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

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...

Birmingham: Temples to many things

Birmingham's cathedral is overshadowed by more modern temples: the mirrored swirls of New Street train station; the dotted bulge of the Selfridges store; the lacy blocks of the library; the pillars and pediments of the museum and art gallery. Museum and town hall Next to all these, Birmingham Cathedral, in its square of dusty grass, isolated from the main flow of shopping and travel, seems less like a dominant building and more like a minor chapel. It turns out the unpretentiousness is deliberate. St Philip's Church was built in 1715 when the worshipping population of Birmingham had outgrown the medieval constraints of St Martin in the Bullring . Birmingham remained part of the Diocese of Worcester until 1905, when Charles Gore pushed for the creation of a new diocese and became its first bishop. Seeing the depth of need in the city, he decided to convert St Philip's to a cathedral rather than spend money on a grand new building. Birmingham Cathedral had to be restored afte...

Canterbury Cathedral

We were booking a trip to France, and I persuaded the family that it was madness to drive four hours to Dover and get straight on the ferry. "We should definitely stay overnight somewhere," I said. "Oh look, Canterbury is very handy - just twenty minutes from Dover." Of course, my suggestion was not influenced in the slightest by the fact that Canterbury contains England's most famous cathedral. On the way down, we stretched our legs on Dunstable Downs, an area of chalk grassland owned by the National Trust. I was pleased to spot a scarlet pimpernel for my 100 Plants Challenge . We also enjoyed watching gliders ascending and descending. We turned onto the M25 and made our way through busy traffic to the Dartford Crossing. This is one of those mythical points on the UK road network, like Scotch Corner and Watford Gap: the name familiar from traffic reports on the radio; the reality - for someone who grew up west of London - a hazy blur of imagination. It turns ou...

Martha's Marvellous Munchies

Search This Blog