I’m reading The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe to RoRo at the moment. Contrary to our normal rules (for most books that have been made into films, we insist on reading the book first – yes, we’re meanies, but it’s so much better that way, isn’t it?), she has seen the film already a couple of times and has also seen Prince Caspian. She most recently saw Prince Caspian (and was not impressed with the fighting scenes, incidentally) and is getting a little muddled between the two.

I loved all the Narnia books as a child. My parents read them to me and then I read them myself, over and over and over and over again. I created my own Narnia stories in my head and got lost in the magical world where animals talk and four children can become kings and queens. The Magician’s Nephew scared me quite a bit, as I recall.

What I can safely say, however, is that I had absolutely no impression of any religious undertones, allegories or anything of the kind. To me it was just a magical series of books about a magical world and lots of fun adventures. I didn’t even get annoyed about sexual stereotypes, like I did with Enid Blyton – because, frankly, the girls do get to have a lot of fun and do some fighting, too, in Narnia.

Anyway, I’m really enjoying reading it to RoRo – sharing books you loved as a child with your children I think is one of those things you fantasise about when you get pregnant, or before even (or is that just me?), yet so often it can be a disappointment, because they don’t always share your enthusiasm (when I first tried reading the Brambly Hedge books to RoRo she wasn’t at all interested, except in the fabulous ice hall in the Winter one). But she is enjoying The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe – at the moment she’s worried and sad about Mr Tumnus and she’s rather in awe of Aslan (I’m curious as to whether she will spot the religious elements, because I think she is far more ‘into’ Jesus and God than I was at school – I took my parents’ atheism on with pride and sometimes perhaps a little too much enthusiasm).

Sadly, though, she has been rather spoiled (or very lucky, I should perhaps say) by having her father read many ‘chapter books’ to her, because he does amazing voices and puts bucketloads of meaning and drama into his readings. I’m not quite monotone – I can get the meaning and I can manage an occasional different accent (most come out as deep Gloucestershire), but I really can’t do a different voice for everyone and I quite often forget that I’m supposed to be doing a voice. To the point where the other night she stopped me to give me reading tips. Apparently I need to read differently when I’m reading the description bits, to make it very clear that I am describing and not being someone talking. And maybe I could try some different voices for different characters, too. So Mr and Mrs Beaver now have Gloucestershire voices and I think I’m managing to make Lucy and Edmund sound a bit younger than Susan and Peter – and of course the children all speak with plummy BBC English accents. I’m not looking forward to meeting up with all the other animals soon, though. I have a horrible feeling I will get all muddled up.

And perhaps before we read the next one, I should read through it on my own and practise all the voices.

What are you reading to your children at the moment? Do you enjoy doing the voices or do you struggle with them like me? Have you enjoyed sharing your childhood favourites with your children or have they not liked them?

My Phonics Kit is a pack from Oxford University Press for parents to help their children with phonics and which ties into the new Year 1 Phonics Test (see last week’s Sunday Reading post for my concerns about the test).

My Phonics Kit contains three workbooks (Kipper’s Phonics Workbook, Chip’s Phonics Workbook and Biff’s Phonics Workbook), instructions and guidance for parents, a reward chart, stickers and a CD-ROM with eBooks and related activities. The pack costs £10, though it’s currently available on Amazon for £6.

My Phonics Kit is based on the, almost certainly very familiar, Oxford Reading Tree, that most schools use and so contains familiar characters and artwork. Each of the workbook has some words for your child to read to see if they’re at the right level for the workbook. (The kit is aimed at children reading at or above Level 5 of the Oxford Reading Tree.) There’s then a page with some tips and guidance for learning together with your child. There are then nine pages, each looking at a specific sound, and the different graphemes that can make that sound. (For example, in Biff’s Phonics Workbook there’s a page on the sound ‘k’ and it covers ‘c’, ‘k’, ‘ck’ and ‘ch’.) There’s a section of words to read and then one or more ‘alien words’ to read (the alien words are indicated by a little picture of an alien and are clearly differentiated from the actual words by being in a different coloured and styled box, as well) that use some of the graphemes introduced on that page. And then there’s an activity for the child to do using the graphemes from that page. For example, there might be an activity to match sentences to pictures, to fill in gaps in sentences, to find sounds within sentences, and so on. Interspersed throughout these pages are whole-page activities, such as larger gap fills, colouring activities (find the words in the picture and then colour the picture) and matching captions to pictures. Each of the workbooks ends with a ‘Silly Ditty’ using lots of words and sounds from that workbook and then a final activity (a wordsearch in one, pairing words together in another and putting words together to make other words in the other workbook).

Throughout the workbooks, children can earn stickers to put in the workbooks and stickers for Floppy to go on the reward chart. The reward chart also has indications of where to read the eBooks on the CD-ROM, though you can actually use the kit in any order you want, including going through the workbooks in whatever order you want. There are six eBooks on the CD-ROM with activities to go with each. There’s also a section for grown-ups, where you can hear the different sounds and find out about the screening test and also read some tips and guidance about helping your children learn to read.

RoRo has tested out My Phonics Kit and really liked it. She enjoyed reading the book on the computer and the way the pages turned. She read the words at the start of the book with no problem (in fact, I was surprised how quickly and easily she read them). She enjoyed doing the activities and wanted to keep going, despite it being late and time to go to bed. She enjoyed finding the stickers and sticking them in the right places. She read the alien words fine, though she definitely struggled more with them than the real words (because, as I mentioned in last week’s post, she doesn’t just decode any more, but uses context and her knowledge of vocabulary to work out a word that she doesn’t already know – neither of which can be used for alien/nonsense words).

I was pleased, as well, that working through some of the pages in the workbook together, had RoRo talking to me about what they’d learnt at school in phonics and spelling – she does talk about school a lot more than she used to, but it’s still always nice to have something that prompts her to talk more about what she’s doing there.

I thought My Phonics Kit was excellent. Oxford University Press have integrated the alien words in an unobtrusive way that should introduce children to the idea of needing to read nonsense words without too much confusion and help them become familiar with the idea. It covers the sounds they should be familiar with at that age and will help them with reading words in isolation in addition to within stories and other texts. I think that My Phonics Kit would be a useful pack to use, regardless of the test, and will be very helpful in providing additional reading-related activities for children to familiarise them with the different graphemes – both for reading and writing. I think there’s a strong chance I would have bought a copy of this and would certainly recommend it to others. The price is very good for what you get – we often buy workbooks from Wilkinsons or the Works which cost a couple of pounds each. They usually have a stickers and definitely more pages than these workbooks, but they don’t come with eBooks and activities on CD-ROM and I don’t think the activities themselves are as targeted as these ones. The familiarity that theOxford Reading Tree brings to the children as well, is an added bonus. I might be tempted to buy it in Reception, rather than Year 1, though, depending on the progress of the individual child. I’m sure LaLa will, at the very least, be reading the eBooks on the computer, as she loves Kipper and Floppy!

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of My Phonics Kit to review by Oxford University Press, but the opinions expressed are my own (and RoRo’s).

As you are probably aware, the government has introduced a new Phonics Screening Test which comes into play this June for all children in Year 1, after a one-year pilot. Children will have to read 40 words with their teacher, which will be a mix of real words and nonsense words that are made up of letters and sounds that are part of the phonics route of teaching reading. It is not compulsory to teach reading using synthetic phonics, though a lot of schools do.

I am not a teacher, but I do have a daughter in Year 1 and have seen the range of reading skills that her classmates show. They used phonics to teach reading in Reception and they still use phonics, along with other methods, to teach reading in Year 1. RoRo is reading books at Stage 5 in the Oxford Reading Tree (and the equivalent in other schemes). The vast majority of her reading is now recognising whole words that she knows already, in addition to this, she uses context to work out what words she doesn’t know say – sometimes she still decodes, but for the most part, she’ll do something like look at the first few letters of a word and the last few, look at the length of the word and look at the picture and the words around it, to work out what the word is – from meaning. Decoding now forms a miniscule part of her reading process. And, from what I’ve seen, this is the same for a lot of her classmates. There are, of course, still some who are using decoding the bulk of the time, but not very many. And there are others who are further ahead and almost never use decoding – recognising the majority of words, and working others out from context.

Phonics worked wonderfully as a teaching tool for most of RoRo’s classmates, but the teachers have always shown adaptability and have helped the children to use different methods. One of the most important things has been the use of story books and non-fiction books that engage the children and help them pick up words and reading in general because they want to know what is happening, or find out more about something. We love phonics and I have already started introducing some letters and sounds to Eleanor – very gently, of course, and with no pressure (I’m not a Tiger Mum!) But I would never, ever, ever, try to get them to read nonsense words to practise the letters and sounds. The point of phonics is to help children learn to read. The point of phonics is not to teach them to excel at reading a large number of letters and sounds but never be able to translate that into actual reading.

The government claims that the point of the Phonics Screening Test is to “identify the children who need extra help so they are given support by their school to improve their reading skills”. But… do you know what? That’s what teachers do already. Year 1 teachers and teaching assistants work with children according to their ability and needs in learning to read. They will do things like guided reading in groups, individual reading with teachers, teaching assistants and parent volunteers. And they will help those children who are struggling, using the most appropriate methods for them. They don’t need a 40-word check to tell them who needs help. What they could probably do with is some extra money to give those children who do need extra help a bit more one-to-one help.

What they definitely don’t need is a bunch of children getting stressed out about taking a test at the age of five or six. They don’t need a bunch of children getting thoroughly confused about having to read nonsense words when what they really want to do is read about Floppy and Kipper’s latest adventures with the magic key. They don’t need a week off timetable to fit in testing all their children themselves. And they don’t need the extra stress themselves of administering a test.

If we lived in Spain, then the Phonics Screening Test could well make sense, because Spanish is spelt phonetically. English is not spelt phonetically. Some of it is, yes, but most of it isn’t. There are plenty of letter groups that have different sounds in different words, there are plenty of sounds that are spelt in a huge variety of ways. You learn to read ‘bough’, you’d expect to then be able to read ‘tough’, but no that has a different sound and then again you have ‘through’. To, too and two sound the same but look very different.

In the one year pilot, only 32% of six-year-olds who took the test reached the expected level. Is this because they couldn’t read? No, it’s because most of them could read well and taking a step back to decoding nonsense words and reading a list of words instead of a story, is not at all helpful or indicative of actual reading levels. The government’s explanation was that “pilot schools were only given details of the content and structure of the screening check shortly before the check took place”. Which essentially translates as “they were actually testing they could read the words, when they should have been testing that they could do a test in a specific way and specific format”. If they’d had a whole year to teach these children how to decode nonsense words and read a list of words instead of a book, they’d have passed the test. They might not actually be able to read books to the level they would if they’d been learning to read, of course, but that’s OK, because the government will be able to tick a box, which is what matters, isn’t it?

Hopefully, the test (or ‘check’ as it’s been called) can be administered without too much disruption. Hopefully, it won’t give children a knock-back in their progress at learning to read (whether through insisting on testing recognition of phonics letter groups rather than actual words, or through making confident readers feel like failures because they can’t decode a nonsense word. And hopefully this test, which is as nonsensical as some of the ‘words’ it tests, will be scrapped very soon.

Edited to add: There’s an interesting response to the Phonics Test consultation from the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (PDF).

If you’re worried about the test at all and would like to help your child prepare for it without adversely affecting their actual progress in learning to read, Oxford University Press has brought out My Phonics Kit, which is based on the Oxford Reading Tree and treats the nonsense words as ‘alien words’. We’ve received a copy to review, and we’ll be giving our verdict next Sunday (My Phonics Kit review is now live), but on a first quick flick through, it looks like they’ve done an excellent job at providing a comfortable introduction and practise for this test.

What do you think about the new Phonics Screening Test? Are your children going to be taking it this year? Do you think it will confuse them? Are you going to help prepare them for it at home, or let the school prepare them as they want to?

The time has come. I thought I would keep going until she chose to stop, as I did with RoRo*. RoRo stopped of her own accord at the same time as she dropped her nap, but she’d already cut it down to one feed a day – to get herself to sleep for the nap. LaLa has a bunch of ways to go to sleep – including the occasional dot dot (breastfeed) – and she still has a fair bit of dot dot. She has some in the morning – but usually two or three feeds. If I’m around, she’ll have some in the afternoon just before her nap and will often, but not always, fall asleep at the same time. She’ll have some in the afternoon, when she gets home. And she’ll ask for some whenever she’s upset. She tends to have more if she’s feeling unwell.

And, honestly, I can’t see her letting up of her own accord for a good long time. As she says “Dot dot is my favourite and my best.” She asks very nicely: “Please may I have some dot dot? Just a tiny bit? Please?” If I say no, for whatever reason, she’ll cry, but very briefly and it’s the same cry she’ll give if refused sweets or TV or other such stuff. So, yes, not about to drop it voluntarily.

Last night, I was up half the night with her. She woke up at just gone midnight and pretty much decided it was morning. She was asking for dot dot most of the time. She’s not allowed dot dot in the middle of the night – because it just leads to her waking up with the purpose of having dot dot, rather than sleeping through happily like she usually does. So I spent most of the night saying no and plying her with cow’s milk and juice and water and books and toys and TV on the netbook. The rest of the night was spent with her saying she wanted to go to bed and could I carry her upside down (one of her latest ‘things’) and put her in her bed, whence she would climb approximately one minute later declaring that she was ‘not tired’ and it was ‘time to get up’.

In the end I gave in – yes, I know, giving in is my downfall and I repeat it time after time, because I do not have the patience to deal with screaming and crying when I know I can avert it with the judicious (or not so judicious) application of dot dot, sweets or TV – and gave her dot dot, and she fell asleep – at four in the morning. But before I did we had a little chat about dot dot and I said that tomorrow (i.e. today) we would be stopping dot dot.

And she hasn’t had any since four in the morning. In the morning, I went back to bed and Chris took over, so it didn’t crop up. When she came home RoRo had a friend round and there were Friday treats to eat, so she didn’t immediately ask for dot dot. When it occurred to her to ask, I reminded her that we had said we’d been stopping and offered milk or juice instead and also reminded her of her sweets and the existence of people to play with. She was distracted for a while and then asked again, this time with a bit more vehemence. She was allayed by pink milk. Further into the afternoon/evening, she was fobbed off or distracted by the DS, some TV, the rest of her sweets, some pudding, a bath, bouncing on our bed… and then I disappeared to watch Pirates of the Caribbean with RoRo while Chris put LaLa to bed, so the issue was removed again.

We shall see how things go tomorrow. The mornings will be the most challenging, but I think if I work on the distractions and my high-pitched exaggeratedly cheerful voice we’ll be fine. Most reports of stopping at this point say it only takes two or three days. So, hopefully we’ll be done by the end of the weekend.

Wish us luck!

* In case you missed it, at my eldest daughter’s request the girls are now referred to by nicknames on the blog (RoRo = the eldest; LaLa = the youngest).

Lego is brilliant stuff, isn’t it? I went to a learning conference this week and there was a Lego stand and they had a huge table-full of Lego for delegates to build with – the idea was to build bits of the school of the future. Brilliant fun. I could have sat there fore ages, but I had to go and listen to some talks and visit some other stands, so I just made a little open-air classroom. Interestingly, there was no pink or purple or Lego Friends bits in among the bricks and figures. There was a fair bit of Star Wars bits, though – for the future theme, I suppose. The delegates building there were male and female – I overheard one woman enthusiastically talk about spending her whole weekends building Lego with her kids and how much she enjoys it – she’s obviously very experienced, too, as she built something far more imaginative than me, and in much less time.

We’re mostly about the Duplo still in this house, though we do have a couple of Lego games (Creationary and Shave a Sheep, both brilliant games) and a small Harry Potter set. (The shop in town that sells Lego and Duplo has the Hogwarts and Hogwarts Express sets and I just stand and stare at them for ten minutes whenever I’m stocking up on Duplo – one day… one day… I will have the Harry Potter Lego!)

For ages, we just had a basic Duplo set, which was fine, though fairly limited in scope. LaLa was getting really in to building very tall towers with it, so we and others gave her Duplo sets for Christmas – the Zoo and the Alphabet sets – and suddenly, both LaLa and RoRo exploded into little Lego construction engineers.

They’ve built zoos, houses, jails, parks, castles, schools, hospitals, space rockets and trees, with the range expanding considerably once we invested some of their Christmas money in some bases. (I have to say that you cannot fully appreciate the versatility of the stuff without some bases to keep your constructions together.) LaLa especially enjoys playing with the three Lego people we have (‘man’, ‘man’ and ‘lady’ as she has imaginatively christened them), while RoRo is getting the most out of coming up with new things to build and working out how to do so. She’ll do things like build walls with striped patterns, or make sure a tree has a yellow and brown trunk and green leaves and the sea has a blue and green base. And she’ll work out how to connect walls together and build stairs and roofs and turrets for castles.

So… why in the name of all that is holy, do we need pink and purple Lego with girly girly sets and interchangeable hair and fashion accessories for the characters? Why? Some of the sets in the Lego Friends range, actually look quite good – a tree house , a vet , an invention workshop , for example – but why do they have to be steeped in this whole Moxie-girlesque 21st century post-feminist girly backlash? Why not just have these sets as generic sets and throw some different coloured blocks into all sets? Differentiating between Lego sets for boys and Lego sets for girls is sad. It is taking away from a toy that has always been reassuring gender-neutral and bowing to the purveyors of pink peer pressure.

Girls have been playing with Lego for many years and have happily been able to build whatever they wanted – be it shops and castles and ironing boards, or rockets and dinosaurs and cannons. Are there really girls out there who refuse to build with Lego because it’s ‘for boys’ or ‘not pink enough’? If so, that’s surely a very worrying thing? A worrying attitude to be bringing up our girls (and our boys) with?

By all means, Lego, throw in some pink and purple blocks to the sets and introduce some new sets that are more wide-ranging in appeal, but please, please, please, leave the sexualisation and gender stereotyping to Barbie.

Other people have already written about this – Sally Whittle wrote about Why she used to love Lego, there’s a Huffington Post piece about the uproar this new range has been creating worldwide and Mum’s the Boss wrote about her anger at the new range as well – and there are plenty more out there (yes, I’m a bit late to the row, sorry).

If you need to move furniture around, then you should wait until all possible children are home and in the room. In fact, it would probably be advisable to arrange a couple of playdates, so that you really have maximum numbers of helpers. This works particularly well when moving the furniture will expose toys, mementos and dead spiders who have not been seen since, well, probably last Christmas. That way, when you’re cleaning out the space for the tree, you can have small children running between your legs and tripping over bits of Lego. It’s also particularly helpful if you try to move as much furniture as you can all by yourself. You never know, this might help you find a way to A&E in the run-up to Christmas.

If the children somehow manage to escape the lure of sparkly tinsel and baubles for the lure of the television, giving you far too much time to actualy clear the space and put the tree up, do make certain that you call them back before you put the lights up. Especially if you are likely to have any dead bulbs that need replacing. Because impatient children are really essential to the whole process.

If you’ve bought new decorations, do make sure they’re all still in their box, preferably secured to each other or the box by means of impenetrable wires. It’s a strong bonus if you have bought decorations that include some shaped like teeny tiny presents, because then you can have the fun of watching one child open one out of curiosity, while the rest copy the leader. You can then be sure to throw in that most Christmassy of Christmas traditions, threatening to send a small child to bed for opening a present too early – and you don’t even have to damage a real present in the process. Perfect.

Any old decorations should, of course, be as tangled up as possible, requiring hedge trimmers and Vaseline to extricate them and work out which two can actually be reused this year. By this point, you will probably have lost your child helpers and may well be left to finish clearing up the various messes all by yourself. If so, large doses of alcohol should be administered in order to mimic the effects of small children.

I come from a family who pretty much always makes their Christmas cards. Now and then we’d have to cheat (yes, that’s what it feels like) and buy some, because we were too late or someone was in hospital or something like that, but generally we would make them. When I was little, I would usually make them and my sister would make them when she was little. Once we had desktop computers and printers, there was a tendency to make one design and print it out. Some years have been more intricate and adventurous than others. One year I made triple-layered cards with cut-out windows in them and then individually coloured in pictures at the centre. That was, needless to say, before I had children.

Once you have children, though, making home-made cards takes on a whole new dimension. I had intended to get Rosemary to do a drawing of a Christmas tree or similar, scan it in, funk it up a bit in Photoshop and/or Illustrator and then print multiple copies. However, time was running out, toner was running out and I also thought it would be nice to do something that could involve Eleanor as well as Rosemary. My first idea was potato stamps. I cut out some Christmas tree and star shapes from some potatoes and Rosemary tried to print them onto cards. All we got was big blobs of paint. Not a success at all.

But the next idea worked out really well.

Cut and stick Christmas cards

You will need

• Different coloured (preferably bright) A4 card
• Scissors
• Glue stick
• Glitter shakers (optional)

I prepared the cards and shapes the night before, but if you have older children, you can get them to do that too. I made four cards out of each piece of A4 card – cut into four then folded in half. (I made a total of 28 – but obviously you can make however many you need.) And then I used a couple of pieces of each colour (with extra green) and cut out squares and triangles of different shapes. I made extra green triangles because they’re very useful for Christmas trees. (I did this while catching up on TV shows on Sky Go and drinking a glass of beer. Of course, you could watch or drink different things.)

I then presented the girls with blank cards, glue, shapes and glitter shakers and they made a bunch of cards, and had lots of fun doing it (which is important when you’re using your children to do your work, really). We made Christmas trees, stars and also some random patterns. And then sprinkled some of them with glitter. Eleanor did a few just with glitter, too.

Here are Rosemary’s cards (she got a little distracted and ended up creating pictures instead of cards in the end):

Here are Eleanor’s (she had a real production line going):

And these are mine (I had a great time, too):

You probably haven’t left it this late, but just in case, I believe it’s the last posting date for second class tomorrow, so you could prepare the materials tonight and get the kids on the job in the morning, if necessary!

We have quite a lot of left-over shapes, so maybe we’ll use them for Thank You cards, too. If we actually manage to be organised enough to write any, which is certainly not guaranteed!

Chris pointed out to me recently that I was sometimes having unrealistic expectations of Eleanor. I’m sure I’ve mentioned before how I’ve forgotten a lot of what it was like to have a two-year-old and, even when I remember how Rosemary used to behave, that doesn’t really guarantee that Eleanor will react the same, or develop at the exact same rate. Then, too, there are the raised expectations because Eleanor picks up a lot of things (as, I believe, do many younger siblings) from her sister earlier than she probably would otherwise have done.

So I’ve been working on adjusting my expectations of Eleanor a little recently. This includes expecting her to have a meltdown a few times a day and, for the most part, ignoring them all. It includes, not getting uptight or telling her off about fairly minor things – if she tips all the Duplo out on the floor, leave it there; if she pours her drink on the table or the floor, take her cup away and give her a cloth to wipe it up; if she runs off when out, pick her up and carry her for a bit, or stop and kneel/sit on the floor and have a chat about the stones or the ants or something. Distraction, ignoring unwanted behaviour (unless it’s dangerous), using a simple ‘no’, rather than making a big fuss. These are all things I should know, but somehow I think I was expecting her to behave just like Rosemary (perhaps because she does copy her so much).

I’ve found it’s working pretty well. Today, she played with the Duplo by getting pieces out and putting them together, rather than just tipping them over the floor, and put them back when she’d finished with them. She didn’t pour any drinks anywhere. She walked slowly and calmly to nursery school, running in the places she’s allowed to run. OK, so she did then take an age to get to sleep and got up two or three times, but I didn’t have to deal with that, because I was walking Wesley.

Being reminded of the need to adjust our expectations of Eleanor has made me think about our expectations of Rosemary. As with Eleanor, I think I (we) tend to expect Rosemary to be a lot more mature than she is. Of course, as children get older, it is important to increase our expectations, but it’s also necessary to balance them and ensure they’re not too high. Too high expectations and the child will always fail to meet them; too low and they won’t push themselves at all. Trying to pick up when Rosemary is ready to move forward in some area, and help her to do so, while at the same time not pushing her to move too far is very tricky.

Take reading, for example. Rosemary tends to come to a point with reading where she doesn’t want to do it much – where she’ll have been reading whole books in a night, she’ll suddenly refuse to read more than a page, or she’ll read half a book, wriggle and moan and act silly and make it take a huge amount of time. This usually comes at a point when she’s getting ready to move on a stage, but sometimes I jump in too soon and it will have the opposite effect and mean she refuses to read entirely for a while. The teachers are usually pretty on the ball about when to move her forward, at least they have been so far, and I’ve stepped back in pushing for her to move up a stage without at least checking with them first.

But there are other things that can be done. This week, Rosemary’s been reading her school books in her head and I’ve been asking her questions about them – she reads a page and I ask her about that page. She asks for help with any words that she’s not sure about. We’ve also done some reading in her head and then reading aloud with expression – she did a brilliant rendition of ‘Dad looks so silly.’ said Wilma last night. I suggested these because it seems like she’s really wanting to start reading to herself and I thought this would be a step in the right direction. But then I jumped too far ahead this evening, when I suggested that she might have a go at reading the first Jack and Annie book to herself. She threw herself on the floor and acted like – well, like her little sister.

So I’m now determined to work on reassessing my expectations of both children on a more regular basis. We don’t need to do this as much with the adults in our lives, as we’ve worked out what our expectations should be of them and and know they’re not going to change much (for example, Chris is rarely going to put the tea towels back on the oven door and I’m rarely going to put my shoes in the shoe box; these are things that we each have to live with). But children – especially young ones, I think – are changing and growing and developing at such a rate that we really do need to adjust our expectations of them regularly.

We’re a bit shell-shocked here at the moment. Eleanor has been, generally, a pretty happy, polite and remarkably compliant child. We’ve had problems, of course – sleep problems, tantrums and breastfeeding issues – but nothing major or unusual. Of course, there’s nothing particularly unusual happening now, but it’s still come as a shock.

Because Eleanor is discovering the appeal of independence and the joys of boundary pushing. Apart from the waking up at 4.15 every morning for close to a fortnight now, which is really really messing with my head, she’s started deliberately doing the opposite of what we want her to do over the last few days.

She’s not allowed in the office on her own (mostly because there’s a dangerous window, but also because of work and computers and wires and stuff), so she is constantly running up the stairs to the office.

When it’s time to get dressed, she’s mostly running away and needs to be chased round the room – or the house – to catch her. If there’s time, we can put her in the girls’ room with her nappy and clothes and she’ll get dressed on her own (because she loves doing things herself and hates having to get help); if there’s less time, we can give the clothes to Rosemary and she can usually persuade her to get dressed; sometimes, though, time runs out and there’s schools and/or nursery schools to get to and the only thing that works is to hold her still and put her clothes on her – kicking and screaming be damned.

She has started taking her shoes off while out and about – sitting down on the pavement and taking them off, taking them off in the park (something she’s been allowed to do in the summer, so less of a surprise) and this morning she refused to put them on and took them off about five times before I said (OK, shouted) I’d just put them in the bag and carry her, which would mean she wouldn’t be able to walk on any walls or walk up the hill – as soon as these consequences were pointed out to her, she wanted to put them on.

She also seems to want to do everything and try everything and is getting a bit conflicted or perhaps confused about what to do at any given time – she’ll get out the blocks and be building towers, then spot the blackboard out of the corner of her eye and run off to draw on it, then she’ll decide it’s time to hide and seek, or that she’s going to wash her hands or brush her teeth. She’ll want immediate gratification in most things – she’ll be eating some toast and decide she wants noodles, then strawberries and then something else and something else… Often there are four or five half-eaten things on her plate at the end of breakfast time. Oh, yes, and she’s worked out how to open the fridge. It involves dragging a chair over to it and climbing up and pulling hard until the door opens. So far, all she’s managed to get out is a satsuma, but it’s only a matter of time before she pours a carton of juice all over the floor or gets the butter down and digs into it with a spoon (for some reason she likes to eat spoonfuls of butter – Rosemary used to, as well).

The worst one, though, is running off when out and about. Today, on a corner, she ran off down one street when we were going up the other (on the pavement, thankfully). She got a good way along before I caught her. She ran off into the playground when Rosemary was going into school. She tried to run off into playgroup (she doesn’t start there until next September!), then up the slope to one of the doors. When we got to the park, I told her there was no time to go into the play park and that it was too wet, anyway. She ran off into the play park and managed to climb all the way up to the top of the little play house (on the roof, this is) before I caught her. She went on my shoulders the rest of the way to nursery (and had a cry because she couldn’t go to the Co-op, another because she couldn’t go to the doctor and another because she couldn’t go to the library). When I picked her up after lunch, we popped into town to get her feet measured (I had thought perhaps she was taking her shoes off lots because they were too tight, but no). She ran into three shops and out of two shops and the library, and in the opposite direction to the one we were going in three times. Thankfully, she never ran into the road, but she’s so fast it’s definitely a worry. I think we have some reins somewhere that we used briefly with Rosemary (I hate them so much!), which I’m very tempted to dig out. Don’t think she’d stay put in the buggy or the backpack unless plied with huge bags of Haribo.

I know this is normal. I know Rosemary did it. I know most children do it. I know it’s a really important part of development and learning. I know there are strategies to deal with it (or cope with it – gin perhaps?) that I need to remind myself of pronto. And I also know that there are way more than equal amounts of wondrous and miraculous things that she is also doing at the moment. But knowing all that does not make it any easier or less tiring.

Good luck tomorrow, Granny Jenny!

I had a beautiful afternoon with Eleanor today. It took me back to Tuesdays with Rosemary when she was at nursery school; when life wasn’t such a rush and a juggle.

Eleanor started nursery school a couple of weeks ago, and we had been trying out my mum picking her up and taking her home for lunch and a nap, because the idea has been for a while that we work during school hours and keep the rest of the time for family and us*. Eleanor hadn’t been falling asleep until so late, though, that she was getting home at 5.30 instead of 4.30 or 3.30 like normal, which felt too late to us. So we’ve changed it so she has lunch at nursery school and then we bring her home – theoretically to sleep, but perhaps that’s not going to happen!

I picked her up at 1pm today, and she gave me a big cuddle and handed me her things and chatted away (she’d fallen asleep at circle time apparently and had half an hour’s sleep before lunchtime, when they woke her up). We left and walked home through a sunny autumn day. We chatted about the wind in our hair, popped into the RSPCA shop to put some money in the dogs, walked past the waterfall, talked about what she’d done at nursery school (painting, playing shops, playing in the sand and the water), what she’d liked most about her packed lunch (she listed everything!) and then we chased our shadows all the way home, dipping in and out of splashes of sun.

She then spent the afternoon with boundless energy, baking pretend cakes and making pretend soup (pie soup and carrot soup), reading stories, drawing, building towers, splashing in puddles (we found two tiny puddles in the back yard) and, finally, sitting down for some ‘dot dot’ and then an apple and some Octonauts on the iPlayer.

She stayed up until bedtime and continued to be happy and enthusiastic and energetic pretty much all the way (apart from a little bit of a disagreement about it being time to go to bed). And, though it was quite tiring (especially after being up with both girls since before 5am and baking and crafting with them instead of just leaving them to their own devices – or to TV on the netbook), it was one of the nicest afternoons I’ve had in a long time and I think Tuesday afternoons might very well turn into Mummy-Daughter Tuesdays again – if she doesn’t fall asleep the second we get home next week, of course.

* Yeah, right. Never works out like that, of course.