Writing and reading

I'm at home with no children. It's the first morning of the child swap, and Mabel hardly even noticed as I waved her goodbye and left her in the most capable hands of my friend-who-will-be-a-doula. "I'll be fine," I said, and she laughed. And I walked back up the hill strangely empty handed and unburdened of back.

I have resolved to use this time only to do things I can't do when the kids are here. So no picking up, no cleaning the kitchen, no laundry: blogging is okay, but I shouldn't be checking Facebook (too much). Really I should be writing or editing or working on something I might get paid for, but I have yet to organise anything like that, though I did go to the lengths of joining LinkedIn, which seems to be a sort of cross between Monster.com and Facebook: you make "connections" with people you've worked with or who are in your area, and people can search for you and read your resume and make connections with you, and you can ask for recommendations. Unfortunately, neither of my two old bosses from Dublin seem to be on it, but a lot of other people I've worked with are, so it's fun catching up with what everyone's doing these days, even if nothing actually happens from it.

I might also use this time to do things like sorting out winter clothes or big cleaning/tidying tasks that I can't do without little people clustering round me (yes, two can cluster) demanding to know what this is and what that is for and then taking everything away to play with instead.

But here I am today. I've written two paragraphs of Something Else (to be unveiled Sometime in the Future, or quite possibly Never At All) and I'm blogging so that this evening when B fires up an episode of his latest Netflix-on-Demand discovery, The IT Crowd (very amusing BBC comedy by the writer of Father Ted), I can give it my full attention.

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I was going to say that I love having a four-year-old. For some reason, perhaps because I started school at four and have at least some memories of being four, I feel it's a big step up from three. Monkey can be depended on to trail after me in a shop without being chivvied from pillar to post; he can open his car door and climb into his booster seat (but not do up his seatbelt just yet); he can - and more importantly, will - get himself dressed; he can quite often put the right shoes on the right feet. He tells jokes (mind you, so does Mabel, but she gets stuck after the first line: her latest is asking: "Why did the mummy chicken cross the road?", but she can't tell you the answer). He wants to help, even if his efforts are sometimes misguided and I have to try not to shout at him for making it worse when I know he's really just trying to make it better.

Yesterday we ventured into a large shop where I didn't need anything, but we'd come out on a wild goose chase and I felt they should be set free, a little. Mabel ran away. I said, totally without irony: "You can run... but you can't hide." Her new trick in shops is climbing under the clothes on the racks and hiding there, and it's either hilarious or terrifying, depending on whether or not I saw her go. Monkey ran after her, tackled her to the ground, and sat on her; as I brought up the rear, wearily commenting, "You don't have to pull her arm out of her socket...or sit on her..." and catching up with them "...and you, Missy, don't have to laugh about it..."

One of the most exciting things about four is the almost reading. I realise this happens at different ages with different kids, but right now Monkey can recognise all the letters* (at least in uppercase; sometimes the lowercases confuse him) and is beginning to get the idea of sounding them out. In his new class they have a "Question of the day" to read every morning when they go in the door, with their very own cut-out lizard to place on the velcro strip under their answer. There isn't time to spell and sound through the whole sentence with him, as other kids are lining up behind us and there are distractions aplenty, but I'm trying to do the first couple of words every day, with the hopes that they'll start to repeat: when and what and how and where and do you think.

So this afternoon [yes, it's later now. Mabel was fine. I was fine. It all worked out great. Round II tomorrow morning at my house] we went to the library and picked up some of the very first beginning-to-read books - the sort with about three words on each page, but a little more interesting and fun than the cat on the mat. I don't know what, if anything, he'll do with them, but I'd like there to be something suitable in the house in case the mood strikes him and he suddenly wants to read a book.

Have you any great first-reading books to recommend? I'd be delighted to hear about them.



*I thought this was just some miraculous progression that happened on its own, but then I realised that his dad drills him on the letters in the frieze around his bedroom wall every night when putting him to bed. They're doing the days of the week now too, and I was amazed to discover that Monkey knows them all, in order. (Doesn't stop him talking about everything in terms of "the day after this day," but maybe some time it will.)