My heroes

You know when you try to think of heroes – people you’re inspired by, whose example you aspire to? I’m currently sitting in the swimming baths watching my daughter’s swimming lesson and I think my children might be my heroes.

Daniel is 6. He’s quiet, intelligent and analytical. But he’s quietly confident, an intelligent leader among his friends,  and a diligent, analytical hardworker. He has determination and he doesn’t shy away from a challenge. He’s caring and compassionate and draws people to him.

I want to be like my son.

Emily is nearly 4. She’s dynamite – she lands with a splash wherever she goes and she doesn’t know the meaning of quiet. But she is confident, funny and dances through

life. She has friends and she cares about people. She lives in the moment and she can focus when she needs to.

I want to be like my daughter.

My kids make me immensely proud; not just for what they can do,  though what they can do constantly astounds me,  but for the strong and wise people I see them becoming. They make me more than proud though, they set me an example, and this is a fairly new and startling revelation.

My children are definitely my heroes.

image

Bouncing into March

Well, that was February. Time for an update on my Happiness Project? This shouldn’t take long…

February’s resolution was to pay more attention to my marriage. To spend some time, just even in small bursts, nurturing it and being extra nice to my husband (anyone with filthy minds, STOP sniggering now. Thank you). This never really materialised, and I’m pretty sad and regretful about that. There’s two reasons; first, it would have been easy to show extra affection by buying little gifts and tokens but to be quite honest, we’re not in a position to be doing that. Secondly, February was a really, really down month for me. Between feeling unusually tired, full of cold, concerned about my grandpa who has been close to death two or three times and keeping on top of two boisterous, bouncing children, I’m afraid my resolutions slid way off my to-do list. Actually, I think I can see my to-do list on the floor there, being jumped upon underneath a pile of toys and good intentions.

But I’m not going to give up, and I AM going to make ‘Giving proofs of love’ a more long-term priority, which I guess is the whole point of this project anyway. At least I know that our marriage is as deep and loving as it could possibly be, and I think Andrew knows how muchI love him.

So, into March. March is all about the babies – making the children my priority for this month. Before you start worrying, there’s no real way of being a stay-at-home mum of a 4 year old and a toddler without making them a priority (all those jokes about locking them in the cupboard were just jokes. Honest *goes to unlock cupboard quickly*) but I know I tend to run out of patience. A particular touchy time is the morning – did I ever mention I just don’t DO mornings? And getting two children ready and out of the house on time is like lighting a fuse.

This month I will use every drop of patience I possess, and then some; wish me luck! Here’s the list of ideas and resolutions for March:

  • Patience, patience, patience
  • Explore, experiment. They’re both very inquisitive, it’ll be good to encourage that. Preferably without blowing the house up.
  • Make the most of holidays and weekends
  • Cook with them. I’m not a natural cook so I don’t really do it with the children either but I should make an effort.
  • And returning to my January resolutions – laugh with them, be spontaneous, have some fun. Is it a bit OCD that I need to make a list item about having fun? Hmmm.
  • Finally, I read somewhere the other day that children also need their mum to relaxed and happy and taken care of, so I will take some time to myself too. Purely for their sakes, of course. No, really.

There you go, that’s March sorted. Peace and harmony in the Brown household. Or something like that…

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.