Boys who read

Robin

Connect-4 has for weeks pushed reading aside, with a football book tolerated if L or I insist. Then Robin picked up and began reading one of the Astrosaurs series. We have read them to him before and they come with Gabe’s recommendation. But this reading is focused and outcome orientated. He updates me regularly on his page number. He read to himself in a whisper on the landing on Saturday when he woke before he was allowed downstairs. Now he’s finished his first book and started another. Yet, I’m not sure how much he understands.

Gabe

Gabe’s bedtime reading has returned again to his hardback 2010 World Cup books. The challenge he sets me is to give him four teams he hasn’t read about in recent nights. An alternative is his book on the history of the Olympics. My role is to pick an olympiad for him to read about – one he hasn’t read in recent nights.

Eliza

Baejae’s even-money bet was lost. Eliza was upset but seems to have a tough shell to protect her. L set aside an afternoon for some Baejae memory fixing, writing and drawing about him. Of the kids, Eliza continues to be the most consistently interested in the gerbils; for example, taking the lead in cleaning their cage before they went to stay with friends during our holiday.

Another gerbil drama has played out yesterday and today. L found Silver with a bloody tail. The cause is uncertain – fighting, the vet thought; our suspicion has fallen on a new neighbhour’s children who were alone with the gerbils for a few minutes. The vet presented two options, of which I selected surgery, to remove the tail-end where the skin had been torn off. This was performed successfully today. A groggy Silver was brought home with a one-third length tail.

Go karts and Citeh

Gabe

We took Gabe and eight friends to an indoor go-kart circuit in the basement of a soon-to-be demolished factory for his birthday party. The karts, available to anyone over the age of eight, were the same as the ones adults with driving licenses and road sense use. L and I found ourselves the responsible adults without the ability to control the boys’ behaviour behind the wheel.

Only one lad had a head-on crash with a barrier – the most reckless of the group – and only one opted throughout for caution. They were really quite adept, so perhaps the transfer of wii and x-box skills was taking place. Gabe started cautiously, but built up speed, ending up with the third fastest average lap time, with which he was very satisfied.

The following day, City played QPR seeking a win for the Premiership title, with United poised to take advantage of any slip-up. Gabe watched the match on my iPad while he, Eliza and I played monopoly. In the opening 20 minutes of the second-half things began to go awry for City as they surrendered the lead and then fell behind. Gabe switched off the iPad unable to watch. We continued to play our game, but he was subdued. I was monitoring the game on my phone and let him know that City had equalised, but he didn’t want to watch. When my phone refreshed City had won and Gabe switched the iPad back on and wallowed in the celebrations. During his team’s historic half-hour, he had passed Go a few times, spent some time in jail, paid some fines and erected a few houses.

Robin

Walking to school, Robin complained of a sore head. I suggested a cup of water when we got to school. Leaving the junior school with him, I noticed a lump on his forehead and realised he’d banged himself. “How?” I asked. “Don’t want to say. It’s embarrassing.” Entering his playground, the lump more visible, I got him to explain. Out of my eyesight, he had walked, head down, into a wheelie bin on the pavement. Reluctantly, he followed me to the school office to get some first aid. Ice applied, the teacher asked how it had happened. “Robin will have to tell you”, I said, as I signed the accident form.

That evening, the bump was hurting when touched so I found the calpol bottle. Robin fiddled with the lid, but couldn’t open it. “It’s got a child-lock,” I told him. His response: “But how does it know I’m a child?”

Eliza

It’s test week at junior school. Gabe and his peers are doing Key Stage 2 SATs. In Eliza’s class, they are doing their annual assessment tests. A morning of tests and afternoon of play suits her well. Unusually, not a single complaint about having to go to school this week.

One afternoon was spent at chess club. Back at home, we played our first match. She caught me out with an audacious queen move, but I recovered and eventually wore her down with risk-averse attack.

50:50

Faced with Gabe having his ‘worst birthday ever’, L took Baejae to our local vet, a second such visit in three days. Similar outcome, barring some good advice on adminstering medicine and a numerical prognosis – 50:50. The certain uncertainty assuaged Gabe and he returned to birthday mood.

Gabe was very pleased with his camera, European Championships replica football (a ball-a-birthday, but this time he hasn’t asserted that it’s a “real replica”), cricket bag and chocolate cake.

Bank Holiday Monday was spent as Gabe’s day of family celebration. He directed us on a walk to the Mersey where he goes cross-country running with school. We ran along the river and then around the Water Park. Later we went ten-pin bowling. Oddly, the birthday boy was off-form. Eliza’s zig-zagging bowls kept producing spares. Robin was very serious, putting competition ahead of enjoyment . L sprung from the pack to win the tournament.

Gabe’s party awaits at the end of the week, by which time we’ll know whether Baejae is in the surviving or declining cohort of gerbils with infected sebaceous glands.

A day of mini-dramas

Soon after breakfast, Eliza noticed that Baejae was scratching and nibbling himself, sometimes spinning in an effort to get at the irritant on his underside.

Gabe and I left for his first cricket match of the season and first competitive hard-ball game. His team batted first, he opened and faced first ball. That ball deflected from bat to pad, unluckily onto his stumps. In under ten overs, his team was dismissed for ten runs, eight of them without scoring. Gabe took a wicket – bowled – but there was little for the team to cheer and indeed they looked broken as their opponents batted through their 20 overs.

Eliza and Robin were taken to a friend’s house, as much to take Eliza’s mind off Baejae’s continuing discomfort as for the company.

L picked Gabe up from the match and rushed him to his football team’s Cup Semi-Final. His team trailed twice, but equalised – the second time in the final minute of the match, taking the game to extra time. Gabe stayed on the pitch throughout, looking more and more tired. Extra time was scoreless and so the tie was to be decided on penalties. The score was 2-2 when Gabe took his penalty and lifted it expertly into the top corner. But in sudden death, a teammate fired at their keeper and the game was lost. Two sporting disappointments borne in a matter of hours.

L had researched vets open on a Sunday. Eliza, Baejae and I set off to a 24 hour vet service. Two of the families ahead of us in the waiting room left without the dogs they had come with, in tears. Another family brought in a wheelchair using alsation, leaking from its amputated rear legs and reaking, I imagined, of rotting flesh. It was queue-jumped out of the waiting room.

Young vet Tom diagnosed Baejae as suffering inflamed sebaceous glands, reckoning a parasite the most likely cause. Baejae sunk his teeth into Tom’s hand, so he quickly handed him back to Eliza. At home, we cleaned the cages, isolated Baejae from his brothers, and hamfistedly administered an anti-parasite drug and rodent antibiotic.

Meanwhile, Robin had helped L bake fairy cakes and then eaten his first proper cake since the official passing of his egg allergy.

That’s the life

Robin

Robin had his scheduled egg challenge at the hospital and cleared each hurdle: egg placed on his lip, egg mixed with chocolate mousse and egg with bread. He was monitored for over three hours, but no signs of ill effects showed. Increasingly restless – and hungry – he was happy to break out of the ward, to the outdoor play area where we played ‘three and in’ with an under-inflated basketball. “This is the life,” he enthused.

Eventually discharged, he celebrated with chips and ribena in the hospital cafeteria. Cake waits for another day. We talked about how patients stay overnight at hospital so nurses and doctors have to stay awake to look after them. “That’s not the life,” he reasoned.

Eliza

Is this the life for Eliza? Taken by a friend’s mother for cake at Starbucks in the Trafford Centre and then a trip to the haberdashery department of a store. Girly but grown-up, civilised but gauche. I think she would prefer to be turning cartwheels.

Gabe

Gabe’s life is punctuated with high pressure moments. To the entrance exams, Cup Finals, music exams and singing competitions is now added playing the piano to the mayor and an audience of 80 at a charity concert. He looked like he was about to faint as he prepared for the piece, The Military Minuet, but pulled it off well.

Bake-off

Gabe and Eliza had reached stalemate, vetoing each other’s wishes for how we could spend the afternoon while Robin was at a party. From one, quickly supported by the other, came the idea of cooking: a bake-off, like on television. They consulted recipe books, chose different sweets and drew up a shopping list. I was to decide the winner, and the thing I wasn’t allowed to do was call it a draw.

The baking took hours as they struggled with cracking eggs, chopping chocolate and whisking, while I only participated when heat or sharp knives were involved. The floor and kitchen surfaces were covered with detritus from the chocolate chip cookie and chocolate brownie making. The spoils came out of the oven while they had tea. I marked them on independence, clearing up and taste. Gabe’s brownies won by a single point.

Robin

Robin, perhaps returning to school after the Easter holidays, has shown a little more vulnerability than usual. A couple of nights he became upset, saying he couldn’t fall asleep and that his mouth was too small to yawn, which he showed with a fish-like gulp at the air. Another night, a book he had read with L about Planet Earth had made him fear falling off and into space. And in the playground in the morning he has clung to L or me, resisting the entry to his classroom.

Shattered and blistered

The Easter holiday has involved copious amounts of physical activity. All three children have had six days at the cricket club multi-sports camp, playing through sun, wind, rain and hail.

Robin

For Robin, multi-sports has really meant hours and hours of football played with boys older than himself. ‘Mikey said I’m the best mini-kid at sports,’ Robin reported one of the teenage helpers telling him. At home, before and after camp hours, Robin has been in the garden with a football, practising keepy-uppies (personal best: 3) or playing with me and..

Gabe

..Gabe in emotion-filled games. Usually laughter as they tackle and tangle trying to score against me; or Gabe trying to head crosses from me past Robin into the net. And then when Robin is too shattered to know when to stop, and Gabe too tired to know when not to tease him, an outburst of anger.

At the camp, Gabe has been putting in the hours in the cricket nets and lording it as one of the oldest there by winning tournaments.

Eliza

More reluctantly, occasionally as the only girl, Eliza has been at multi-sports, too. She avoids the football and plays tennis, hockey, soft-ball cricket or rounders. Then after a day of outdoor activity, she has been going to gymnastics for two hours (twice per week), ending up exhilirated and exhausted. Her first experience of intense practice on the bar has blistered her hand – a mark of her serious intent.

Forced on top of this exercise was a walk near Wrexham. Eliza describes it in her holiday homework:

My holiday story

Monday 9th

On Monday of my Easter holidays I unfortunately me, my mum and dad and my two brothers went to Wales. This was only because my dad wanted to do a walk there. Well there was goats, lambs, alpacas that I really liked and pigs that I didn’t like so much. And thre was places to collect stones and pottery. But the best bit of it was deffinately walking across the 40m aquaduct which Gabe didn’t really want to go across. We had lunch there and went in the playground and altogether it proved me wrong about the unfortunately thing at the start.

Reveillé

Gabe

In recent weeks, Gabe has got up in the morning, woken by his alarm, without prompting. He has come downstairs for breakfast dressed for school and completed his other preparations quickly. It’s a sudden change from years of moving slowly and reluctantly, slumping and fiddling, as if school could be resisted that way. With up to an hour freed each morning, Gabe spends it watching TV.

Robin

Robin is usually up first in the morning. Hunger, boredom or some other need draws him out and about – into our bed or to wake Eliza. At breakfast he eats one and one-half or, if unsupervised two, bowls of cheerios and his own, special, soya milk, using his own blue-handled spoon. And he’s loud, singing and barking, unable to retain a warning to be quiet.

Eliza

Eliza casts off her morning sleepiness, evident the moment she wakes, in minutes if not seconds. She is the least habit-bound in the morning. She’s easily distracted at breakfast and errs from getting dressed and ready for school into games with Robin and playing with the gerbils.

Second skin

Gabe

The demands of playing football outdoors through the winter are a little less severe on today’s young lads. A ‘skin’ is a tight polyester shirt worn underneath the football top, which seals in their body heat and insulates them from the cold and wind of the playing field. Gabe used to hunch and look so reluctant when playing in bad weather. In his skin, he no longer bows down to the conditions. After the game, L or I have to help him out of his skin, which clings to him. I pull a cuff, and he withdraws an arm, fighting the suction of the sleeve. More dramatic is taking his head through the collar. It catches his ears and pulls the flesh up his cheeks before, with a quiet pop, he is freed.

Eliza

Eliza has moved to the books of Michael Morpurgo. She has just finished Private Peaceful. I’ve read extracts with her at bedtime, each of which has upset me: death of a father, saving a young child from a falling tree; a cruel Grandmother chasing away the animals looked after by a lad with learning disabilities; life amidst the mud, rats, lice and shells of a first world war trench. It ends, she told me this morning, with the execution of a young man for refusing to leave his younger brother, when injured in the war. ‘Did you find it a very sad book?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, but didn’t seem upset by these gritty, harsh tales.

Robin

Robin wants to do what I do. I pruned the plum tree and broke the branches into sizes to fit into the ‘green’ bin. Robin insisted and persisted until I relented to be able to use the saw. Carefully and ever so slowly, he got to saw into a branch. Later, hanging new curtains in L and my bedroom, Robin appeared, eager to help. I placed him on the window sill, from where he could just manage to stretch up and hook the curtains onto the rail, with me marking him tight so he couldn’t fall and while holding up the curtain.

Degree of difficulty

Eliza

After months of performing more advanced gymnastics in the living room than at her gym club, Eliza was moved to a new class following some prompting by L. She went along for the first time tonight. The two hour class began with a lengthy conditioning session. Then onto bar, vault and rope. A far more physically demanding class, Eliza ached all over at the end. L said she looked enthralled and she did seem excited although said she was annoyed that she couldn’t do everything they practised.

Gabe

World Book Day was transformed by the junior school into a day to come to school dressed for sport. Gabe went as a cricketer. He came downstairs for breakfast in his whites and padded up for his cereal. Gloves and helmet went on for the trip to school. He stayed in the full kit all day at school, only taking his helmet off for lunch and recorder lesson.

Robin

In place of a bedtime story this week, Robin has opted for games of connect-4. He’s keeping in nick for an ongoing breaktime competition with his classmates. He explained today that his next game is four days away. Robin’s described how the matches attract an audience who whisper and chat about what the next move should be.