The Creator has a Masterplan

The Creator has a Masterplan

This song by Pharoah Saunders is truly wonderful, fabulous musicians, free form jazz, peace and happiness for everyone. It's long, really long, like half an hour or something and gets pretty intense in places but it has been a favourite of mine for over twenty years.

A twitter friend wrote a blog post the other day that was two different versions of the same day, she asked her readers to guess which was real and which was made up. This is an appropriate way to view our Saturday. From one view S had a friend over, they did drawing, washing animals, playing shops and we went for a cafe supper at the beach. From the other perspective a brief summary would be to say Middle Small broke the window in the outside toilet. Both of these perspectives are true by the way. S had a super day with her friend, so much so that we rather lost track of time, to be honest I had sort of thought she might ask to go home at some point but she didn't! She is exactly two years older than S and 4 years older than E, almost to the day, in fact her birthday is one of the only two days that separate Big and Middle Smalls! We'll call her I! I did a fabulous drawing of a row of terrace houses and pointed out to S that she used to draw a gap between the land and the sky in her pictures until she noticed that there wasn't one! S read to I, Winnie the Witch: Mini Winnie, and The Trojan War, I notice now that S is really putting feeling into the characters when she reads. Lovely to hear. I likes things tidy, organised and neat and she had a great time re-organising our wooden shop into the correct classifications and size ranking the schelich animals. We landed up a Sea Lane Cafe in Goring for supper, I even indulged in banoffe pie and an iced coffee. A little daft really considering but, after the events of the afternoon, I rather fancied it. After food we had arranged a rendezvous with I's brother and sister and all six of the little people had fun in the sea and the rock pools. The tide at Goring was the farthest out I have ever seen it. They found a crab. For the red heads in our family early evening is the best time to enjoy the seaside. That was the good day. If you read my post yesterday you will know that almost from the word go we were having problems with Middle Small. I started out well suggesting: fist clenching, deep breaths, drawing pictures in response to angry feelings, all things that have been helping recently, but when all of this failed and I got angry, Baby Small had been up in the night. 1am, 2am, 3am. I handed over to The Daddy One until his patience was spent then we both just had emptied our reservoirs and totally lost it with him. Not good. His response was to break the window in our outside toilet. With his fist. In addition there were so many toilet based accidents that at one point yesterday we had actually exhausted our supply of pants. He is seriously strong. In the photo here he is (far left) the youngest child by more than a year in one case and three years in another. He is the biggest by quite some margin. So, after thinking that progress had been made, we are back to the drawing board which, after a good hours crying on the sofa last last night today looks like this.

1. Re investigate food allergies: thoughts include bread and red food colouring. I have been considering taking him for some vega testing which we did with Big Small when she was a baby following a strong reaction to avocado.
2. Take him to the Doctors just to rule out physical problems, although confidence in this is very low, I don't hear positives about this angle from anyone.
3. Would be benefit from some time with a child minder? Is separation the answer to what might well be an attention based problem? Not for a moment do I really think it will help him but might give everyone else some space.
4. Try some new discipline ideas. He does not seem motivated by carrot and stick or fear and guilt and sanctions at all and is acting on impulse is just that? Does impulse control come with maturity? Perhaps there are a few occasions recently when we should have left him at home but would he even make the connection or, if he didn't want to come where we were going would he act up just to stay home with a dedicated adult? Is he even that smart?
5. That all of this is actually a pretty normal part of raising a boy who is jealous of his baby brother and intimidated by his Big Sister's abilities It is just that people are not honest about how hard they find parenting or they delegate most of it to someone else and so blame them when it all goes wrong.
6. Fundamentally we do not want to raise compliant adults who do as they are told but failure to respond to a request like "Stop hitting" is not acceptable. How can we encourage cooperation without a backlash?
7. We need to try and ensure in future that something specific is organised for the other siblings when a playdate happens especially in the winter.

As I type this he is playing so nicely and has been for an hour or more, it is hard to imagine yesterday happened! Well obviously if he wasn't I wouldn't be able to write down my thoughts. This is not a 24/7 issue and of course I am aware that many parents manage children with specify conditions and disabilities but for our little unit this ripple is making waves. Overall Middle Small has been significantly better today, certainly there have been no further breakages, thankfully. He slept in this morning and so The Daddy One and Big Small went swimming early, just the two of them, and, as a result, were able to do lots of practise without the float and for S a further opportunity to show off her new swimming costume, although the pool was empty bar two adult swimmers doing lanes they tell me. S has been reading today, on Tuesday she discovered Jacqueline Wilson and has so far read "Sleepover" "Mum Minder" "Werepuppy" "Vicky Angel" (skip the first chapter Mum it's too sad) and "Lizzie Zipmouth" and signed up to the website. It would appear that Jacqueline Wilson is as prolific an author as S is a reader. Should keep her going for a week or two!