MayMay started very well, with Marjolein and Daniel having a beautiful warm day for their joint birthday party. It was Daniel’s third party. He had already had a party at school, a kid’s party with his buddies at a big playground (see April) and now he got another load of loot from the grownups that came to this party. We really, truly make an effort not to spoil our children, but if you do not entirely flout the conventions they end up getting more toys, books and software than you can shake a stick at… That said, it was a fine party and good weather, so everyone sat in the garden. The children behaved very well and the whole company (20 warm bodies) ate (weight watchers) Boef Bourgignon with every sign of enjoyment.
The next day we gently woke up, rather late, to find that Matthijs and Daniel were singing songs about how sweet they thought each other was. Creeping up stairs to determine if these could possibly be OUR children we discovered that they had carefully made an extremely impressive robot out of Daniel’s birthday Knexx. Falco was playing cheerfully in his room. They were absolute little angels ALL DAY. Scary.
We then started preparing to go on holiday to France. It is very nice to have a big red box of a car (a red Sharan). You can just stuff everything into it, strap down the toads and go.
We stopped off at my mother’s house in Brussels, gave it a once-over, slept over and departed rested the next day. That meant that the children did not have a single long continuous journey and reduced the stress levels a lot. We got to the camp-site rather late because we ended up going through vast numbers of minuscule French towns. It still stuns me how huge France is and how many tiny little towns there are full of denim-clad farmers whose lifestyle has not significantly changed in the last 200 years. The camp-site was stuffed with Jeeps (Dutch Jeep Club) and the boiler of the caravan would not turn on. That got us down a little, but we had a very nice meal in the site restaurant and the Jeep people were friendly, though of course mad. They roared off home the next morning and a chap came and replaced our gas-bottles so we could take hot showers. The weather also got nice and warm (not hot, but lovely and sunny) so we ate outside practically every day. It was a very nice campsite, middle of nowhere, well spaced out, good swimming bath, stacks of safe play-areas for the toads within walking distance and visual range and forest walks around about.
It was quite the cure for our previous, extremely tiring and enervating, camping holiday in France. We went this time with low expectations. We expected to have a tolerable time chasing children; but we actually managed to sit and talk to each other, we swam and enjoyed ourselves. Marjolein took two fat books, expecting not to get through even one of them and ended up having to visit the camp library because she had read them though.
We also managed an outing to the local theme park Nigloland. It was a typically French combination of a very nice park (as in trees, flowers, deer) with Disneyland type rides. There were jungle boat-rides, a monorail, a Jurassic Park with giant, plastic, animatronic dinos, a sea lion show and decent coffee and food all over the place. It was an excellent day out and both we and the kiddos had a truly fabulous time.
On the final day it started to rain, so we packed up a bit earlier than planned and trundled gently home via Brussels again. The weather picked up again and we managed to stop off in Belgium and sit in the garden with some friends we had not seen for almost two years. We were back in the Netherlands for Whitsun weekend and stopped off at the Macdonalds by Schiphol to give the monsters a final treat. All in all an excellent holiday, that also demonstrated that we can start doing more things with the kids and perhaps even have a little time for each other…
Back in the Netherlands we set off in to visit some friends we had not seen in a while and I asked Matthijs in the car why he thought we were going to visit them, expecting something along the lines of "have fun, nice food" etc. Matthijs, once again more thoughtful than you might expect, said "so that we will not lose them, so we will stay friends with them."
Falco’s speech is progressing steadily. He is an excellent mimic and soaks up vocabulary very rapidly (often long before he understands it). This extends to the Spanish vocabulary he gets from his "Dora the Explorer" DVDs and some French he picked up on holiday. He counts well in English and Spanish but in Dutch he tends to skip over the number five for some reason. He also continues to be amazingly good at jigsaws: he has now conquered a 50 piece puzzler.
Talking about discotheques at the dinner table Matthijs chipped in with "with those big balls with lights in" and Daniel, demonstrating his acute observation and visual memory elaborated with "yes, like with the sea lions, with little square mirrors all over". There was indeed a disco ball in the sea lion show in France.
Poor Daniel was under the knife again this month. He was back in hospital to have his ear sorted out. Marjolein was once again struck by how enormously brave he is. Daniel can get pretty upset about unimportant things, but when he is in a genuinely scary situation he sets his little jaw and carries on unflinchingly. When the anaesthesiologist gave him the mask he took it and breathed in the gas without hesitation, even though he hated it last time. He was on the table for half an hour and then Marjolein could go to him in the recovery room. It was a hard awakening as the throat tube had hurt his throat and made him cough a lot, but after sitting on Mama’s lap for a while he felt a lot better.
I was managing the home front, but while waiting to collect Daniel and fuzzy with lack of sleep I totally forgot to collect Matthijs from school. I had just realised and was setting off with my ears burning with shame when he turned up, having carefully walked home on his own. Fortunately it is a pretty safe walk (one quiet road to cross) but I still felt like a pretty useless father for a while. Matthijs was fairly cross with me too…
The next day Marjolein’s mother came to baby-sit as we were going out to Star Wars episode 976: "Revenge of the filler between the films with the decent story and the films with lots of special effects". She brought a present for Daniel "because he had had a tough time" and we asked him if he knew why he was getting a present. "Because I had a tough time" he answered (naturally). When asked what that had been, he paused for quite a while and then came out with "because my head went under water (in the swimming bath on holiday)?" Obviously the hospital was not too traumatic.
Actually Daniel is always a brave little fellow. Two days after the operation he had to go in for a check-up and to have his bandage removed. That involved pulling loose a sticky plaster that was attached both to his (tender and battered) ear and all the little hairs around it. The doctor’s assistant came in and started pulling it loose (with some difficulty) and caused him sufficient pain to start him screaming and gripping Marjolein’s fingers as hard as he could. He did not however try to bat the assistant’s hand away: pretty restrained for an agonized five-year-old. A somewhat more intelligent/competent assistant then showed up to find out what the row was about and said that the specialist would do it. Daniel then went and sat quietly and trustingly on a chair so that the specialist could have a go: quite amazing under the circumstances. Fortunately the specialist had a spray that dissolved the glue, so taking off the sticking-plaster did not hurt at all. Marjolein’s relief at that was of course tempered by a strong desire to biff the first assistant. We have a brave, brave little boy.
Daniel will need his courage, because it is quite possible that he will need more surgery as they have not yet put back his bones of hearing. There was a build-up of thick fluid in his ear, this is not unusual in young children as the Eustachian tubes are rather constricted and it was quite possible that the bones would be displaced by that, meaning yet more surgery. The current wisdom is that it is better to wait until the tubes have grown and the ear has fully settled down (when he is about 10) before putting back the bones of hearing. In the meantime he must manage with the just the ear-drum and nerves (which should provide some level of hearing) and have a shunt to remove the fluid.
On the 25th Marjolein was fetching Matthijs from school when she was approached by an old lady who was looking for the voting station. Marjolein explained that she was a week early (voting for the European Constitution on 1st June). The lady was astonished that she had mistaken the date and Matthijs then chimed in helpfully with “Old brains ay?” We are going to teach them tact soon, very soon.
It was “Park Day” in Haarlem and a nice sunny one too. It stayed nice until the end of the day so the monsters had a fine time at the local park playing games and eating ice-creams. Highlight of the occasion was a display of medieval life by a group of highly convincing enthusiasts, who were dressed in period clothes and cooked appropriately ancient food over a wood-fire. Best of all were the ones got very slowly and intricately dressed up in suits of armour and then went and bashed each other. Matthijs plucked up the courage to go and talk to them and they kindly posed to have their picture taken with him and let him hold a ginormous sword: he looked as if he would burst with pride. Naturally Falco then grabbed one too, but Daniel (who is less courageous when it does not matter) stayed well away.
On the last day of the month we went into school to hear from the psychologist who has been observing Matthijs. Her findings were quite detailed, but nothing particularly new. The psychologist emphasised that the fact that Matthijs understood things very quickly meant that he often assumed that much of the teacher’s presentation would be redundant (as it often is) and therefore failed to listen: this is the famous three-times problem. She said that the teacher should check to see whether Matthijs had fully understood what he had to do: not just asking “did you understand?” but also “tell me what you understood”. She pointed out that missing out on the instructions often caused him to lose track and given that he was on a shorter, condensed form of the class work, if he then restarted based on what he saw his neighbours doing he would end up doing the ordinary class work too and not make the progress he should. She also said that bright children often find it had to choose between a number of possibilities and that the teacher should limit the number of alternatives he was offered as much as possible: not what the teacher expected, but very recognisable for me.
We already knew that Matthijs will never have a problem with the academic content (except perhaps where it involves much rote-learning) but that he needs to learn to work. The psychologist said that this is a typical problem for smart children. Most children already develop work-methods and the associated behaviours in playschool, but Matthijs has never needed to do things “by the numbers”: he has always understood them immediately. I recognise this: I have the same problem myself. I have great difficulty being systematic and methodical. I did not start “applying myself” until well into university work and I am still poor at it.
All in all it was a practical and useful report. We will be following up with the school to see what actions we need to take.
Frankrijk: mothersday &
sea-lion show
3.5 Mb, .wmv file
Dag van het park
6 Mb, 2 min., .wmv file
