We have arrived home this evening after a week spent in Lincolnshire with my brother and his family. It took on my role as “children’s entertainer” for my nephew and played Chess, Lego, had pitched battles with hundreds of plastic knights, and (perhaps most crucially) breezed through the various license tests in Gran Turismo for the little lad. At one point while traversing a particularly windy section of the the Nurburgring Nordschlief in a Lotus Elise he piped up “how come you make it look so easy Uncle Jonathan?”
I smiled.
It’s the first time we have spent any serious time with my brother’s family in ages. Following the various stuff we have been learning about child development I find myself working things out when children play up - in this case finding the causes for (how shall I put this) situations with my nephew. It’s difficult, because if you speak out you hurt the parents, and if you keep quiet then the situations are going to happen again and again. I’m not going to get into any specific things that happened here, but let’s just say that even our rudimentary understanding of cause, effect and attention seeking made it obvious what was going on.
It’s funny, isn’t it - all the parents who read this will be saying “just you wait until you’re in the middle of it”. We know that when we do finally complete the adoption journey, we may well be facing world war three in our house, at which point everybody else will smile as we sink up to our neck in chaos
And you will all say “Go read your books now then…”