Another week of school done and we only have 28 more school days to go before the Christmas holidays! We started rehearsing the nativity today (although we still aren’t sure if the children are actually going to be able to perform in front a live audience) and now bonfire night is over it really does feel like we’re on the countdown to Christmas all of a sudden. I even started my Christmas shopping the other day!

This week’s pictures were just taken at home at the weekend. Gabe asked me to play snakes & ladders, and then amazingly didn’t cry when he lost! At six years old he still really struggles to control his emotions and his default response to most things he doesn’t like (whether it’s losing a game, being told off, or generally not getting his own way about something) is to cry.

It’s a tricky one to deal with because I don’t want to be the parent who says ‘boys don’t cry’ or any of those kind of things but equally, crying at everything isn’t really what we want him to be doing either. We try to say that we need to save crying for when we’re hurt or really sad about something but it doesn’t always work. School are trying to help as well but if you’ve got any suggestions of anything we can do then I would love to hear them!

Although the boys will nearly always choose to play video games if they have the chance we do try and encourage them to do other things too. Toby had the Magformers out again this weekend which are always fun. And you can just see in the background the Lego Boost robot that he built last week too. It’s such a great set – it was pretty expensive but you can make 5 different models and then programme them to move and talk using the Boost app. We’ve had it a few years now and Toby (and Gabe sometimes too) change the models every couple of months and keep coming back to play with it.

Anyway, I need to go and pick Toby up from Cubs in a minute so I’d better leave this here. Until next week…

This is my ninth year taking part in this linky celebrating childhood, based on a poem by Kahlil Gibran, “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth” .

If you’d like to see the rest of my Living Arrows posts you can find them all here.