Sophisticated

As you may know, it's World Book Day today, so all the children in the Boy Wonder's class went to nursery school dressed up as various fictional characters. When the Offspring were at school I dreaded and railed against these fancy dress days, but L is made of sterner stuff, so B went kitted out as the Gruffalo, complete with Terrible Claws his mother had constructed out of some brown gloves and pieces cut from an old pillowcase, and a book and plush toy of the Gruffalo's Child. When he came running out of the school door I tried to get into the swing of things by saying, "Oh help! Oh no! It's a Gruffalo!", but he looked at me as though I'd lost my mind, and went to talk to Granddad instead.

Sigh.

Over lunch R and I tried to tease out of him what the other children had been wearing, but he already works on the principle that school is school and home is home and never the twain shall meet, so it was an uphill struggle. Eventually he volunteered that his frenemy A came as a parrot. "Parrot," I said, "or pirate?" "Parrot," he replied firmly. "Oh. That's... different. What colour was the parrot?" "Green," he said, so decisively that I was finally convinced. But when I conveyed the information to L later, she rolled her eyes at my gullibility and said, "A came as Elsa from Frozen. Like pretty much every other girl in the class." A green parrot dressed as Elsa from Frozen is a sight I'd like to have seen.

At the playground B and I played ball in the bandstand while R went to buy coffees, until the Boy said he'd had enough of that game because I wasn't kicking the football properly, and went off looking for things to plant in the surrounding flower bed. Luckily R arrived back before we could fall out about this, and brought not only the requested babyccino with marshmellows, but a spoon with which B could eat them. He made a pretty fair job of this, with only minor spills down his new fleece jumper, but still paused at intervals to peer down at his front and exclaim, "Look at the state of me!" I foresee a career on the stage.

We were then joined by L, carrying B minor in a front sling, and B major had a good time showing Mummy some of the physical skills he's been mastering recently. When this palled he invented a new game in which he and R had to climb on and off the large boulders which the council has installed around the play area to keep the local A&E in business, and when he got tired of that he went off by himself to the other side of the playground. I followed, still thinking Fractured skull, but when he saw me he waved me away. "You have to go back over there," he said, "because I am going to do my yoga, and I need to be by myself." I backed off, but was summoned back shortly afterwards because, it turned out, we now needed to do yoga together. This involved me taking instructions such as, "We have to stand on these rocks, like this, and then we bend over like this and put our hands on this rock. That's right. And then we do this with our foot..." - this being lifting the left foot up behind, then twisting it round and putting it down on the far side of the right one, a little like dismounting from a horse. "And then we sit down on the rock like this - yes, it is rather low for you, isn't it Grandma? And then we take our sticks, and wave them like this..." and so on. 

As we were walking out of the playground later I commented that he'd been much better at the yoga than me. "Yes, he said. "I was better." "But did I do OK?" I asked. "Yes you did," he replied kindly. "You did it as good as you could." He might on occasion be an unholy terror, but at base he's a genuinely nice child.