School Holiday Bitzer Edition

After carefully counting out the days on a calendar, Cherub realised there was only 90 more sleeps! till his birthday and immediately began preparation of the Secret Birthday List, which I am not allowed to look at. I said how can I get you what you want if you won't show me the Secret List? and he quite saw that that might make shopping a problem so he will let me see it as of September 15th. It was going to be a mere one week before the birthday but we haggled.



Yesterday we took Nell and the boys to Arthur's Seat to run around The Enchanted Maze. We had a great time. As well as a proper hedge maze, there were brain teaser mazes, like the giant tyre one where you have to get to the middle following the red-blue-green pattern, or the one where you can only turn left or go straight ahead. There was also a childrens' maze featuring a big Snakes and Ladders game (Cherub defeated me) and to cap it all off, a lolly shop. The boys loved it, and we adults also had a good time.



Look, two Cherubs!



Mister Fixit was once again awarded Outstanding (in his stream) Apprentice at TAFE but the award ceremony was a daytime event, possibly un-catered, so we didn't go like last year. The certificate arrived in the mail last week, unaccompanied by a cheque sad to say. Last year it was a sponsored award and he received $200. But Fixit says he'll tell his work about the award because when his work eventually got the memo about last year's achievement (6 months after the fact) they gave him a Myer voucher for $100.



And Fixit's Mum says if work doesn't come up with the goods this year, she'll get him something. So ace.



We've done a lot of talking with and in front of Climber (and Cherub) re the whole dropkick-threatener-Dad situation and I hope the lesson my boys have come away with is that they absolutely must come talk to us if anything like that ever happens again. I'm still very cranky and not hiding that from the kids. As we read Harry Potter together the other night I said I'd love to send The Loathsome Bully a Howler, right in the schoolyard. How good would that be? Climber tells me that if he'd seen the Creep in the playground he used to detour so as not to walk near him. Flipping heck.



I mentioned in Climber's hearing that I thought that the way in which Climber had been so fulsomely and excessively punished for a relatively minor wrong-doing (he laughed at the other child, for goodness' sake!) had resulted in him feeling unfairly hard done by when he'd received other more legitimate tickings-off during the last 6 months since that idiot threatened him. It was like the scales fell from Climber's eyes when I said that, he said yes, that's exactly how I did feel! That really makes sense. I suspect that all that non-specific misery he's been feeling about school was in large part related to this, and am therefore hoping he can now relax and enjoy again, and concentrate on learning.

Even though this was a negative thing to have happened, we can still take some positives away from it. Such as learning that the worst thing you can do in such a situation is to bottle it up and not tell someone, and that bad things are survivable.