A few wows

I'm snuggled on the sofa, Duncan's just fallen asleep beside me, all wrapped in the red blanket and clutching a collection of Magic Roundabout toys. Gordon's away for the night in Belgium (looking forward to some good chocolate!) and I've just had a dose of silly Thursday night TV (Hotel Babylon- fluffy, ridiculous and entertaining).

We've had a good day. I wasn't too grumpy, and the children weren't too irritating. Lady and Thomas only argued about 3 times, and Duncan was in excellent spirits. Wow!

At one stage, we were all gathered around the kitchen table, Gordon was working on his talk for tomorrow, Lady was drawing an elephant and a koala bear from her Draw Write Now book and reading about them in an animal encyclopedia, I was drawing a Soldier Sam (from the Magic Roundabout film) for Duncan and Thomas was playing Starfall on the computer. After a while I tried to interest Thomas in doing some activities in one of the many learn-to-write workbooks we have lying around. He was totally uninterested, and insisted that playing Harry Potter PC games was his work. So I left him to it, but then Duncan started filling in the workbook. There were several pages, with all the letters of the alphabet written out in rows, with 4 letters for the child to trace over, and then a picture and word of something starting with that letter. Duncan picked out a light red marker pen and carefully traced the 1st 'a', then chose a blue marker for the 2nd 'a', then the 3rd he traced in green, then for the 4th he used yellow. Next he asked me to colour in the apple, and he started on the letter 'b', again using red, blue, green then yellow. He did the same for all the letters up to k, when he tired of this activity, and decided to write 'big thunder mountain' along the bottom of the page.

He named all the pictures but didn't recognise the word or picture of an igloo. I said 'it's an igloo; Pingu lives in an igloo', he told me, 'Duncan lives in an igloo, Duncan eats fish.' So he knew what I was on about.

And that reminds me; the other big thing is that he has discovered a love of fish. We had salmon for dinner last night and he gobbled it up, with loads of potatoes and peas. He wanted more fish today and since we had no more fresh, wild salmon (delicious but dear) I offered him some sardines from a tin, and he liked them. Again, wow! I don't know whether this sudden and welcome addition to his diet will last, but for now, I'm happy about it.

Duncan has also been doing more drawing for himself. First he drew a copy of the front of his Zurg toy's costume and stuck it onto his pyjamas with sticky tape, the next day he drew a great copy of the old Ragdoll logo (as in the production company behind Teletubbies and Brum). This was his first ever solo and unasked for attempt at drawing a face, and it's good. Today he made his own 3-D copy of the Thunder Mountain train, with only minimal input from me. I'm so glad to see him gain the confidence or whatever it is to do these things for himself; not least because I'm lazy enough to hope that perhaps he won't be asking me to draw quite so often.