixth birthday party on the first day back at school. We just about recover by the end of the month. Fortunately I’m on sabbatical (nearly). So I can observe with horrified fascination the trials and tribulations of the administrative merging of two departments. It’s getting there.

October: Matthew goes to Edinburgh for half term. He also starts reading lots more, with ever-increasing appetite for reading; we get the first of many occurrences of “I’ll go to bed as soon as I’ve finished this chapter…”. Peter can read and write P-for-Peter and seems to think that’s quite enough. Getting back into volunteering and with a little more time flexibility, I spend several mornings pottering around at the drop-in for destitute refugees and asylum seekers.

November: Gavin spends a weekend shut in a portacabin inside a huge concrete box, firing neutrons at things and trying not to get hit by any of them himself. I spend a week in San Francisco talking about interesting things with nice people. This advances our research, in both cases. Sometimes I’m pretty confident I picked the easier line of work.

December: Peter goes to lots of birthday parties and seems happy to have his own little box of food (especially when in contains pizza). Two unforgettable Christmas shows featuring Peter as an owl and Matthew as the principal investigator of the Magi stellar observation programme. A research council decides that Gavin can have lots of money to spend more time playing with neutrons [etc], or instructing his minions on how to do same; he is happy. Our Christmas travels are a great success despite the best efforts of the pig on the line near Cheltenham. And so to bed.

2012 looks like it could be marginally more interesting (there’s a start-of-school, and variously increasing responsibilities at work; there’s a ruby wedding celebration and a wedding celebration to go to; if possible we’d like to get some more bits of house taken apart and put back together; but as we know and Macmillan apparently never actually said, it’s events, dear boy, events).

OK, having spent a day going around being ridiculously and pointlessly proud of Matthew, and knowing that this blog is mainly read by people who don’t mind the occasional opportunity to be proud of him, I shall note that he was ‘elected’ as one of two Year 1 representatives (one boy and one girl – they operate a strict quota system that would be highly controversial elsewhere) to the school council. I have not heard that this election (conducted on the shut-your-eyes-and-put-up-your-hand system, electoral reform still being a long way off) was marred by any dubious practices, although apparently the fact that some of the candidates (including Matthew) had worked out that they could vote for themselves, and some hadn’t, did affect the result. The stated criteria were being ‘good at talking, good at listening, and good at having ideas’, and clearly (humour me, this is parental boasting time) this applies to Matthew fairly well, even if the second item doesn’t always apply to successful politicians. I asked him what he would have to do on the school council, and he said in an offhand and somewhat world-weary tone ‘Go to lots of meetings’. I think he’s somehow got the idea from Mummy and Daddy that meetings are not exciting.

from our holiday in Southerness (near Dumfries):
- Following visits to some of Historic Scotland’s finest monuments, Matthew deciding that the sandcastle needed a sand visitor centre next to it.
- Peter trying to persuade his parents to take him swimming again despite the fact that the swimming kit was still wet: “But it’ll be the same water!”
- Matthew trying (with some success) to learn to play chess, and then transferring this to a game he and Peter were playing around a wooden castle/fort in the playground. Peter: “I’m being a knight!” Matthew: “OK, I’ll be a rook…”

Peter falls over and bumps his head. He comes downstairs lamenting loudly. Mummy picks him up. Daddy is in the same room. ‘What happened, Peter?’ Peter tells Mummy what happened. Mummy applies the normal range of cures (kissing the head better, cuddling Peter). Peter continues to lament loudly. Mummy asks ‘is there anything else that you think would help to make it better?’ Peter sobs ‘I need… to tell Daddy about it!’ So Peter is passed across the room to Daddy, who repeats the entire performance (from ‘what happened, Peter?’).

Another day Daddy is away overnight. In the evening Peter is stung by a wasp. As he is carried upstairs crying, to have anti-sting cream applied, he wails ‘I want to tell Daddy about my wasp sting!’ Daddy isn’t here right now. ‘I will have to tell him when he comes back!’ Fortunately in that case the wasp sting stopped hurting before the talking-to-Daddy cure could be applied.

Matthew enjoyed his last couple of weeks in Reception and brought home an impressive pile of samples of his work from the year. It’s particularly interesting looking at what he chooses to write, given a free hand, e.g.:
‘My mum has lots of plants. She grows spinich to feed snails’.

And we had a full transcription (by one of the adult helpers) of the story he made up when a storyteller ran a workshop for the class. They were given 3 random objects (in this case models of a person, a dog and a cottage) and asked to tell a story:
‘Once there was a lady called Bethany who was 100 years old. Her only food was orange, chicken and meat from the dog. They lived in a floating house on a raft on the sea. One day Bethany put on her diving suit and set sail to catch further food. She dived into the sea and collected 20 sardines, 10 barracudas and 14 puffin eggs. She swam back, went inside and got the chicken ready to lay and the dog’s bones ready. “Strange”, said the lady, “I have a garden shed that leads straight into my house”. She went inside and boiled the puffin eggs, chopped and fried the sardines and barracudas. Then she got the motor ready to sail the house to the Isle of Purbeck in the South of England. When they got to the isle they set off to the harbour of Studland, south of Purbeck. They set off to the ice cream parlour. They had come to celebrate her birthday”.

[I think, even assuming "meat from the dog" is a typo: full marks for celebrating older people, no marks for environmental awareness... ah well...]

He then celebrated the first day of the holidays by learning to ride a bike – or perhaps by realising that he’d learned to ride a bike. The two are hard to separate, so I think we declare him able to ride a bike at the moment he turns round from a long unsupported pedal and shouts “I can do it now!”. It was a good moment.

Tonight tucked into Peter’s bed there were, and had to be before night-time could officially begin:
Peter
Beh the zebra
Newzie Lamb (the soft toy lamb with New Zealand embroidered on its top, which we try very hard not to call New Zealand Lamb)
Little Lamb
Teddy
Teddy With The Tie
Ming-Ming the duckling
Einstein (the woolly mouse who looks like Einstein)
Socks the dog from Chicago
Fireman Sam the knitted fireman
Two sets of plastic castanets that came free with the ZingZillas magazine
Duke the small metal toy steam engine (as used on Peter’s birthday cake)
And Duke’s tender.

Three has to be the easiest birthday to get right. There are presents (it doesn’t really matter what’s in them); there are balloons; there is a cake; therefore it is bound to be, as Peter said, ‘a very fine birthday’, and occasionally also ‘fantastic’ and ‘really good’. We had Peter’s two best friends from nursery round for a small party (which largely involved playing with Peter’s and Matthew’s toys, and threatened never to end when the Brio railway was discovered late in the day). Matthew occasionally attempted to organise the three three-year-olds into playing games, but to his credit did not persist when they resisted organisation. (And they eventually undertook the ‘balloon hunt’ he had created and accepted his help in finding all the balloons). I reflect ruefully that birthday parties are never going to be this easy again.

The starter pack for that Brio railway was, as it happens, Matthew’s becoming-a-big-brother present from us three years ago. The railway’s grown a bit since then, as well. (I rather hope it’s now stopped, except that one always ends up one curved piece short of the perfect layout).

Sometimes I think that Matthew and Peter have conspired to exemplify contrasting approaches to life, simply to keep Mummy interested.

For example: ethics of justice/ ethics of care. Matthew says, and said from an early age, ‘don’t do that, because it’s not fair’. Peter says ‘don’t do that, because so-and-so will cry’. Matthew will not give up what he takes to be his due, even to stop someone else crying; Peter very often will. (We took a while to figure out why Peter had started sometimes insisting that Daddy took him to nursery, when Mummy had generally been the favoured parental escort for both boys; it was because he thought that Matthew might cry if Peter demanded Mummy. And of course when we figured this out, Matthew was more than happy to make a plan that involved fair shares of Mummy- and Daddy-time for both boys, and Peter could then accept that Matthew would not cry, provided that the plan was implemented). But then, Matthew will rarely try to claim more than his due, even if he could get away with it; and Peter definitely will. Peter was the one who tried to persuade his grandparents, when they were looking after him for the weekend, that Mummy and Daddy usually read him five stories, let him have lunch in front of the telly, etc; it would never have occurred to Matthew to try that on.

For another example: abstract and concrete. Matthew learned letters as letters-with-sounds, nothing fancy; I think he liked the predictability of them, the fact that they turned up everywhere and looked the same. Peter is now developing an interest in letters, but only selected letters, and only through their very strong real-world or story-world associations. He has known, and been excited about, P-for-Peter for ages. Now we do, on a good day, M-for-Mummy-and-Matthew-and-Michaella (his friend from nursery), D-for-Daddy, Big-big-round-round-circle-O-for-Owl, Squiggly-snake-Ssss, Big-hungry-mouth-C-for-Cousin-Marcus (who always has to be called Cousin Marcus,to distinguish him from Matthew’s friend Marcus and to make it clear that this is the Marcus on whom Peter has a claim). He points to letters on notices and asks, not what sound they make (which would always have been what Matthew wanted to know), but who or what they are for. Fascinating stuff, for me anyway.

Matthew finally brought home the story for which he was given a special good-work certificate at school. It’s called ‘Clay Man’ and was written while a clay-artist-in-residence was working with the reception class children.
I then had to return his writing book to school so I can’t reproduce the idiosyncratic spelling exactly, but here it is.

Clay Man went to the shops.
He red the list.
Apples
flaks,
thats all
he said.
Clay man playd on the car.
Weeeeeeeh he said.
He made a train.
He playd in the sand.
He was happy.

Matthew invented his first ever joke that actually (I think) counts as a joke:
What is a cross between a sack and a phone?
A saxophone.

Peter is trying to learn to tell knock-knock jokes but has not learned which punchline goes with which joke:
[Peter]: Knock knock who’s there.
[Me] Er, who’s there?
[Peter] Nobody.
[Me]: Nobody who?
[Peter]: I didn’t know you were a cowboy [which is the punchline for 'ya' / 'ya- who?']

But Peter did manage, which I thought was quite clever, to develop a joke out of a tired Mummy coming out with the wrong words:
[Me, as we arrive home, having just been talking about watching telly before lunch]: OK Peter, time to get out of the telly, I mean buggy.
[Peter, delighted]: We’re not going to watch the buggy! And we’re not going to get out of the telly!

And he is still unfailingly funny just by being two and a half:
[Matthew] I think I’ll have a toasted sandwich for lunch today, like Peter has when he’s at home with Mummy.
[Peter] Matthew, you can’t have a toasted sandwich, because you’re not little, you’re big.
[Me] Peter, you’re a funny little chap, aren’t you?
[Peter, seriously] Yes, I’m a funny little chap.