Reading

Now Gregor is at school he is learning to read. He's just starting to recognise the odd word or sound in the bedtime stories I read them. If he's in a really nice mood, he'll tell the story to Alastair, who would happily sit there for the rest of his life listening to Gregor. Even better when the story is spiced with a few 'poos' and 'smellies' and 'bums'.

Almost every day Gregor comes home with a new book. I try and go through it with him in the evening or at breakfast, depending on what he wants. If he's in a mood to concentrate he can read slowly and clearly, but if he's not in the mood, he'll rush and guess the word from the picture, and basically make it up as he goes along.

Our mantra is 'slow down, follow with your finger'. Here he was telling us about a bug with a big bag and all her bits fell out.

Alastair is happy to listen to Gregor. If it's not a silly day (which it often is) then Alastair will try and attempt some of the words with no encouragement. I am learning to just let him get on with it.

Here he was copying Gregor and even copying following with his finger.

Today he said a perfect 'bus'.

Mother's Day

Last week was mother's day - when you get showered with flowers and attention, brought breakfast in bed and generally have a day off. So they tell me.

(Just thought I'd get another picture of Misha's haircut before it all starts to grow again). Anyway, we did go out - to Dunwich forest, half an hour down the coast, and most well-known for being a prominent medieval city that was lost to the sea.

We started with proper mother's day stuff - a bit of tree climbing.

This knobbly old fig tree at the Ship Inn must have provided endless hours of fun and fascination for generations of children over the years (and relaxed dining for their parents). Gregor found a couple of coins on the grass, so they had great fun hiding the coins in the tree and letting the other one find them.

Alastair needed a bit of help, but not much. Then he wanted to play his favourite game: beavers. Usually, we just say we're beavers and cuddle, but here we progressed to collecting some sticks and trying to make a dam.

Later we took a walk on Sizewell beach close by. Gregor wanted to see the nuclear power station, obscured behind the original Sizewell A, in the background.

It was all a bit eerie to be so close and to hear the whirring of it all. Before long we were met by the patrolling special nuclear police, looking fairly intimidating for a gentle stroll on a Sunday. But they were soon demystified and humanised by Gregor's barrage of questions about all the weapons and gadgets they were carrying. He mostly liked the ray gun which freezes you on the spot. Who needs power rangers!?

Actually they were quite friendly and obviously do a lot of PR without being too PC. In true cold war mentality, Misha was more suspicious of the nice looking couples in matching North
Face gear walking their dogs so aimlessly.

We finished the day off with a stop to look at the Blythburgh pigs that roam freely on the fields round there. Alastair was overjoyed to see them up so close and has really moved on from the cow debacle a year ago.

Gregor made the connection with where his food comes from, and said 'Um, mummy, I want a bacon sandwich for tea when we get home, please.'

Brotherly love

The other day Gregor whacked Alastair with his sword and made his lip bleed. He was immediately very sorry, and was utterly shocked to see blood (appear so fast). Alastair had been climbing on Gregor's bed to bounce with his shoes on and Gregor had asked him to get off, take his shoes off (which he can't), and, well...

Usually they are pretty good together for about 20-30 minutes. This is the more normal relationship - Gregor getting Alastair to try stuff. Above was a different climbing on bed episode. This is Alastair's room. Here they had wedged Alastair's shelves by his bed and Gregor was getting him to use it as a ladder and jump onto the bed (??!!).

Here they were road sweepers with brushes.

A newly acquired doll's house that stayed that way for just five minutes before being transformed into a fire station (though when I suggested painting it to red, Gregor was horrified, and said it had to stay pink and purple). Very macho.

Pretend play is quite a new world for Alastair. As Gregor is age appropriate, so to speak, his play is complicated, but Alastair is just dipping his toe into the idea that he can play out real life with his toys. Dinosaurs attacking the castle is a bit anachranistically in at the deep end, but hey.

I love it most when they are calm and quiet, playing side by side and wheeling a few little carts and trains back and forth.

And with spring just around the corner, this has opened up the outside world for them once again! I am trying to make our gardening effort a more holistic affair with Alastair, and get him to practice colours, words, making his own signs, as well as planting and watching things grow. It's a work in progress obviously, but I'll try and blog what we've done so far.

These brothers celebrated Gregor's recent 'homecoming day' with a trip to McDonalds and a re-enactment of 'The Three Little Pigs' story - the bit where the third little pig rolls home from the fair in a barrel and knocks the wolf down.

Yesterday Gregor said 'If only I could shrink and get me into his brain and crack open the door so he can speak'.

Kim

I recently met up for lunch with another old schoolfriend in lovely Blythburgh, a small village on the Blyth estuary - viciously dissected by the A12 (the closest we get to a motorway from London). In fact, Kim is my oldest schoolfriend, and I hadn't seen her for 15 years. Funnily enough, she lives 45 minutes away, with two horses and a husband and acres of soft, sandy land overlooking the sea on a beautiful peninsular further down the coast. Her village is a close-knit one and not very accessible by public transport. It is home to a prison, but one with a slightly broader remit than most, I suspect. This prison is one of the few places where the famous Suffolk Punch heavy horses (also the horse on the Ipswich Town Football Club badge) are bred - at the Hollesley Bay Colony Stud. The prison has always been there in one form or another. In the 19th century, it started out as a Colonial College to train missionaries going to all the pink countries on the map. Then it was a workhouse, and later, an agricultural college, which explains today's funny extra-curricular activity for the Home Office.

Anyway, Kim and I became firm friends at four once I discovered that both our names began with a 'K'. Friends for life, that meant. Though from my perspective at that time it troubled me that whenever we wrote our names she would have finished before I'd even got halfway. I was known as Katherine in those days, you see. And nine letters took forever to write.

So I found out that Kate was short for Katherine, announced the change, and started writing my name just as fast. Who me? Competitive? Yes, largely down to Kim, probably. I do recall wanting to be better than her in absolutely everything: reading, writing, rounders, athletics, climbing, riding bikes, gymnastics badges, brownie badges, swimming, egg and spoon. I know I did piano because she did, though got restless once summer came and gave it up. I'm sure I took up bell-ringing first though, but remember being very impressed that she called herself a campanologist at such a tender age. That was pretty much all that was on offer in my village in the 70s. That and brownies or guides, Sunday school and the choir. And even then my bell-ringing career was very short-lived because I was too light and too small. Standing on a milk crate didn't help, and I soon got fed up with being yanked upwards holding on for dear life as my arms were being wrenched out of their sockets. All in all, Kim and I were pretty evenly matched, though she was by far the more diligent and better behaved, needless to say.

Anyway, that's all water under the bridge, and it was lovely to catch up. A bit strange to go back 30-odd years though.

Red Nose Day

Today it's Red Nose Day, the annual silly day in the UK when loads of money is raised for the Comic Relief charity. At school, the children were encouraged to wear fancy dress and pay some money to charity.

So here they are. Gregor as Sportacus - a hero from the Lazytown show on TV - minus the glasses and belt, early casualties. Alastair in an eleventh hour borrowed ca-t, as he can now say. He was so pleased to be dressing up and, I'd feared he'd refuse to wear something, but he was as enthusiastic as Gregor, it was so cute.

And his enthusiasm kept him going to the classroom which is where he's dashing. He couldn't wait to show off his costume to his little classmates, and feel a real part of the group, as he's increasingly wanting to be.

Later that day one of his teachers told me he'd drunk almost all his juice today, from a straw. Another first.

Hand-eye coordination

One of the areas of difficulty for Alastair remains his fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination, so I'm always looking for ways to help him improve. We've both become a bit fatigued with so many of these toys and activities which profess to advance your baby's skills in these areas. I can categorically state that we will never look at another form board puzzle again in our lives. 3 years we've been plugging away and we're still no further on, so they all went in a big bag last week and were happily donated to the charity shop.

And we've been playing with real toys ever since. I think my definition of a real toy is one where we all argue over whose turn it is.

My next bit of enlightened therapy was to admit that, after the toys that I also want to play with, there are jobs that I have to do and where he can help. His tendency is to refuse, though he didn't mind being exploited to plant the beans and make the pizza....

But looking at these photos makes me realise that the guy will certainly look if he needs to.

So I am more and more convinced that much of this 'play therapy' is a bit artificial and certainly not for us. From these pictures you'd think nothing was wrong.

But now when something isn't working, we will just stop doing it, rather than labour over it.

And only do stuff which interests and engages the both of us, in some way.

Sounds obvious again, doesn't it? Still I'd not quite figured this out before today.

Before and After

Last month Misha was ill and had a high temperature for a couple of weeks. He stayed in bed for most of the time and got better eventually. He hasn't just lost weight, he has stopped smoking,and miracle of all miracles, got his hair cut!





















The transition had an influence on Gregor, I think. But instead of going to Bruce the barber on our street, he got the scissors out and did a DIY job! Needless to say, we did visit Bruce the next day.

The celebrations continue

In mid-January, the boys had a birthday party at our local gymnastics centre where Gregor goes. This time the cake was a castle. Allie, who had come up for the weekend to help, made a sterling contribution to the turrets and drawbridge. Here is Alastair actually blowing out his candles. Another first! After a tentative start we managed to persuade Alastair that it would be more fun inside than out. Once he'd had a bounce on the tramoline there was no stopping him. Gregor and his friends spent most of the hour jumping in a big pit then hauling themselves out with ropes.



































































Alastair surprised himself by doing roly-polies and practises them all the time at home now.And they all went home exhausted and happy.

Jake

My sister Caroline and her family made their annual visit to the UK from Ohio. Their visit coincided with Christmas and Alastair and Gregor's birthdays. Here they are about to tuck in to the first cake - a steam roller.








We didn't see them for much of the visit since Caroline always has a busy schedule to catch up with friends dotted around the country. However, we managed a trip to Orford Castle one afternoon. Gregor is now firmly convinced of the merits of swords and bows and arrows to solve everything and I have to call him Gregor knight. If I forget, he shoots me with his two-fingered gun which 'a big boy at school' showed him. Charming.