OctoberOn of Falco’s favourite toys is a cork board that you can nail coloured wooden pieces onto. It was his favourite at playschool and he makes elaborate pictures with it: water with boats and swimmers and a sun. The one shown here is a scarecrow with a moon and a sun.
He is a still a great flirt and strikes a pose and pulls all kinds of funny faces whenever he sees a camera. He really loves seeing the (digital) pictures then appear on the back of the camera or on Mama’s computer. Falco also loves dressing up and pretend. Just before the picture was taken he shouted “Abracadabra… MONSTER!” and then appeared round the corner with Daniel’s gym shoes and Matthijs’ gloves on: a glove and a shoe on his feet and likewise on his hands. “Now I am a monster!” he growled...
Matthijs is also gradually learning to entertain his brothers. He is a good reader now and sometimes reads aloud to them. Daniel really enjoys that and hangs on every word.
An old lady who lives on our square gave Daniel a catalog from the local toy-supermarket. He was utterly delighted and kept it safe under his mattress for ages, so that Falco and Matthijs would not get to it. Finally, after two weeks, he borrowed a pair of scissors and started cutting out pictures, all of which turned out to be laptops, gameboys and playstations: we have obviously been giving him the wrong example. “For Saint Nicholas”, he told Marjolein. “So it doesn’t matter if it’s expensive. You don’t need to pay for it!” Saint Nicholas is starting very early this year apparently...
Matthijs had a Pharos camp this month. Pharos is an association for people with smart children that we joined a while ago. The idea of the Pharos camps is to let smarter children interact with peers and have their own kind of fun. School is going rather badly for Matthijs right now, so we were not sure if it would go well, but he had (a few small scuffles excepted) a super time and came back utterly addicted to Monopoly. The camp was at a WW2 fortress called Fort Penningsveeron the outskirts of Haarlem and, though it is a effectively a bunker, it is a beautiful location, surrounded by trees and water. Matthijs is already looking forward to the next camp in November.
School is going steadily down hill: there are four rather rowdy boys (including Matthijs) in his class and they reinforce each other, egging each other on to misbehave. Matthijs is in a negative spiral of bad behavior and steadily increasing punishments which we have been unable to break out of with the usual stickers and praise. He needs a firm and structured environment to give him focus and he does not seem to be getting that in this class. The material is rather too simple for him. He gets very bored, and starts looking for “entertainment” of the worst kind and other outlets for his frustration. The teacher cannot really cope: she does not understand why she cannot get the gang of four to toe the line.
The school hopes that play-therapy (Matthijs starts next month) will do wonders, but we are skeptical. It may well help him to find better ways of expressing his feelings and controlling his impulses, but it will not take the boredom and frustration away. We are going to call in the school psychologist at the end of the month, she made some sensible recommendations before, which have yet to be followed up.
Some fun things happened at school too. Childrens’ Book Week had magic as a theme this week and the school was transformed into a sort of Hogwarts: all the children could come in dressed as witches and wizards and there were lots of magical activities. As our monsters are well supplied with dressing up clothes they were able to go in full regalia.
Matthijs had skating lessons this month. He has a “sports passport” that lets him try out lots of different sports. The day of the first lesson was a bad school day and Matthijs was a very bad mood: very distant and difficult to handle. Marjolein gave him a serious talk so that he would not go wild in the skating lesson. She suggested skipping the lesson because it would be difficult for him to change his mood. He quickly promised to do his best, but she insisted that he think carefully about it. By promising, she said, he would take responsibility for doing his best and putting his bad mood aside.
He gave it some thought and decided to make a go of it.
When they got to the rink she discovered that she had forgotten the obligatory gloves and had to rush home for them. So she gave Matthijs his sports passport, money to hire skates, told him more or less which way to go (she had never been in the rink either), sent him in and tore off. Fortunately Daniel and Falco had play-dates so she was able to dash home and back again. When she returned she found Matthijs was in the skate-hire office where he had hired skates in the right size and was just putting them on. He also did his absolute best at the skating lesson. Given he had just had a rotten day it was very impressive that he had managed to change his mood and take responsibility. We were both very proud of him. It makes you realize how things could be at school…The weather was beautiful all October except for the three first days of the autumn school holiday, when it rained buckets endlessly. That was just when we had taken a chalet at the Slagharen Pony Park. The weather was absolutely abysmal, but the pony-park was fun, though extremely muddy and the toads enjoyed sitting on the pony rather more than we enjoyed wading through the mud and leading it.
They pony-rode all day (surrounded by 99.9% girls) and the park people had the child-pleasing thing down: indian headdresses, chips galore with everything, a nice little log cabin to sleep in and, thank the lord, a heated swimmingbath. The pony seemed to have a permanent depression, but as far as I can tell all ponies are like that. Probably having kiddos jumping up and down on you all day and permanent hock-deep mud does not help their moods. The last day was fine and we spent it as the associated theme part going on all the rides. Despite everything it was a successful holiday.
An anecdote: Matthijs was considering whether he would like to give a speech/presentation in front of the whole class. Though he loves an audience, the prospect of a whole class of children staring at him was daunting. Marjolein tried firing his enthusiasm by saying that he could talk about something he likes, space or dinosaurs or volcanos, for example. “Yes Mama!” he exclaimed “I could tell them how fish became dinosaurs!” To Marjolein’s nonplussed look: “the fish swam closer and closer to the land and their babies came on land and started breathing air and their babies <pop> grew legs. Some of the babies started eating meat and later they became Tyrannosaurus Rex. But that took ages, almost a hundred years!” It’s the short guide to evolution. So you see, you can teach it in schools…
October 2005
.wmv file, 8,2 Mb, 2 minutes
