Fighting Dragons

Any one who reads regularly will know that dinosaurs and dragons have been a recurring theme in the last few months. Fortunately we live in a town with its very own dragon legend but that aside the theme keeps popping up here and there.

Today it was Bean who set out to make a portal in minecraft. Anyone not familiar with the game will get entirely lost in the next paragraph or so but to ignore our success and not record it would be a momentous shame. It all began about an hour after Plum had gone to sleep and I had had a tough few minutes with Bean who had previously said that he wanted to make Christmas biscuits and had now changed his mind (I was a little upset...sometimes it's my expectations that need managing!) We went our separate ways for a while. After half an hour he came to find me to ask if i could help with his portal on minecraft. I honestly didn't have a clue what he was talking about! So we started at the beginning. What is it you want? What does it do? Where did you get the idea from? How far have you got? He showed me what he had built and expressed his frustration because it wasn't working. Not having seen one before I didn't know what it was supposed to look like, how you could tell it wasn't working, what it was supposed to do, or how to fix it. To Youtube we went! We used the first clip that we found to fix the portal that Bean had made but it still didn't work. We looked up a second clip, hoping it would show something slightly different and therefore shed some light but, it that showed exactly the same thing, (except it showed where the ender portal took you.) So we returned to the game and tried again to fix the portal Bean had made. It still didn't work. We decided that we needed to start again someplace new. After searching for a flat space Bean began placing the blocks in the correct formation for the portal. Unfortunately, just he was standing in the middle of it as he placed the last block and was immediately transported to the Enderworld. Fortunately we were all clued up on what to expect as the second Youtube clip had showed us where and what to expect. We (thought we) knew the only way back was to kill the Ender dragon. We spent the first 15 minutes trying to kill it before realising that it was replenishing itself from the Ender towers. Bean then destroyed these. After a further 30 minutes he discovered that if he killed himself by jumping down a large hole that he respawned back in the original world! But by now he was determined to kill that dragon. One and a half hours later he had done it, and the portal home was opened. (n.b. he did also flit about doing other things in this time: helping his brother; hopping about in excitement; getting himself a drink etc) Most importantly for me was the sheer joy he got out of setting and completing the challenge. He really persevered and was not disheartened at all by our repeated failing efforts. And we got to work at something together, even though it wasn't Christmas biscuits!

Pumpkin has been quiet today. Mostly playing games on the ipad. He (and me) had a disturbed nights sleep (awake from 4-6am) and for the first time in months (possibly over a year) came into bed with me early this morning and then fell back to sleep for a few hours. He said, later in the day, that he had had a sore tummy in the night but rubbed it and it felt better. He ate breakfast but skipped lunch, snacking on apples and grapes all day and then ate dinner.

Plum has had a fantastic day, making fudge and drawing, making Chritsmas cards and sorting laundry. All the things that take me away from doing and being with the boys have become things that Plum does with me and I have realised, in the last few weeks, that she is moving beyond the 'care' stage and learning more and more from the things that we do together. In truth she has probably been doing this for a while but it has just taken a while for me to cotton on and, of course, the care package continues.

And I must mention (fanfare please) that Bean, who does not eat fruit or vegetables and hasn't for over a year has this week eaten green beans and broccoli. In fact, the other night, he said, 'can i not eat my dinner and just have the green beans?' I tried not to fall of my chair with surprise and said, 'of course, that's fine. (n.b. we don't make our smalls eat food they don't want to. I tend to put something of everything on their plates or buffet style on the tale and they eat what they choose to.)