After Anabelle

It has been almost 7 months since his birthday and apart from a summer of respite and a few weeks in November, we've more or less been back in a permanent lockdown again since the end of the September. It blows my mind that so much of being him being age 3 and 4 has been spent living like this.  

Lucas Elias. Right now we're in the midst of another full lockdown and at the end of another half term of home-learning. Since your birthday its been more lockdown than not, again; local lockdown, firebreak lockdown, Alert Level 4 lockdown. It is never-ending.  Alert Level 4 meant the schools were closed once again.  You didn't get a whole Nursery year, and now you won't have had a full Reception year either. It is no way to start school.  That being said I was glad at least that you had the Autumn Term to settle in school for full days before all this nonsense ensued again. You absolutely took school in your stride even though you hadn't been to Nursery for almost 6 months. 

Even when you had to start a few days later than the rest of of your class because we were a household waiting on Covid test results (when what we really needed was antibiotics for your big brothers ear infection!).  Yes you live in a time when one persons temperature effects the entire household.  I often wonder how we'll get over this period of lives without health anxiety or ongoing disproportionate reactions to the most minor of symptoms. I wonder how we're setting you little ones up to be fearful of close contact with anyone outside your household. I think the effects are going to be felt for years, even when we finally get some normal back. Please tell me we're going to get normal back!  Oh anyway,  I digress. 

We've spent Home-School Two, in much the same way we spent Home-School One. We've pushed on. I'm lucky at least that I've confident in my experience to teach you and you have responded so well to 1:1 learning each time and continued to flourish. This time you have learnt nearly all of your Set 2 sounds, worked on early sentence writing, improved letter formation and handwriting, we've started early reading books. You've been ordering and understanding numbers to 100 or more, secure with number bonds and addition within 10, confident within 20 and doing brilliantly with subtraction skills too.  You love number work especially and if I'm honest I still think Numberblocks need to take all the credit!  

I have a feeling school will be a funny old experience for some time to come as teachers try to balance ever expanding differentiation needs in their classes and curriculum expectations shift to account for 'lost learning time'.  It isn't fair on you children at all.  I can only hope you'll get a full Year 1 experience next year! 

But maybe you'll also be a little generation who appreciate the smaller things. The luxury of a Nature Reserve and the simple joy of running riot around the nearest playground. In fact just this afternoon I've asked you kids what you would like to do in half term and it is a small simple things we do at home that struck me - because being at home is what you all know now - the list includes play board games, bake biscuits, the go to the funny faces park (the playground over the road), find puddles to splash in, colour-in, arts and crafts day. Nothing beyond the constrains of our 'parish'.  

At four and a half you still really love trains. Trains trains trains! So we keep adding to the train collection. Just the other week Daddy scoured eBay to find a now out of production "Cranky" for your train set. What is is about you two younger boys that the things you would like are out of production lines?! 

Every day you build a new train track on the floor, becoming increasingly inventive and when you can't get something to fit you strong-arm Xander into helping you create an even bigger train track.  Haha, still have your Big wrapped around your little finger.  You love to build train tracks that are off the ground and your specialty is creating big slopes and balanced trackways.  You like to play with toys you can put together and love the marble run you had for Christmas off Grandma too.  You've started to play with big boy Lego too - and apart from playing Numberblocks with the Duplo you seem to have bypassed that stage altogether.  I think it really is a case of 'anything my big brothers do I can do too'.... baby toys are a big no! Right down to playing Minecraft.  All three of you sit on your separate iPads, in the same world, building something or playing in Survival mode together. Nevermind that you also like to already have a go at playing Lego Ninjargo on the Xbox too. It is quite cute but there is no way we would've allowed Alexander to play Minecraft or Xbox at the age of four! The youngest is clearly the one we break all our rules on! 

We love you lots our Little.

Mummy and Daddy xXx