Daily Responsibilities

We don't have a problem with TV; he has screen time and certainly during the holidays he has an hour of tablet time most days. But… he is also quite happily just to sort of play independently. I'll come downstairs in the morning he will come down and while I'm doing his breakfast he will quite happily and independently get some colouring out and do that by himself. He is quite happy to have the television turned off, although he you know, he is at that point where he will specifically ask for certain programmes, and he'll want to watch them if you let him for hours on end. But equally, he is quite happy and compliant when you say that it, it's time to turn it off and go outside or, or do something a little bit more hands on. So yeah, that is pretty much it.

It's given me a structure to the day and the baby a structure to the day, in that we have to be up and out the house to take his sibling into school and then to pick him up again, so we know we've got those sorts of time structures to our day. And it means that I get to do one-to-one with the baby, whilst his sibling is at school. So, on one level actually it seems him, him starting school has been great timing for me, not particularly planned that way. But on the other hand, yeah I miss him, I still miss him now as much as I did in September when he started.

My husband's really very dyslexic, so it's not surprising that our child is struggling, because it's possible that he has some issues in that way as well. Because we had talked about this before we started, we were hoping that the teachers might just be quite relaxed with it and help him to feel enjoyment and motivation for it, but actually, what we feel is happening is that they're just pushing him really hard to be doing it really well which is just de-motivating him entirely. So that's really hard work for us, because I'd love to be the Mummy who gets home, sits down, does the reading book with him, do all of those kind of jobs, but actually, if you get his reading book our he gets really stressed. So, it tends to be that we avoid this kind of school tasks entirely and find other ways to do other types of reading. Reading for pleasure is much, much better for him, he will ready much more complex sentences if it's a book that he enjoys, so it's just about making sure that that compromise is there while making sure that we don't... kind of stop doing it all together, because it will be a routine that he needs to get into in terms of the homework and the reading and things that is going to be expected of him as he goes through school.