Category: Family

Doing Ok

So, my posts lately, as well as being ever so slightly erratic, have not been particularly cheerful, have they? Apart from the Saved by Cake one. Cake is always cheerful, unless something goes horribly wrong. Well, I thought I might pop in and say, I’m doing ok.

What inspired this? I was hanging washing on the line, the children were playing with abandon and joy in the garden, the sun was shining and warm and I had one of those really special moments where you stop and realise “right now, I’m happy’. Actually happy, properly, daft-smile-on-your-face-for-no-reason happy.

A few weeks ago, no matter what anyone said, I couldn’t have counted my blessings if they jumped up and hit me in the face with a wet herring. I could reel of a list of things that were going well but that just didn’t translate in my brain into ‘These are things about my life that tell me life is good’. Now I can see them for the gifts that they are: my kids are happy and healthy (now that Daniel has got over the horrible tonsillitis that spoiled his last fortnight of term) and sun-kissed and soaking up fresh air and sunshine (yes, even in the north-east of England! Well, it’s all relative) and clever and inquisitive and loving and, most important, they know they are loved. My husband is tired but seeing real success and fulfilment through his business. I’m throwing myself into cooking and learning to enjoy being a housewife for the first time since taking on this, frankly, terrifying and exhausting role. And I am letting my brain tick over; I’m not saying I’m writing again but there are rusty old cogs beginning to turn again. Today’s blog post is tangible proof of that (can a blog post be tangible? The metaphysics of the internet!). I’m getting closer to my family and closer to my real self. Once I find my real self again, the Real Becca (scary, eh?) I can begin to reconnect with the world again; I’m starting, in my own little way.

One of the tv shows the Best Beloved and I enjoy together is Outnumbered, the semi-improvised sitcome about the Brockman family.. It’s mad, chaotic and messy, and funny and true. One of the ongoing character traits of Sue, the mum, is her we-all-so-do-that tendency to compare herself to all the other mums. But you know, I think the Brockmans have things pretty well-cracked. Sue has a job and her house is untidy but not dirty, more a ‘lived-in’ look, she has a stable marriage and they have a secure income and a gorgeous house. More importantly, their kids are hard work, yes, but they’re intelligent, sociable, conversational, curious and they have a strong bond to each other despite the frequent spats. I think Sue’s doing ok.

I think I am too.

Greener Grass

Well, I guess you’ve picked up that the April A-Z has fallen by the wayside! This time it really isn’t my fault. Honest.

We’ve been looking to move house for a while and during the Easter holidays we saw a house, fell in love with it and decided to go for it. The problem is, there’s not really any hanging around with a rented property. When you buy a house (I’ve heard) you have to wait for contracts and surveys and solicitors and whatever else. With a rented house, the estate agent/landlord decide if you’d be a good tenant and that’s it, you’re good to go as soon as you arrange a date to pay your bond and first month’s rent. The estate agent here has a policy that once you apply for the house it’s off the market for four weeks then it goes back on and is fair game for anyone.

So we had four weeks to pay our bond and rent.

But we can’t pay rent for the house we’re living in and the one we’re going to live in.

So we have to move in four weeks.

But we had to wait a week to get approval from the estate agent.

So we have three weeks to move!

Yikes.

Three weeks to move a family of four, five years of accumulated STUFF (we’re all hoarders), baby STUFF, working-from-home STUFF. And the books. Lord help us, the books. We sold 6 boxes of books, we took another 10 boxes to Oxfam and we still have at least 7 boxes of books. That’s not including the babies’ books. Of which there are many.

Basically, I’m meeting myself coming backwards. So all writing, blogging, even twitter has gone out of the window. And I miss it – I miss tweeting my friends and writing the blog and writing full stop. Thankfully I know my friends will still be there when things have calmed down, as will my blog and my works in progress. I’m addicted to pinterest still, and being visual it’s easy to switch off from the house for twenty minutes and browse mindlessly. Plus there are cool ideas that I’m going to implement in the new house. But everything else has been put on the back boiler.

It’ll be worth it though. The new house has a garden – imagine the change from being in a first floor flat! There’s a bedroom each for the children and a converted garage where Andrew will have his office. It’s close to a small village school so Daniel will be near his new friends and it’s about ten minutes drive away from our parents.

I know it could be a case of the grass being greener on the other side. There will be downsides, such as getting used to having neighbours again. That’ll be nice but it will be hard having to watch our noise and putting up with other people’s. Umm…yeah, I’m sure there will be other things that crop up that take some getting used to. I’ll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, my sudden enthusiasm for housekeeping and homemaking and getting organised has happened at just the right time! I’ve developed on from my last post on getting organised and I now use a filofax and a home management file – more another time – and I’m about as organised as I can be at the minute. Tomorrow we go to visit the two possible schools and at the weekend we’ll have a packing marathon. It’s all going swimmingly…so far. Wish us luck!

Words

There’s a song I used to love, twelve years ago when my husband and I started going out. It’s Words, originally I believe by the BeeGees but in ’99 when Andrew and I met it had just been covered by *shameful whisper* Boyzone. It has lovely lyrics, but it’s the refrain that’s the killer:

It’s only words, and words are all I have to take your heart away. 

As any writer or reader, aspiring or established, knows, it’s not “only” words and that line perfectly sums up the power of words – they can take someone’s heart away. Hold that thought.

Last week Daniel learned to read. He’s been desperate to for a while, sitting poring over his picture books and deciphering letter by letter but not quite managing to turn individual letters into words. This week something clicked, the missing magical ingredient I guess. I’m still trying to catch it so I can bottle it, sell it, and retire. Anyway, It clicked and we sat together and he read me a whole story by himself. What happened was he wanted to sit near me while I was making tea so I gave him an early reader I’d got out from the library in case he could manage the odd word. I thought I’d have to help him out frequently but at least he could have a go and then I was on hand to do so. Instead, I stopped what I was doing and listened in growing wonder as he read word after word without my help. Some of them he stopped and decoded sound by sound, others he read aloud fluently as if he’d been reading for weeks instead of minutes.

He then read the same book to his daddy three times and searched out the Oxford Reading Tree At Home books I had ready for after Christmas. That night, our house was all about Words.

The thing is, I had a bit of an epiphany reflecting on the episode. While he was reading I kept asking him what was happening to make sure he was understanding what he was reading rather than just speaking aloud without taking anything in (he was, the little star). That’s when something I’d suspected was really borne in on me.

It’s “only” words.

It’s the Power of Words. The letters didn’t matter. He could recognise individual letters but they were powerless without being turned into words. Being able to read means being able to turn black squiggles on a page into a story and characters and conflict. He has that power now.

He had power over me with the words he was using. He had me asking what was happening, wondering what was going to happen next, and he LOVED it. Instead of being spellbound by a story, he was the one casting the spell because he could read the words. 

Writers have that power over someone else every time a reader picks up their work and is caught by it. We love having that power over people and making them think “wait, but what happens next…?” I think it’s actually a little bit addictive. Of course, with great power comes great responsibility etc, not to mention great guilt, great big whopping holes in self-confidence, but those things are part of the deal and really, it seems like a fair price to pay for the power of one day dreaming that a child or a teenager somewhere is reading my words, and my words are taking their heart away.

I’m off to add some more words, perfectly packaged in books, to Daniel’s Christmas gift list. Have a wonderful Christmas everyone!

First Words

You might be forgiven for assuming that the first words I’m talking about are Emily’s. But no.

Daniel has been astounding us lately with his progress in writing. A couple of weeks ago he showed us how good he was at writing numbers – he did 1, 2, 3 and within a couple of days he’d mastered 4 and 5 too and was making a good stab at 6. To be honest, I’d sort of assumed that he’d read before writing. I had a idea, I’ve no idea where I got it from, that reading was easier. He has been able to recognise individual letters for a while but not string them together, sounding them out to make a word. We’re practicing breaking words down, and ‘something beginning with …’ games but he’s happy just playing around with sounds for now, and while I like to push him a little I don’t want to put him off wanting to read and write so I work on the principle that he’ll do it when the pieces fall into place in his head.

So I got the biggest shock this morning when he called me over to show me this, that he’d done on his blackboard:

Do you know what it says? I’ll tell you. It says ‘lollipop’. He knew that ‘lollipop’ has a’s and o’s and l’s in and he put them together. Heck, he even knew (guessed? maybe, maybe not) that it should have two l’s together and one by itself.

I suggested that it should have a ‘p’ in:

I didn’t even know he could do ‘p’. Now if you read it backwards it actually sounds a bit like ‘lollipop’.

He tried another word: OCLO which he decided said ‘Grandad’. I said it was really good, and also looked a lot like ‘COLD’ –C-O-L-D. So he wrote this:

…and spelled it out for me. C-O-L-D.

Is it just me, or has he been holding out on me?!

I DO know that I’ve heard somewhere that a big difference between boys’ learning and girls’ learning is that boys often appear to be making much slower progress than they actually are because they internalise the learning, and are reluctant to demonstrate what they can do until they know that they can do it, whereas girls a) show off more and b) are less afraid of making mistakes. It certainly seems to be true of Daniel here.

On a related note, we got his very first report on Friday from nursery. Someone suggested reports are too formal for such young children and a year ago I would have agreed. But there’s this big chunk of time during the week where I don’t know what he does (he won’t tell me), I don’t control what he does and someone else knows this part of my son better than I do. I was almost hungry to find out what I was missing. Needless to say, I was delighted with his report. He’s happy, he’s confident and he’s learning.

That’ll do.

Telling Stories

One of the things I really love seeing develop in my son is his storytelling. He’s got an imagination that is taking wings right now and he spends a great deal of time either ‘reading’ the books that he knows and loves or else making up stories with his toys.

He seems to understand that stories need protagonists, antagonists, conflict and resolution. He even understands that characters need distinctive voices – he varies his voice to suit the character he is pretending to be. From some of my reading, there are adults who don’t understand that yet! (I am, of course, desperately hoping that I don’t fall into that category. We’ll see.)

What I really hope for is that he doesn’t lose that love of stories, that soaring imagination, as he gets older. Storytelling is a hugely important part of a person’s life. It helps you escape your day-t0-day life, it helps you work through problems and experiences, it helps you explore language and emotions in a safe way. It’s the reason I want to write for children, after all; to tell them stories and hope that I can help them do all of those things for a short time.

Storytelling has been around since the beginning of humanity, as far as I can see. And it’s as important now as it has ever been. Whether it’s the Young Adult books that may, or may not, be dark and dismal and depressing (cue *eye roll*) or fairytales, or repulsive yet engaging little boys or a child’s first introduction to picture book stories, the best stories engage children totally for a short time and take them somewhere else. It doesn’t matter what their own experiences are, when they are engrossed in a story; the bad experiences fade and the good experiences are put aside to go into this new and imaginary world where they are in control.

Stories are a great leveller, too. There’s a huge gulf between a child from a wealthy family who goes on holiday, has good quality clothing, the latest toys and a child from a poor family who may never have left their home town, who feels the embarrassment of shabby clothing next to their friends, who has few toys. In their imaginations though, there are no such barriers. And stories are free – to read at at the library or to make up at home. You don’t need to be a great writer to engage a child happily for a long time with this happened and then this happened, just playacting with a few toys.

It’s for reasons like this, among many others, that we should be encouraging our children to make up stories, to act out, role play, dress up, dream, imagine, escape. Then one day, when life gets a bit too much as it has a tendency to do, they can flee into their own world for a while, working through their problems or escaping from them.