Boys will be… boys!

There’s no denying it, boys is troubles.

If they’re not fighting over some silly toy or which TV programme to watch, they’re arguing with us, the wife and I.

It doesn’t necessarily matter what I’m actually talking about, as you, the reader, can simply pick an element of ‘life’, and use that in the imagination part of this blog post. For instance, they’ll argue and scream blue-murder about something as trivial as whether there’s too much water in their cup, or the food is too hot/cold, or whether there’s too much or too little on their plate to eat.

Ignoring the fact that whatever they are actually arguing about, the ‘problem’ itself could be rectified immediately, but they insist on dragging things out, as tired little boys do.

All of this arguing, to’ing and fro’ing, has made me remember-back to how things were when I was their ages, and how life was different in some ways.  It’s difficult to stop one’s self from this, and I’m sure I’m only remembering the bits I want to remember, but nonetheless, I’m still dragging myself back all those year, for the simple sake of comparison.

Yes, we all argued, me and my brother, Russell, or my and my sister, Emma. Or Emma and Russell, or any other combination of the three of us against each other.  We fought, screamed and argued our way through the foundation years of our lives, which has inadvertently become the Brett Rigby Benchmark, used for the comparisons of life mentioned above.

We were probably no different to how Jack and Oliver are now, in that we, too, were very spoilt little children who had almost EVERYTHING we could dream for and more, and had no idea about the values of things… as children don’t.

Our parents worked. They bought us lots of things, and we didn’t go without.  They’re in the same boat.

But the other thing I keep reminding myself about, is that we’ve not done this whole ‘parenting’ thing before, and there’s no manual that helps.  As an IT geek, there are rules for making things work; but life ain’t that easy. And so, we’re trying to find out how to do this for ourselves. 

By and large, we’re doing ok with it – not amazingly, like people dream and envisage whilst the lady is still carrying, but ok.  We have our good days, but we’re probably outweighed with our days of late, in shouting at an angry, argumentative (spoilt) child. 

Of course, we want to do the best we can, and Claire and I are always talking about something that’s recently happened, and what we can do as parents to fix it, or make sure it doesn’t happen again, etc. We spend nights awake talking about this stuff, but sometimes I think it’s also a little of Jack/Oliver learning for themselves, too.  They’re learning the same boundaries that I did as a child; they’re learning that bad things mean good things are sent away for a bit; they’re learning who they are too, just as I did.

So, maybe boys will be boys, but we’re trying to help them learn from the mistakes we made in the past too, and sometimes, they need to make mistakes for themselves in the first place.

The boy can RIDE!

Lack of context there, admittedly, so I’ll try to explain myself.

The boy, (Oliver), can RIDE (his bike without stabilisers)!

During the summer holidays, I’ve been determined to get Oli onto his bike and ride like Jack and the other bigger boys do, namely, without his stabilisers. He’s been fairly reluctant to begin with, but when I told him that his friend Charlie (from down our road) can ride his bike “like a big boy”, I could see that I had caught his attention.

I’ve been holding the rear of the seat and holding him up-right, but I think he’s been over-relying on my being there, to the point of not bothering to try and balance in the middle of the bike, but then as the feeling of loss of control happened, he’d let go of the handlebars and reach out for me, making the whole bike unsteady. Not really the best thing to do, but it worked for him, as I’d soon grab him and come to an abrupt stop.

But Sunday this week, we tried again, same as we have been, and this time, he just seemed to get it and understood the idea of peddling hard and staying upright, and was going quick enough to make me break out into a swift jog alongside him.

Giggling all the way, he obviously enjoyed it, we did lots more ‘lengths’ of our part of the road and he loved it. We only stopped as he’d seen that Jack was playing on a ride-on truck, and then jealousy set in. But then, and after I had put the bike back in the garage, did he go back in and ask to go again. Also, in a completely un-related topic, it was also bloomin’ hot that weekend, and so it was me that was dripping with sweat, from running alongside him.

The next trick, is for him to learn to:

look forward pay attention to what he’s about to crash into…

Madness. but very funny.

"Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies"

So, I’ve got two boys. ‘Chalk’ Rigby and ‘Cheese’ Rigby.

Jack…
Simply. Cannot. Lie.

He tries; once he's thought about it for a moment, but then messes it up. We even got thrown off of a water slide at Center Parcs because Jack ‘fessed up at the wrong moment, after I told the slide-man at the top that he’d been on it before, despite being under the funny minimum height-measuring stick by a smidgeon.  So, it was the swimming pool walk of shame, right down past all the others, each then doubting their own ability to ride.

Master Oliver, however, has definitely got the 'little boy gene' for telling porkies. Sometimes it's just over embellishment, which as adults normally happens with your mates having a pint in the pub. But this kid's certainly a ‘live wire’.

Outright and not bothered, I'll see him do something, whether it's whack Jack or throw something, and then flat-out lie about it, to my face. Then, later, he'll then believe his version of events, fictitious of course, and then we'll have a repeat argument/discussion about it. 

I always had a good imagination, and this probably helped/hindered me and my lying ability as a child (don’t check this my folks!) and this is probably just what Oli is doing. It’s just the blatant-ness of it all which is amusing, but not helpful if you need to tell him off at the same time!!  Little snot.

Teeth (or lack of!)

So, Jack is (finally!) at that age where his teeth are starting to fall out.

Not because of them being gammy or manky or anything like that, but thanks for thinking it, all the same.

No, but instead, his teeth are being muscled-out by other bigger, newer, stronger teeth; ones that might last for his entire life, instead of these mamby-pamby baby ones that have only managed about 7 years. Pfft.

In the past couple of weeks, his fourth tooth has finally come out. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except the third and fourth teeth were buddies and were the ones that usually greeted you during a smile; yes, I am badly referring to the two front teeth, at the top. These bad-boys are no more. (Well, unless you're the tooth fairy!!)

Whistling and lisp'ing is common place at the moment, and I'm sure that he'll just get used to them not being there, and the new ones will show up late to the party.

Of course, Oliver is a little jealous and can't understand why his teeth aren't yet falling out. He'll say something, pronounce it incorrectly, and when I correct him, he immediately blames his loose teeth, that he doesn't have.

General catch-up

The boys are both growing and growing, both physically and mentally. That sounds like an obvious thing for anyone to say, especially being as I live in the same house as them, but sometimes when you see micro-changes in something, it's hard to see the longer-term changes.

Jack is getting taller. He's still bony thin, but I always was right up until... I got married, I think! He eats all of his food and then some, but he just seems to have the same 'shape' about him that I always had.

Oliver is racing ahead at the moment. He's getting much heavier as the months pass, as he's changed from having a small kid shape to having a little-big-boy look. You know the one I mean, he's certainly not fat, although he does eat almost EVERYTHING we have that's edible, but he's a lot more thick-set than Jack is.

To put paint on that picture, if I hold Jack's arm, my finger touches my thumb as it closes around him. Master Oliver, however, my fingers area noticeable distance apart, where the meat on his arm is.

Oliver has been carrying on with his reading, both with Claire and I, but also on the Reading Eggs website, which he's absolutely racing through. And I don't mean that in the sense that he's whizzing through but not actually understanding what the letters or words mean. What I mean, is that he's shown the letters or words in the lesson and then he's tested on it such that it proves (or not!) that he understood what's going on. And the fact that we can sit there watching him do all of this and understand what he's meant to be doing without us helping a great deal, sort of solidifies it for me really. But Claire is still spending a lot more time with him and his reading than I am with him, and she's putting the same fantastic amount of effort in that she did do with Jack, and it's definitely paying off. We couldn't get out of the car the other day at Tescos, as Oliver was still reading the letters and words from the builders van parked next to us in the car park.

Everything seems to be 'opened up' to him, now that he's able to read - it's sort of magical watching the learning process happen, and is very hard to explain. Yes, I want to big-him-up as his dad, but he's grasped the idea of what reading is all about and that's not something you can make him do, it's something that has clicked in his head.

When I was at university, and I might have mentioned this before, but one of the threads of the geeky computers course I was doing, was on Artificial Intelligence. The lecturer at the time, Anton something or other, made a point about AI, and about how very difficult it was to make a machine or computer application actually understand, and how much more difficult it was for them to learn. He said something along the lines of "if you want to *see* learning take place, have children", but I'd guess that being around them would work too. Basically, looking back now, I can see what he was getting at, as at the time, having children was not on my radar. He's right, and watching them both learn, adapt and understand new things that get thrown at the every single day is very... cool. Not in a 15-year old 'that's cool', but a gentle rocking/nodding action of the head, coupled with a slight up-turned lips-into-a-smile agreeance whilst hum-muttering a single voweled word 'huhm' sort of cool.

Having said all this wonderful stuff about them, I think it's fair to say that there's no chance that we'd have any more of the little monsters. If they're not waking up at 2:30am and banging about en-route to the bathroom for a poo, and announcing their success, they're arguing about which tv program to watch or which character they are in their imaginary/make-belief games.

Little darlings. Must start counting the days until they're old enough to start university...

Parents' Evenings

So, we've just had our first (ever) school parents' evening for young Oliver - I booked half a day of holiday from work to come home early, to go to see Oli's teacher about his progress.

It's amazing, as all the things that she said about Oliver are exactly what we would like to hear from the teacher… but see so very rarely at home.

"Oh, he's a pleasure to teach"

"He plays so nicely with other chidren"

"He gets on and does, whatever we're doing and doesn't kick up a fuss"

Pfft. Yeah, right.

Maybe at school, but at home, he can be right little handful, that one. Maybe at home, he's able to let down his hair (metaphorically-speaking, as we clipper it quite short!) and that's perhaps when he learns to be around Jack. Granted, that being around Jack might be a bit stressful for him, but that's what brothers are for, is to tease and play with.

But she did comment on his vocabulary and his ability to read, given his age, which was great, as Claire has been spending lots of time with him, either on the readingeggs.co.uk website or through getting him to read short books and pick words out using flash-cards.

Reading Eggs has played a big part in his read, and I'm sure I might have mentioned it in an earlier post, but it's WELL worth noting again. It teaches children words and encourages them to learn it mostly through repetition, but also through games and tasks, all with short exercises but frequent rewards; with these rewards, he is then able to 'spend' them on upgrading his avatar or other things in the game. He also gets to print out a real-life certificate too, which he is most proud of. So, yes, cannot say a bad word about Reading Eggs - a fantastic website, aimed at teaching children how to read, showing them the wonders that it brings too.

Going back to Oli, and his teacher, she said that he's quite laid back and will do as they ask (!!) and will also join in with lots of different people, irrespective of differences. For instance, if he wants to play in the sand, which he can do, there may already be people in there, but he's not put off by playing in there if, say, there's someone he doesn't like or doesn't get on with, or… heaven-forbid… a girl is in there. Remember, he’s at ‘that age’ whereby they’ve just realised that there are boys and the other ones, (namely GIRLS – and yes, you have to say it like GiiiiiiiiRRLS), and that boys are great and girls… well, they're not. This is obviously a little ‘virus’ that must spread around the school, particularly easily when some children have3 older siblings to help introduce new 'things' to them. Either way, it is certainly not something that we'd say at home.

But my badly-illustrated point, is that he's a generally happy little lad with no fears, but no concerns either. And just gets on and does it. Obviously, very much like myself. Except I'm not so little height-wise anymore!!

Oliver can READ!

Claire has been painstakingly taking Oliver through the Reading Eggs programme on the computer, which are web-based lessons that are designed and aimed at nippers that want to read.

He started a little while back and has been doing absolutely brilliantly at it, learning about each letter in turn and, through repetition, playing games to make the lesson stick.

A game might introduce a letter, such a ‘B’, pronounced ‘buh’ in the phonetic-world, and then might have to burst the balloons that have the letter ‘b’ on it. Then, it progresses onto pictures of objects that start with the same sound, like ‘ball’, ‘balloon’ and so on, and then later, to later join them up so that there’s a ball and the better ‘b’ on it, to tie them both together.

The lessons are really fantastic, and we’re both absolutely amazed as to how well he’s done, earning lots of certificates from the lessons at set stages, so he’s got small challenges to work to, and a physical printed reward for doing so. Besides, he thinks he’s playing games and we know that he’s learning probably THE best thing in the world – if he struggles to read, then he’s going to carry that baggage around with him forever, so we’re investing in his future-self.

Claire’s also bought some of the books in the same range, so we’ve got some ‘grown-up’ style books for him to read to us at bed-time – he’s used to seeing Jack read his school story book to us, then as a reward for doing so, he gets either Claire or I to read to him. So, wanting to copy Jack and have what Jack’s got and be able to do what Jack does, Oli doesn’t put up a fight about doing so, as this is what he knows to be ‘normal’, which is great.

Oli and I have been working through the same Thomas the Tank Engine books that Jack and I went through a few years ago, and we’re almost done already. To begin with, he didn’t want to listen to the 5-10 minute stories, but now, it’s just part of going to bed. In fact, when we’re back late from anywhere, when it’s already late enough, trying to get him to go to bed without a story is a nightmare!! It’s quicker to read the book and get him off to sleep in a relatively happy mood, as opposed to spending the next half hour arguing with him and putting him back to bed endlessly. Again, as I said in an earlier post some time ago, it’s simply picking the battles.

Whilst he’s reading, there’s still plenty of words that he doesn’t yet know, but he’s getting to grips with a load already – to the point whereby he doesn’t need to sound-out each letter (phonetically) and try to join the sounds together, but he’s getting better at simply READING them and moving onto the next one.

I know this sounds like an obvious thing to say, as this is how children read – namely parents spending time with them, and helping them and teaching them new words, etc etc etc. But I say this simply because Oliver has only just turned four years old in the past couple of weeks. We thought Jack did well to pick up the ability to read quite early, but Oli seems to have a head start!

His pre-school teacher even took him out of his class and into another, for their teacher to asses Oli and his reading – they showed him various flashcards with single words on, no pictures, and Oli had to read the letters, form the words and pronounce them… which he did brilliantly. They were so happy, they gave him a sticker as a reward and was excited enough to tell Claire as she picked the boys up from school that day.

Good lad, Oli Riggs! My little star.