Gavin, Rachel, Matthew and Peter's Diary

Peter and I look through ‘Stick Man’ by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. He says “Stick Man” a lot. He notes the picture of some ducks on a river. He says “ducks, river, throw!, bread”. We close the book. He finds a few small white polystyrene beans on the floor, which have leaked from Matthew’s very old beanbag. He picks one up. To my relief, he doesn’t put it in his mouth. “Bean!” He picks up the Stick Man book again. He looks through it. “Ducks? Ducks? Ducks?”. There are several pictures with ducks, but he knows which one he wants. He finds it. He says “throw!”. He throws the very small white polystyrene bead to the ducks in the picture. He picks up another. “Ducks. Throw!” The book now has several small white polystyrene beads trapped between its pages.

Yesterday Matthew made up two little songs, and I reckon they represent an advance on his previous efforts, in that they actually rhyme as well as having consistent tunes (the latter being impossible to render on the blog). It is, admittedly, possible that they are based on other songs he knows that I haven’t heard.

The Grassland

Over in the grassland, not much to see
I can hear roaring, what could it be?
Is it a lion? Is it a zebra? Is it a snake? Yes, it’s a lion.

[Repeat ad lib for other sounds and lists of animals].

Helen the Helpful Robot [title of a book]
Helen the helpful robot
She helps you all of the time
Sometimes she gets mixed up
But sometimes it works out fine.
[Repeat ad lib].

In other news, we’re having our umpteenth attempt at getting rid of Matthew’s night nappies. We feel it’s taken much too long to get round to this, but previous attempts have been abject failures and have upset Matthew. This one is also an abject failure so far, but was (unlike the others) actually instigated by Matthew, and isn’t upsetting him. So we are doing lots of laundry, and hoping for the best.

Peter still likes drawing. The other day I gave him (at his request) a piece of paper and a pen, and he drew a picture. I pointed at it and said “What’s that, Peter?” He looked at me with that familiar my-parents-are-so-STUPID-sometimes expression, and said “Paper”. Fantastic, I thought – another of ‘em.

Sorry there have been so few photos posted recently. If we had got round to putting up some more, you would be able to do what we did today – and compare photos of Matthew aged nineteen or twenty months with the present reality of Peter. It was quite a shock – I had never thought that the boys looked alike. But, age for age, they do. Peter has no curls, and he’s slightly taller and thinner (he has outgrown the clothes Matthew was wearing at the same age); but we’re going to have to label any photos we print out., very carefully.

Peter looked at contemporary photos and identified “Mummy”, “Daddy”, “Matthew” (which he now says very clearly) and – “baby”. He does say “Peter”, but apparently only for himself, not for representations of himself.

In the last few days Peter has: learned to whisper (shown a picture of a baby asleep, he whispers “ssshhh… baby”); drawn lots of pictures he insists are cats (free-form attempts to depict the essence of cat, I think); and learned to sing along, minimally, to the Bob the Builder theme song (“Baaaa… fi’ i’!”)

Matthew has… I dunno. Invented a recipe, inspired by a bus-stop advert for Cocoa Pops (it had cocoa in it, of course; also flour, plain chocolate, mashed potato and a cress topping. We dissuaded him from trying to make it). Made up a song about him and Peter being monkeys that could jump higher than the moon. Spent ages drawing a family of nine yaks. The usual stuff.

Matthew cuts the “hair” from his eggshell cress-heads, very painstakingly. We pour cold water over the hard-boiled eggs. Matthew cracks one. I realise that, as it happens, he’s never cracked a hard-boiled egg before. I wonder what it’s like to do this for the first time. With my encouragement, he peels off the shell carefully. He studies its underside, he studies the way it cracks. He’s holding a peeled hard-boiled egg, and we’re both noticing how clean and shiny it is. I ask “what do you think’s inside?” He doesn’t really know. He slices into it. Wow. Yellow. And orange. We look at it again. Then we cut, and mash, and mix egg and cress. We’ve got white-yellow-orange-green. Plain yoghurt, salt and pepper. I cut the bread. He spreads the egg. I cut the sandwiches into triangles, which I never usually do except for parties. For the first time, he’s eating a small amount of something he’s grown, harvested and prepared. And I’ve looked properly at an egg. It’s a miniature celebration.

That’s what I tell people when they ask about my children, or sometimes even if they don’t. I have two little boys. This has, trivially, been true for a little more than nineteen months. It’s only recently, however, that this has seemed an obvious way to describe it. Peter stopped being a baby, and Matthew started playing with him, and at some point I saw them walking along together (in their thick coats and woolly hats) and saw two little boys.

They pull the cushions off the sofa and turn the living room into a soft play area. They build with bricks, and push Duplo machines around. They run up, they run down. They have fits of the giggles. They fight over the orange balloon even when there is a yellow balloon of the same size readily available. They watch Bob the Builder (“Roller”, says Peter. “Digger. Roller. Tip-tip-tip”). They stick stickers. They play with the toy animals. They stir the cookie mixture and lick the bowl.

Matthew tells Peter what to do. Peter ignores it and does whatever Matthew is doing. Matthew helps Peter climb onto things. Often they’re the things Peter wants to climb onto. When Peter hits his head on the corner of a table, Matthew helpfully puts a cushion against the table to stop it happening again. Occasionally Matthew jumps on top of Peter – “I didn’t see him there”. Peter picks himself up. Peter tries, very very hard, to jump up. It doesn’t work yet.

The snow has made journeys to and from work and nursery rather slow and difficult – though not nearly as slow and difficult as they would be if we were going by car. Matthew, to his enormous credit, has several times walked the whole distance in the snow with very little complaint. Peter rides on Daddy’s shoulders (and Mummy avoids watching as Daddy uses his ski-ing expertise to traverse the slipperier snow). While it was snow, and not the current mix of slush and ice, Matthew mainly kept himself going by eating snow. Whatever works.

The children in Matthew’s nursery group built a very large snowman, and most of an igloo, before the thaw.

We went sledging a couple more times.

Peter learned to say “snow”. But generally Peter is not very impressed with snow. It is fun for a couple of minutes, and then it’s cold and wet. And it means that he has to wear gloves and ride on slow-moving buses.

And now we’re bored with this game and would like to play a different one, please, one that doesn’t involve an extended struggle to get everyone fully winter-clothed before we leave the house.

Question: Is it morally dubious to make your four-year-old son unwittingly replay parts of Monty Python sketches for your amusement? Matthew thinks the “yes it is/ no it isn’t” game is hilarious…

[Matthew]: It’s very cold today. You say ” no it isn’t”.
No it isn’t.
Yes it is.
No it isn’t.
Yes it is.
This is a very silly game, Matthew.
No it isn’t.
Yes it is.
No it isn’t.
Yes it is. This isn’t even a proper argument.
Yes it is.
No it isn’t. This is just contradiction.
No it isn’t.
Yes it is.
[etc ad nauseam]

Took the boys to a bookshop yesterday to spend some of their Christmas presents. Although Of Course it is Just Fine for children not to be that interested in books, we are unashamedly very happy to see Matthew entirely absorbed in books… and more books… and more books until he had to be forced to make some choices and leave the shop. Peter was interested in a lot of the books as well, though not particularly in the baby/toddler section (he seemed to prefer the bottom shelves of the 9-12-year-olds’ section).

Is it just us, or:
- have children’s books, in their design and marketing if nothing else, become more commonly and strongly gendered than they used to be? I’m sure there used to be more books that weren’t “books for boys” or “books for girls”, but were just books.
- are children’s books now, on average, more “busy” than they used to be? I mean (by age of child and genre of book) more pictures and graphics, “clever” text effects, call-out boxes, etc. If so, I faintly disapprove in an old-fogey-ish way. I think.

At the moment Matthew particularly likes Allan Ahlberg’s “Gaskitts” books (a bit long & complex for him to read by himself first off, and he needs several re-readings before he understands the stories, but the humour is wonderful); and (still) Frank Rodgers’ books-for-boys; and many longer & wordier picture books. And he likes being read to from Mrs Pepperpot and Winnie-the-Pooh, and he still likes most of his old books. Reading suggestions always welcome.

Peter likes the Noah’s Ark book, and the “if you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands” book, and the new book we found for him with lots of pictures of cats (Cat! Cat!) – and the Little Red Train series, which are much too “old” for him But Have Lots Of Trains And Other Things-With-Wheels. Choo-choo. Choo-choo. Truck. Brrrrmmm. Tractor. Choo-choo.

… a white Christmas. No longer the stuff of dreams. It was, for periods of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, picture-postcard perfect (or, I suppose, next-year’s-Christmas-card perfect). Matthew took Gavin and Melissa sledging on Christmas morning. All they needed was a yule log with a robin perched on top, which they could pull home on the sledge as their scarves streamed out at an implausible angle. Or something.

Christmas has been good. For example:
- we now have an even larger number of toys with wheels;
- Peter has learned the word “share”. Unfortunately he thinks it means “I want that”. He pulls violently at whatever Matthew’s holding, shouting “Share! Share!”;
- Matthew’s fears that Father Christmas would not be able to get down the chimney because one of the cats might sit on top of the gas fire (as they do occasionally after it’s been on) were allayed;
- we managed to get the tree free from its block of ice, with the aid of brute force and a hairdryer;
- the highlight of Christmas dinner for Matthew was the jokes in the crackers, which he wanted to read and reread. He didn’t call them jokes, he called them “notes”. We didn’t think we’d have much luck convincing him that they were actually jokes. We weren’t convinced ourselves.

…of the nativity play. The annual testing-to-the-limits of the mantra “the show must go on”.

There are 90 under-fives on stage in the Students’ Union building, and at least twice as many proud relatives armed with cameras. The person who was meant to be working the sound system and playing the piano is having a baby (yes, really). The show is entitled “Twinkle the Star”, and the eponymous heroine has, at the last minute, refused to wear the star costume and decided to be an angel instead. The narrator, one Matthew Burnell, clutches his microphone and his cue cards, booms out his lines, and bravely ignores the fact that his teatowel has slipped off his head and the string that was securing it is now over his eyes. (He was amazingly good. And of course I am entirely unbiased). Peter Burnell, looking very solemn in a black-and-white cow costume, is just about visible behind a row of other small animals, investigating possible escape routes from the stage. The third camel has forgotten to walk through the desert. Mary strides to the front of the stage clutching Baby Jesus, eyes fixed on the audience, and is caught by a staff member just before she plunges into the footlights. Another junior angel has just decided it’s all too much and been carried from the stage in tears. The sheep are eating the straw and poking it into each other’s ears. Everyone sings “Away in a Manger” and the grownups wipe away a tear or two. The show goes on.