NotSheep

The first of September – and so the summer ends – not officially, I know, but it does feel that way. Or it would, if we’d had any summer to speak of.

We got all skooly first thing this morning, with Barney and Jack working on maths (Barney on his own, Jack with me) and Freddy doing Rosetta Stone French. As Cyril isn’t supposed to hear any French here, I sent him and George into the living-room to play on the Wii. An hour or so later, I gathered everyone together to go to the library – except for Barney, who stayed at home to continue studying. We did a couple of errands before going into the library, so Cyril got to see a little bit more of the town – and without it being rained on, which is a first for him In the library, we looked for some books that we could perhaps use to help his English along, but he didn’t seem very interested – or perhaps it was a lack of understanding? I borrowed a couple of books that I thought might help; they’ll be here if he decides they’re helpful. And I paid unfair library fines – I’d returned a stack of books in July, but when I looked at my account on-line in August they were still showing as borrowed – and overdue. As I had no time to deal with it, I clicked the “renew all” button so that at least they wouldn’t be overdue. Most of them have disappeared from my account since then – presumably when someone else borrowed them – but two were still there, and sure enough, the librarian found them on the shelf this morning. She also waived the overdue fines, because of course they hadn’t been overdue. But she isn’t able to waive the charges that were applied for on-line renewals of overdue books. Grrrrr.

We came home and started to get lunch ready, but Cyril dissolved into tears again. He isn’t yet at the point where he’ll accept my attempts to comfort him, and Barney tried too (in French), but it didn’t seem to be much help. Realising that he’s seemed very withdrawn since yesterday evening, I tried to talk to him – including explaining that we knew that the other children had not been helping things along, but that we’d talked about this and they were going to do better. In retrospect, I should probably have talked to him about that last night, but I was so busy telling them off for their behaviour that I never thought he might need to know that they’d been told off – that what he’d seen so far wasn’t how it always was. I also reminded him that he needs to talk to us, even if hes not sure how to say things, and Barney told him that if he doesn’t tell us when there’s a problem, we can’t do anything about it. George and Freddy also apologised to Cyril for not having been “good brothers” to him in the last few days, and he seemed to understand and appreciate that.

As the sun was out, I suggested that George and Cyril go out for a bicycle ride, and he seemed to enjoy that too. When they came home, they (and Freddy, Jack and Toby) watched a DVD of Madagascar – again, something Cyril has seen before, so he doesn’t need to understand all the English in order to follow the story – and I thought too that maybe it would make him laugh…

After the movie Scratchy arrived with pizzas for dinner (Cyril hasn’t been eating much, but had said he liked pizza, so it seemed like a good idea). Afterwards the children all seemed to gravitate towards the television again and they watched another movie. I asked George what he was doing – silly question, really, given that we’d been to the library. But George reading alone isn’t helping Cyril, so I suggested they needed to do something together. George was lost for ideas, so I suggested they read an Asterix book together – maybe even take one character each and read their words. George liked that idea; I wasn’t sure if Cyril would understand enough to get what he was supposed to do, but it seems he did: I’ve just gone in to check on things and found George, Cyril and Freddy still reading, doing funny voices and all three of them laughing