...double standards...

We have reading... not quite actual-in-fact reading but we have some nearly-reading and some pretty good guesswork and it's clear that reading is about to enter the child's world - or more precisely, the child's bedroom, after 'lights out'.

This is, of course, is nothing new.  One of the first clues I had that the Frog might be marriage material was when on an early sleepover he nervously picked up a book and confessed he liked to read a bit in bed; since then we have gaily traded book-lights in many a Christmas stocking.

While I am deeply delighted that my son is taking the first steps to a lifetime of sleeping next to a toppling pile of half-read novels, I am less keen that he has already realised that firstly, reading after he is supposed to be asleep is quiet and therefore he is less likely to be caught and secondly, that we are less likely to kick up a fuss than if we catch him playing Dr. Who and doing all the voices.

And what am I to do?  I have countless memories of being busted with my torch reading under the covers - something my mother was brilliant at working out mainly because that's what she used to do.  It's a family tradition! 

The thing is, I also remember being tired for school every morning and so of course I want to stop him - but the hypocrisy is dreadful.  I have recently purchased what I think is the perfect book light - and what, I ask you, is reading with a book light while ones partner sleeps other than the grown-up version of reading under the covers?  In fact, since we have moved and Charlie has temporary tenure in a double bed, I have been known on particularly insomniac nights to sneak into his room and read in there to avoid waking the Frog.

So... what am I to do?  For the moment we can insist on lights out as he can't really read much anyway... but give it a year or two and he'll be arguing his case - and I won't have leg to stand on.

Giraffes everywhere

So finally it snowed in London; an event my son considers to be so normal that only last week he was whinging about the on-going lack of the white stuff this winter.  Compare this to 1996 when I returned to 2 inches of snow after Christmas and my cabbie told me "It's like there's blinking giraffes in Trafalgar Square".

In fact Charlie has been begging me to visit his grandparents 'because it's always snowing in Canada'; (an imbalance of expectation which my Mother has made me promise to rectify by taking him out in the summer).

Needless to say he was delighted yesterday and here's the mandatory cute picture of boy-in-the-snow to prove it.

Thankfully it's all melting now - it was lovely while it lasted but that's all the snow I can handle - 24 hours and gone, brilliant.

In other news... well I have no other news.  These are the sorry facts of my life; my child is in the 'didn't he say something cute' phase which never fails to fill me with tedium when I read it on someone else's blog and I am working full time with barely a moment for a nice satisfying sneeze.

I will however pass on something which the child of a friend of mine did the other day.  She wrote, in her own spelling (she is 5) the words to The Gingerbread Man and managed to write 'Run, run you cunt' on a single line, which frankly made my day when her mother related it to me.  I hope it's enlivened yours.

I don't wanna grow up...

We moved just before Christmas.  I may have said this before.  Anyway, we are in temporary digs while we look for somewhere else to live and this is proving tricky.  Firstly, half the things I need are in storage; secondly, the place is somewhat, shall we say, 'dignified'.  Meaning, because it might need spelling out, that it is beautiful but decrepit - and utterly impractical.  It needs wiring, plumbing, insulating, flooring, heating, plastering, damp-proofing and, er, modernising.

That said, it turns out that we are brilliantly happy here, all except for the Frog who is finding the volume of doors that need closing, drafts that need excluding and lights that need turning out to be vaguely overwhelming, particularly given that I am not very good at most of the above and Charlie is rubbish at all of them.

I am used to a small kitchen - our last flat was bijou all round - however the kitchen here contracts the meaning of 'small' to the point where one might logically ask 'what kitchen?'; however it has one unexpected joy: the stove and all 2 feet of counterspace face a small breakfast bar with two stools.  Every evening Charlie sits at it, at eye-level with me, doing his homework while I cook his dinner. 

Turns out that this arrangement is brilliant, I am surprisingly even hoping to be able to mimic something like it, (yet magically larger), when we move.  Charlie and I spend this hour laughing and talking and fooling around together and he talks to me - properly talks to me - about his day, his friends and sometimes about the things that frighten him.

One of the most heart-breaking things that he says to me is that he doesn't want to grow up.  I mean, he wants to be in Year One at school, but he doesn't want to be six, he doesn't want to learn to read or to get taller or to to go school.  This doesn't stand up to much scrutiny as he wants to marry his girlfriend and have babies and live in a castle, but he really, really, really right now, doesn't want to grow up. 

Who knows what this is about.  I suspect it's because in the last four months he's started school, buried his cat, left his house and put half his toys in storage... I guess growing up hasn't been much cop recently.  He also talks about his dreams; they are often bad, filled with fire and loss; or sometimes good, filled, surprisingly, with cats - the same dreams I had when I was little and had just moved house and started school and left my cat in another country. 

Mainly though we make stupid jokes and invent rhymes and laugh. It's good.  It's good that we can talk about things with more depth than wondering where Dalek poo comes out;  I really do think there's something in being able to talk to one's child at eye level that makes conversation really flow.

We may not live here for long; Charlie will continue to grow up, Daleks will continue to have secretive poos and things will carry on changing but perhaps this is something that can stay the same, this conversation.


At least, until he becomes a teenager and stops acknowledging my existence completely....

And another year enters...

This year has been quick out of the gates let me tell you.  It's twelfth night already and I feel like January is nearly over.

The whole thing started with a bona-fide New Year hangover, the like of which I've not seen for some time - we invited 'a few neighbours' around for 'afternoon drinks'... in the end I think the count was 17 adults, 12 children and possibly, although I may be wrong, nearly two dozen empty bottles of fizz by 2:30 in the morning... It turns out that I am too middle-aged for all this.

We moved house a few days before Christmas, something I don't recommend to anyone.  Most of our things are in storage and we are ensconced in temporary digs  which was all well and good when we were 'on holiday'; however now that the year is losing its glow, we are beginning to realise that we packed a great number of things we actually use every day and so the debate begins... replace it?  Or live without it?  I whisked egg whites with a slotted spoon this evening.  Most of them went down my front.

Charlie is adapting very well, due largely to the arrival of Santa Claus and various items of desire which are helping him to forget that we accidentally packed two of his favourite train books. Our favourite of the new toys is a remote control Dalek which can be made to follow you around the house shouting Dalek obcenities and making the boy shriek. "I'm your fwend!" he tries to tell it; "You Are An Enemy Of The Daleks" it dictates back, implacably.

We had a wonderful existential debate while I was making him and his mate some dinner this evening, discussing whether we would prefer to be Daleks or Cybermen and which of them have the better lives.  We were doing really well on the imagination front until the conversation degenerated completely as we started saying things like "Give Me Some Jelly" and "I Need a Poo" in Dalek voices.

A new year and a new baby cousin yesterday - almost exactly 3 years after another of my cousins had a baby girl.  Welcome Amelie Violet, happy birthday Ruby and happy new year, one and all.

Merry Happy!

Chess

Charlie has discovered chess and is patiently allowing himself to be beaten game after game while he learns the moves.  He's already worked out the complicated Knight and is getting to grips with bishops and rooks and the omniscient Queen; he's learnt how to castle his King but he is finding pawns hard to master with their erratic manoeuvres...

I'm delighted and frankly I credit all the problem-solving games he's been playing on my phone for the past year and a half.  Every game he gets a teeny bit better and he is longing for Christmas when we will be staying in a house with a proper chess set.

All this budding chess genius talk is making no impression on the Frog who pronounced after his 5-year-old's third-ever game of chess "He's rubbish, he can't remember which piece is which!"  He also commented, more accurately that "I bet he'll have dropped it in a week" - so no pressure then.

I have an ambivalent relationship with chess.  My Dad started teaching me when I was about 6, no doubt with the same dreams of owning his own personal chess savant that I harbour.  I always wanted to be good at it but sadly the light never shone for me.

I have fond memories of visiting a very good friend who was living in Paris for a while and being taken to his local cafe where chess was played at any hour of the day by wizened Frenchmen smoking tiny, pungent roll ups.  We sat at a table and started a game and within a few moves he had me up against the wall.  As I was concentrating fanatically on at least taking his queen with me before I went down, I noticed the occupants of the cafe edging slowly towards me, muttering to each other.

Before long we were surrounded by chess players and wreathed in cigarette smoke.  The muttering got louder, they were clearly itching to help out... then, unable to stop himself a thin hand snaked down from the closest figure and gestured at a move I should make.

Hugely annoyed at the interference, I made the move and drained my wine glass in irritation.  My friend responded; again I sunk into baffled silence.  The muttering grew quickly into a loud debate about which gambit I should be taking and the whole cafe was now standing around our table.

Another move was suggested and just as my annoyance was peaking, I realised what was happening.  Letting them take over, I watched a beautiful, full-on turn-about take place... I can't remember who won or lost the game but for a few moments, the door into chess had opened and a chink of light had shone through.

Who knows if Charlie will still be playing chess by Christmas?  I don't know and I don't much care but I am certainly going to be encouraging him to do anything which takes his mind away from shooting zombies, throwing angry birds at pigs, sinking pirate ships or any of the destructive video games he's been playing.

No, it's going to be about murdering bishops, capturing queens and pillaging pawns from now on - death to the king!

Not playing

There something about the way the boy looks when he's lying down that makes him seem so much older.  Standing up it's clear he's a half-pint; lying down all stretched out with his long legs and his baby face pulled back by gravity he's shockingly much more grown up than I think I thought he should be.

Anyway, so all this growing up has clearly been happening right under our noses and while we've been blithely purchasing longer trousers and bigger shoes and helping him read and write and swim and... well, all the things a growing 5 year old might do, we've somehow failed to notice.

It's just that so much has remained the same.  He still loves his trainset - in fact we're buying Brio for Christmas for the 3rd year in a row.  He still has warm milk at bedtime, he still loves Peppa Pig and busses and the Transport Museum - and he still hates to dress up.

For some inexplicable reason, we've managed to avoid the Nativity Play for the past two years - his last nursery didn't engage in anything so overtly religious; however he is now in a full on church school and has been coming home singing songs about Baby Jesus for the past two weeks.  This has culminated in a letter requesting the construction of a costume - angel or shepherd.  He's chosen shepherd (thankfully; not sure I would be very good at making wings or that he'd be good at wearing them...).

He might have chosen a shepherd's outfit, but he's not going to wear it - and we all know that.  I know it.  His Dad knows it.  His teacher knows it.  All his friends know it and he knows it - although he's not admitting to it at the moment.  So, even though we all know that this is a total fantasy, I am making the costume.  I am even making the headdress.  I may even make a shepherd's crook, who knows.

What we do know is that the outcome will be a total repeat of the last nursery play, the one from the lovely Montessori he was at for a few months, where we made a costume and packed it up and he wholly and completely failed to wear it.

In fact, I'm going to post the picture up again, because I'm 100% certain that, barring the age of the children around him, this is the picture I will take at the nativity play next week; Charlie in his normal clothes, sat tearfully on someones lap, mouthing the words to the song while all around him, pixelated children sing loudly and do all the right hand-gestures.

And, I will be delighted; proof that he's still actually quite a little boy... at least for a while.

Fights and Phantasms

Charlie is asleep at the moment, he's drifted off listening to Danny Kaye singing songs from Hans Christian Anderson; a CD which never fails to rocket me back to when I was his age listening to the record on the turntable, watching the lit rectangle of my bedroom door and listening to my parents potter about, still up.

I still know all the songs and while it took him a few listens, Charlie can now be caught humming some of them under his breath and offering to play them for friends, which I like.

This lovely moment of childhood innocence is totally marred by his performance in the school playground where he has already been banished to the 'little playground' where miscreants go... for fighting.  Oh yes - apparently he and another boy were windmilling each other in fun until one of them landed an accidental haymaker and then it all got a bit pistols-at-dawn, necessitating an embarrassed conversation in the playground with the Mother of the other boy.

Since then there have been a few other incidents; Charlie complains routinely that they are 'not his fault' but then he also claims to know everything about ballet; although sadly refuses to impart any of this wisdom when pressed.  He got a deep scratch across his face last week while defending his beloved from a boy who had kicked her.. I had a hard battle with my Motherly Love on that one I tell you - difficult not to be damn proud all over him because, obviously, fighting is wrong...

There are all these stages one marks off when one has a baby - first breath, first poo, rolling, sitting, crawling, first steps, first teeth, first this, first that... then you have a toddler then a little boy and then it's the first day at school, the first fight... and then what?  Now what?

What is this creature currently snoring gently in the nursery?  It's not a small child anymore yet it's not a big child; it's wily and cunning and reasoning, it counts, it reads, it writes, it dresses itself and comes out with a range of odd yet accurate facts; one can carry on a perfectly adult conversation with it and yet it still believes in Santa Claus and sleeps with one arm wrapped around Tigger.

Watching him now, even though he's only 5, it's possible to imagine one is watching the man begin to form.  Up until now there have been these big stages, each of which marked a massive sea-change in movements or speech or growth; now it's just tiny incremental steps. 

Personality traits are hardening up, ideas are evolving, skills are developing - and he's in there, this man who my son will become.  He's in there and he's just beginning to emerge, the lightest of phantasms; but he's there, stepping gently and carefully out of childhood and across into the unknown land of grown-up...

I just hope he keeps his fists in his pockets from now on.

School daze

So it's happened, Charlie has started school.  This is old news, it's been going on for weeks; it's practically normal.  The other day he turned to me and said 'Mummy - I'm a school boy now!  A school boy!' as if this is a hallowed dream that he has been clutching to his chest along with his nest of buses and model trams.

 

There he is in his uniform, blowing a kiss as he heads out for his first day and here he is at the end of it, smug as anything.

 

He already looks like he belongs on the cover of a Clash album in his uniform, he's all crooked tie and un-tucked shirt.  He's a proper boy now, he's rushing away from us at light speed.

 

Already there is pressure on us to conform.  The other day he ordered me not to walk to school, but to drive there, then to wait outside in the car, around the corner... until social services showed up, presumably.

Everyone asks how the settling in process has gone but he has slipped simply and easily into school life and is gaily practising handwriting and phonics as though he's been there ages.

It helps enormously that his school is tiny and that he knows children in almost every year.  It helps that I am standing outside his classroom with parents I met when we were all pregnant.  It helps that his beloved Lizzie is in the class above him and despite her raving beauty and superior age is still willing to be his girlfriend at playtime.

It all helps - him, anyway.  None of this is helping me at all.  This has all been much too easy; if he carries on growing up like this it will be no time at all before he is striding off to university and leaving us to the darkness of life without him.

Frankly I could do with a tantrum; perhaps some begging and a little clutching around the knees before school.  I feel like doing a little of it myself, to be honest.

Don't grow up quite yet, my lovely boy.

Cinco de boyo...

I'm doing some hocus pocus and dating this to the start of the month and I'm doing this because that's when my son turned 5 and, should he ever read this damn blog, it would seem harsh to have missed it.

5 is quite a momentous birthday - it means school, more independence- reading and writing... or in our case, it means that clearly, Charlie is old enough to be in charge of everything and do what he wants, because, apparently, he is all grown up.  So 5, it turns out, also means quite a lot of arguing about things in general.

5 year old boys, it seems, like Doctor Who a lot.  Universally the kids have moved from playing Octonauts to playing at Doctor Who.  'The Monster' is now always a Dalek (I relish the story of one of his girl-friends, who, inspired by Charlie's enthusiasm, taught her best friend to play Doctor Who at her house.  They marched up to their parents shouting 'We are the Garlics' to universal hilarity)

5 year old boys not only ride their bikes, they race them all about everywhere and don't much care if they fall off.  Wounds which a few scant months ago would have had our boy lying prone on the sofa, daintily holding his stricken limbs in the air, now only appear at bathtime when his clothes come off -skinned elbows, grazed knees, massive bruises around the shins - who knows where they come from?  'I fell down' he says, or 'someone pushed me but I'm OK'.

5 year old boys - ohhhh, this is so lovely - 5 year old boys make their parents breakfast in bed!!!  Oh yes.  Alright so we're talking cereal with no / too much milk in it and apple juice with a few sloshes around the edges but you know, it's a huge start on what I hope to be a future in-house catering project.

5 year old boys are also not so grown up that they don't want a lot of cuddles, thankfully.  They climb into bed and put their arms around you and kiss you on the nose and tell you that you're their favourite and can they have your iPad?

5 year old boys want dance parties and Spiderman cakes and invite everyone they know and make you play the Kaiser Chiefs and the Ramones over and over and over while they do robot dancing and get all sweaty.

5 year old boys are unbelievable pedants.  'Have a fish finger Charlie' 'No, Mummy, you mean, have ANOTHER fish finger'.  'Let's go'  'Mummy, you mean let's go TO THE PARK'.

5 year old boys are pretty amazing.  I've got one, I ought to know.