Gavin, Rachel, Matthew and Peter's Diary

Here’s an idea – why don’t I make some notes each month instead of waiting for the end of the year and forgetting everything that happened in the early months? Well, it’s a good idea in theory.
In January:
Matthew started swimming lessons. So far they seem to be focusing on learning to float, which seems a pretty useful skill even if you never get beyond that.

Peter spent a lot of time being a pirate. And a lion. Peter’s invisible friend Croc continued to play a small but significant part in our lives. Croc knows a lot of things (mainly things that Peter wants to be true but has no authority for). Croc has a cousin, who is also invisible, and is known only as Croc’s cousin. Croc goes to school and nursery and parties and various other destinations, but never ends up in the same place as any of us (apart from Peter). Eveything else about Croc, including his precise ontological status, is somewhat unclear. “Croc is my invisible friend, but he isn’t really”. “You mean he isn’t really invisible?” “No, he’s really invisible”. “OK, you mean he isn’t really your friend?” “No, he is really my friend. But he isn’t really”. “Oh – you mean he isn’t real?” “Of course he’s real!”

Daddy goes to lots of meetings. Mummy finally gets a bit more writing done. Roll on February.

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…”

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.

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.

We’ve started trying to teach Peter some of the talking games that have kept Matthew entertained on many long walks. We’d forgotten about this stage:
Me: I spy with my little eye something beginning with… G.
Matthew: Grass.
Peter: Grass. My turn. I spy with my little eye something beginning with… Tree!
Me: Tree.
Peter: Yes! Your turn!

Me: Peter, your turn to think of an animal… OK, is your animal furry?
Peter: No, not furry. It lives in the jungle.
Me: OK… Is it big?
Peter: No, it’s not very big, it’s quite little.
Me: Is it a toucan?
Peter: No, it’s a hippo.
Me: OK, right, except you said it was quite little…
Peter: Yes, it’s a little hippo.

Matthew, meanwhile, is still trying to learn to tell jokes, which is quite a painful process. He does ‘get’, and enjoy, and has even more or less memorised, a poem about the train to Morrow that left today (I just looked for a link to the lyrics and could only find a Muppets song version that isn’t the same as the one in our book).

As a kind of apology for hardly posting at all this year, we hereby bring you the Burnell/Muers household review of the year 2010.
The general synopsis: occasional storms, sunny intervals and fog patches; fair or poor. 2010 was not a great year for us. It had drama, much of it hospital drama. It had comedy, some of it bittersweet. It had little triumph and little disaster. It just had rather more than its fair share of low-level rubbishness. And definitely too much vomit.

2010 in months:
January: Begins well with a Mummy-and-Daddy escape to Skipton in the snow. Then melting snow, slush, frozen slush, and repeat. Peter talks.
February: Trip to Dumfries to see Granny Lilo and Grandpa Morris. Peter acquires more words. Rachel starts learning to co-clerk business meetings. It seems to take rather less time and effort as the year goes on. Either I’m doing something right or I’m doing something very wrong. Or, quite possibly, both.
March: In between acquiring words, Peter vomits a lot. Matthew reads a lot.
April: The campus has a brand-new state-of-the-art educational facility – for under-fives. Got to start somewhere. So Matthew becomes a Dragonfly and Peter a Ladybird. Peter vomits a lot more. Muers family gathering on Easter Monday, at which photos are taken with Peter looking small and thin. Hoping for a healthy gathering in 2011. We eventually find out why Peter is vomiting a lot.
May: Peter stops vomiting. We start to work out how to cope with a gluten-free diet. The country starts to work out how to cope with a hung Parliament. After several false starts, failed mixtures and faintly sickening episodes, at least one of these coping efforts seems to be working OK. Hmm. Towards the end of the month we note the end of the brief period during which three of the four of us were square numbers. Gavin (who by this point can see rather less than he would like) convenes Yearly Meeting Elders. Rachel plays with Yearly Meeting Toddlers.
June: Peter celebrates his second birthday with a toddler fracture and a gruffalo cake.
July: Sun, sand, sea, spades, trains, gluten-free cream teas, hooray. I think it was also in July that a mouse managed to get inside our boiler and cause over £1000 worth of damage (aka an enforced boiler upgrade) by chewing the wires.
August: Gavin spends a few hours under general anaesthetic, which some would say was a rather extreme way of catching up on sleep. Matthew spends a few days in Edinburgh with Grandpa Martin. While Matthew’s away, Peter decides that being grown up is clearly worth a try, and potty-trains himself (more or less overnight) in preparation for growing up.
September: It all gets very exciting. Matthew celebrates his fifth birthday at a picnic in the park with lots of Dragonflies; is very sick in the early hours of the next morning; starts school the morning after that. Meanwhile Gavin crosses miles and timezones in a selfless quest for the perfect very-expensive-bit-of-scientific-equipment. And finds it and buys it before the budget gets cut. We say “welcome to out of your mummy’s tummy” (in Matthew’s words) to the boys’ first ever first cousin, the small and perfectly formed Marcus Raphael Muers.
October: Matthew loves school. He also loves half-term with grandparents. After his trip to the Natural History Museum, we have to revise our out-of-date dinosaur knowledge. It’s true – the brontosaurus has now been expunged from prehistory. In other dubiously-justified pieces of educated guesswork, Browne reports. Rachel learns, somewhat to her surprise, that the teaching she’s been doing all these years isn’t of any public benefit. Something’s revolting, and it probably isn’t the students.
November: RIP Kepler, the cat who never learned to miaow or purr (but had a nice line in riding round the house sitting on your shoulders). Plenty of opportunities for the boys to spot police horses around campus.
December: Snow falls, snow on snow (snow on snow). The city grinds briefly to a halt, but Matthew’s school keeps going, as do the student protests. Someone fails to break into our bike shed, and leaves us a red-handled screwdriver and some broken hinges as a souvenir of their efforts. Peter learns to recognise Ps-for-Peter (they are everywhere when you start looking for them) Christmas happens, with lots of food and family, and added mystery viruses for the children. We eventually collapse in an overfed midwinter heap, prepare to wave goodbye to 2010, and thank you all for sticking with us.