In summary a rather good day although it was not without it’s moments.
First thing was TT for Tarly who was in some sort of minx mania mood and refused to sit when she was supposed to, take turns or go where she should be. When she did as she was told she was excellent as always and tbh I think it is probably more that she is simply ready to move up to the next class now. She is the oldest in the group, some of them are literally just 2 and she is only a few weeks shy of her third birthday – and the year between 2 and 3 seems to be a long one! She gets bored waiting for the slower ones to execute stuff infront of her and given my children will not have to get used to being as slow as the slowest in the class I have to admit to struggling to watch her being ‘held back’ too. She dashes round doing her climbing, balancing and jumping at top speed and with real agility but then gets stuck behind a toddling toddler who takes forever to climb across something so she loses interest, buggers off and bounces on the trampoline instead. I’m sure there is something to be gained in learning patience and turn taking but frankly she gets her turn taking practise at home and in other situations, patience is not one of the virtues I possess in large amounts and I think it can be highly over rated anyway (although I would of course now fall firmly in the camp of waiting til one can afford something and not being impatient about spending any more 😉 ) and whena child shows a wanting to be the best and do stuff in a competitive manner I am disinclined to prevent them from doing so really. Of course if it were my child being the slow one I might feel differently 😉 ! Anyway, she moves up in the new year so she only has about 5 more classes in this group and I think she will really enjoy the challenges of the next class up.
Davies also kept appearing in the room which was a distraction for me and he does this thing of just hanging around and talking in a real baby voice, which given his obvious tallness in the room of 2-3 year old marking him out as of school age really pisses me off. I just have no patience with him babying himself really, particularly with an audience who I am aware all know he is Home Educated and probably look at us curiously.
So by the time I was trying to get Tarly’s tights on with Davies messing about I was heard to hold my hand up to Tarly with a very small gap between finger and thumb and warn her ‘I’ve got THIS much patience today Scarlett. Use it wisely’. Which her and Davies took as the open invitation to open the door and run down the corridor towards an open door to the street where vans drive up and down like lunatics while I was putting my boots on. Dashed after them, yelling as I went. Caught up with them in the foyer (I don’t actually think for one moment they would have gone out of the door, but…) and lectured them before getting them into the car and explaining, at high volume why that was not acceptable behaviour. Unfortunately I did this with the car doors open and I had an audience of mothers arriving for the next TT class which is for 6-12 month olds. So there was I, yelling in a very attractive way at my two small people, for all to see and hear while these mothers with their little baby bundles all looked at me in horror. I was barely a breath away from turning to my audience and finishing off the rant properly but ran out of steam in the end. The children apologised and we came home.
And along came Ros, bringing with her children to entertain my own, soup and proper branded bread for them to eat, cakes and a new way to cook supernoodles for me and best of all a stack of the trashy celebrity magazines which I have been getting withdrawal symptoms from ever since we started economising. (I know, I’m shallow, but I can’t help caring if Jordan is blonde or brunette, whether stars from Big Brother have lost so much weight you could play a tune on their rib cage and who has been spotted where wearing what!) Lovely couple of hours gossiping and catching up on each others news in person – thanks 🙂
Mad dash to get everyone out again for Davies’ Gym Bobs session. He did really well today. Last week I talked to one of the women helpers as they do this warm up type game at the beginning where they have to run around the room in a certain style (like a bird, or a tiger, or a giant or something) and then when they blow a whistle they have to stand really still until they call the next style out to run around in. Davies never participates, he just stands at the side of the room while all the other kids do it. I asked her why and she said he just doesn’t seem to understand why they do it so he doens’t see the need to do it. Which to me makes perfect sense actually! And infact is one of the things that makes Davies so Davie-y really! So today I explained to him why they do it, to warm up muscles so that you can climb and stretch and jump and so on without hurting yourself and so on. And so off he went to join in with it quite happily! The woman actually said to me she thought it must be to do with him not going to school as they have a couple of other HE kids at different groups and apparantly neither of them like doing that bit either!!! So because the lemming reflex has not been installed in him to mindlessly do as he’s told without a logical explanation and a reason he is already starting to be a bit different. He’d already be used to not asking questions and just accepting everything if he’d been ‘in the system’ for a year or so but he still requires a purpose for doing things before he goes ahead and does them.
While he was doing his class Tarly and I sat together and did some drawing and colouring. She is getting very good at drawing very recognisable things – she did an excellent picture of Ady without any guidance at all which is not far off of the one Davies did earlier this year. I don’t know if maybe she’s bypassed a developmental drawing stage perhaps but I think his drawings are pretty good and hers are not far behind them. Which is a bit scary actually as I have no idea how to guide them on anything artistic other than cartoons and caricatures. Davies also made a very very good Peter Pan model with some plasticine today too which Tarly came and picked up and said ‘oh look Peter Pan’ about when she came in the room afterwards. Ah well, makes up for the maths I guess! 😉
Got home to find Ady already here so he sorted their tea while I whizzed round and tidied up, they are now both asleep, Ady’s cooking dinner, Lost is on tonight and we have our midweek alcohol allowance too 🙂
giggle – it *is* a competition you know Nic 😉 Lijah’s crap at drawing, must tie him to the table tomorrow with a pencil strapped to his hand …
Glad they didn’t get run over anyway 🙂
LOL – shame the TT lady didn’t think to explain it properly to Davies herself. That’s just like Freya at Music and Movement, she tends not to bother with some of it, or to adapt it to what she wants to do. Interesting, all that stuff, I think, really telling at this age, in a group with children who have really been through the nursery/school thing for a while – they do tend to just do what they’re told a lot of the time.
We went to a HE Roman morning at the museum in town a couple of years ago (Lulah was a very small baby I seem to remember) and before they all went in the museum woman asked them all to line up – they all looked a bit quizzical and continued milling about whilst all the parents started sniggering 🙂
Have the same drawing dilemma here too but am settling for having lots of books on “how to” and assuming Maddy will do it for herself. 🙂
Sounds like a nice day anyway.
Thanks for the cool day.
I shall be blogging shortly with full details of the rest of mine 😉
That’s what real mates are made of- knowing what you *really* want. I had a HEAT reading phase when I was pregnant with Maya and my sisters sent them to me in the post 🙂
Your description of the lemming reflex is very accurate but I think it actually starts at home and is just perpetuated in schools. Most families run on a “do as I say” regime, so maybe it’s more that HE parents are “more likely” to be “thinkers outside the box” and therefore less likely to have a mindlessly authoratative approach with their children. Several of the children I’ve met who have come out of school because it hasn’t worked have come from families with parents who practise non-authoritarian (or just low authoritarian)
parenting and it’s been very difficult for the child to adapt to the juxtaposition of home and school environment.
So maybe he’s not a lemmming because you’re an “outside the box” thinker 🙂
Off to bed now, drunk too much.
I’d stand up and walk out on you.
well I knew *you* would 😉