Skip to main content

Transforming into a 7-year-old

Well, our big boy is now seven!  Like the Transformers toy he was begging for, Toby is changing rapidly from one thing to another.  He's gone from just starting school to the top year of the Infants, from hanging onto my hand to going round the block by himself, from sounding out letters to devouring Roald Dahl books.  He can beat any of us at Mariokart racing on the Wii (due, no doubt, to far too many hours of practice), wants to be in the Guinness Book of Records (for the fastest spinning hands) and likes maths the best at school. 



You won't convince Toby to try it your way unless he's tried it his way first.  But he'll always be trying something, that's for sure: making, writing, building, experimenting.  Sometimes he'll dash through it.  Sometimes he'll storm off in frustration.  Then other times he'll persevere, and produce something amazingly intricate.
 


Toby celebrated this year by having a few friends over for a birthday tea.  Seven-year-olds, we discovered, are a lot easier to entertain than five-year-olds!  Within minutes of arriving they had all vanished upstairs, with only a few muffled giggles and thumps to give them away.  They then spent most of the rest of the time on the trampoline, with a brief break for pass-the-parcel and pizza.


The cake this year was Transformer-themed.  That's Bumblebee's vehicle mode, if you didn't recognise it, with Bumblebee in robot mode perched on top. 


He got his coveted Transformer, by the way - Optimus Prime, who turns into a truck.  But, being Toby, he just had to take a moment to read a few facts from a book before opening the big present.


Happy birthday, Toby.  We're glad we get to watch you transform.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Mr White Watson of Bakewell

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions.  The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?"  This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them.  Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone.  That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of.  Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died.  And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was.  His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...

Baby Language

For some reason baby equipment is an area in which American English differs markedly from British English. As well as learning how to care for a baby, we had to learn a whole new vocabulary! Fortunately we are now fluently bilingual, and I have compiled a handy US-UK baby dictionary for you. Diaper n. Nappy Mom says if you can read this change my diaper. The first time you change one of these you will be all thumbs and stick the little adhesive tabs to yourself, the baby and probably the changing mat before you get them where they ought to go. A few years later you will be able to lasso a running toddler and change them before they even know what's happened (yes, I have seen it done). You will also get through more diapers than you ever thought possible, creating scary amounts of expense and waste. Hence we are now mostly using: Cloth diaper n. Reusable nappy Cool baby. No longer those terry squares, the main drawback is that there are now so many types it can be qu...

Portway: Alport Heights to Middleton Top

From a Heights to a Top and back again: that gives you an idea of the elevation profile of this walk. It looks like a sine wave. Wirksworth provided the trough between each peak - a town I had never thought of as down  before, but which turned out to be surrounded by considerable amounts of up . The weather was cloudier than on my previous visit, but the views from Alport Heights were still stunning. I parked at a respectful distance from a guy who had a four-metre radio mast attached to his car. Across the valley I could see the Carsington wind turbines and the craggy hump of Harboro' Rocks to their right. That would have been the next landmark for ancient travellers on the Portway. I headed down, down, down on a series of small roads, paths and tracks. I spotted a Peak & Northern Footpaths sign, crossed a ford at Folly Well, and passed a farmhouse with the fantastic name of Boggart's Inn Farm.  looking back up to Alport Heights Boggart's Inn Farm Gorsey Bank is a tuc...