Thursday photo #305

It’s a strange thing when most of your daily interactions are via social media rather than in person. I’m not glued to social media, but it does form a big part of my life. It’s one of the best ways to share blog content and interact with others who do similar work. It’s also useful to interact with people who work from home, it would be quite lonely with no contact at all with anyone during office hours. That said, it definitely gives me a distorted perception of reality. A reality where people are panic buying toilet rolls and living their lives differently because of the threat of coronavirus. Because when I actually speak to people, they’re all relatively sensible. It’s business as usual until we are told otherwise.

Catching up with friends

We had a lovely weekend meeting up with some old school friends of mine. One of them has children a little bit older than my two and the last time we saw them, the four of them got on brilliantly together. This time, when we met up they all went a bit shy. For the first ten minutes or so, they stayed in their sibling pairs and didn’t interact.

Then, we went up onto the hills and everything changed. They immediately became a group and if you didn’t know differently, you’d say they’d known each other for ever. They played in the stream, ran, climbed hills and trees and found sticks to play bows and arrows with. There wasn’t a moment’s moaning about being tired from any of them, despite climbing one of the steepest hills in Malvern. In fact, the only complaint was when it was time to come home. One of my friend’s children suggested that we really should make getting together an annual event. He’s right, of course.

In her own time

Lia has always done things in her own time and often in a strange order. I was chuckling to myself the other day when I remembered when she first started counting. We were in a waiting room at the ballet studio while Libby was in a class. Lia took out an abacus from the toy basket and started playing with it. After a while, she shuffled over to me and showed me the abacus. Then, she counted to ten while moving the beads along. This wouldn’t have been remarkable if it hadn’t been for the fact that at that point, I didn’t even realise she could talk.

We’ve had a similar thing recently with her reading. She’s been getting on ok with it since starting school, but it has been a bit of a chore. Her reading was slow with a lot of sounding out and very little fluency. Until a few weeks ago, when it suddenly fell into place. One day she sat down with a school book and read it to me, completely fluently with expression in the right places. Since then, she’s been happily reading Libby’s library books. Because she’s still doing phonics in class, if there’s a word she doesn’t recognise she can nearly always sound it out.

This odd quirk is a good reminder that everyone develops at their own pace. Lia can often seem a bit behind others her age until one day, something clicks and she catches up overnight. At nearly six, she still hasn’t lost any teeth. She’s one of the last in her class to do so but yesterday, she finally came home and announced her tooth was wobbly. She’s disappointed to be one of the last but in her own inimitable style, I’m sure she’ll soon catch up with the others.

A quick photo snapped before ballet this week but at least they both managed not to pull silly faces for a change.