He’s FOUR years old!

\An obvious thing to say, but yes, I’m starting to comprehend this.

I think I have been comparing Jack to Oliver, and have probably been expecting a little too much of Jack.

Maybe it was around when Oliver was born, I think that we started to treat Jack like he was a bit older than he was, as you could converse with him, play games with him and get him to do the odd menial task, too.

As Oliver hasn’t really mastered the art of sleeping yet, the wife and I are sort of struggling to survive of late. I, certainly, have been probably putting a little too much on Jack, expecting him to understand the problems that we’re dealing with, and then get disappointed with Jack when he acts… like a four year old.

This morning was pretty bad. I had little sleep, and was fairly grumpy to Jack when he comes into the spare room where I had been sleeping, saying that his Lego-man torch had strangely had an arm amputation in the night. It wasn’t that he came in and woke me, as I’m a fairly light sleeper and heard him clamber out of bed. It was more that it was 05:30 in the morning and we had agreed just the other night that he wouldn’t get out of bed before 06:10.

Again, I must have assuming that Jack had a) remembered our conversation, b) thought to check the time before leaving his room and c) joined the dots together enough to think about what I had been doing during the night.  Never going to happen really, was it?

Because…. he’s four.

And being four, he didn’t respond in the most positive reaction to my miserable state of mind. We ended up arguing, resulting in me threatening to stop Jack from going to swimming or to his beloved Karate lessons.

Again, I was reminded that he is just four years old,by my conscience (Claire), leaving me feeling quite bad about it all. And yes, I was the bigger man and apologised to him as best I could.

I’ve spent the day thinking about it and made sure that he was in a happy mood this evening before going to bed, as he doesn’t need to care about anything other than being a four year old boy.

Because he’s four.