Poem #3

Life is never all one thing or another is it?

Over the last few months Oliver and I have taken to spending a couple of hours a week on our own doing "stuff". My sister and her husband have been taking their youngest son for speech therapy. Sitting in the waiting room is tedious for anyone but excruciating for a 7 year old. So instead we do our own thing.

A lot of the time it's simply a walk to the playground with our football and kite, or doing some Wii game if it's raining outside. We also cook, chat, practise juggling, magic tricks, make up jokes ... the list goes on but basically we hang out.

Maths. Oliver is stunningly good at maths. When we go for walks we start out with a mathematical problem that we can only use our heads to solve. No writing things down. Oliver loves to do mental gymnastics and I love to show him the shortcuts and tricks for helping to remember where we've got to in the process of finding the solution. Cool (his word).

And words. We try to think of the hardest word to rhyme anything with, and then try to find one that does. We do allow compound words and hyphenated ones because otherwise it's not fair (or so I've been informed). There are times when we must look quite mad as we bellow out that the word that rhymes with science is alliance ... we are still looking for a satisfactory rhyme for the word elephant.

On my fridge at home I have one of Oliver's first poems. When I look at it now I see that in his orderly manner he has noted the fact that this was in fact his third poem. Time passes so quickly don't you find? By keeping these reminders where I can see them I try to keep in mind that life is happening NOW. There is much to enjoy.

As some of you might have guessed, I am working through some things in my life at the moment. Even so, I am also finding time to have fun. Whenever I make a mental list of my blessings my family and friends come right up there at the top of my list. It is only recently that I have started to learn to rank myself up there too. Life is a journey.