Aidan Andrew McEwan Wansbrough - Aidan's Gallery

Aidan is really enjoying playgroup now - he particularly likes singing, storytime, and just playing. He sometimes brings home a creation, but more often than not is too busy running around having fun to make something. He started a third day this month, so now he's going on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, for two hours.

In case you're not familiar with the UK system: playgroup is run independent of a school, and it's a bit more relaxed than pre-school/nursery school (which starts from age three or four). Carolyn drops Aidan off at 0930, and picks him up at 1130. The children have crafts and lots of different toys available for them to do; it's entirely their choice which activities they participate in. They have a snack (soup and bread, cereal, fruit, and/or biscuits) midmorning and then story time and singing time. There's a theme (Chinese New Year, Spring, etc) which the snacks, crafts, and stories all help them to explore.

He's started to deliberately choose the opposite of whatever we want him to do. But he can also be very polite - at the golf club the other day he spontaneously said thank you to the waitress for his lunch.

He recently demonstrated that he doesn't only make fairy cakes on Mondays - he made a birthday cake for Elaine, and a Madeira cake too.

Aidan has developed a bizarre fear of bits of fluff, which is related to his fear of flies (after a fly flew into his face last year) and of spiders. We've had some success getting him through this - earlier this month (8 Feb) Aidan woke crying in a panic about the "fly" (actually a dragonfly) painted on his calendar, and Carolyn took him through his Little Wombat book, pointing out all the dragonflies and other fascinating insects. He's been a lot calmer since. However, he also is afraid of having his hair cut, and despite several attempts we have still not succeeded in actually cutting it! This is becoming a longer and longer problem...

The major event of the month was a week-long trip to Cambridge to catch up with old friends. We stayed in three different places en route before reaching Cambridge; it was nice to see people but rather tiring and stressful travelling with the kids. Aidan and Megan both had a good time, and in particular Aidan's speech improved dramatically (according to Grandma, Grandpa, and Gungle). He's using pronouns correctly sometimes ("I"/"my" instead of "you" for himself, for example, and "it"). Illustrative braintwisting but (I think) grammatically correct sentence: "Aidan's got my X".

We stayed with Auntie Jeanne, Uncle Jeff, and Philip (and visited Locomotion: The National Railway Museum at Shildon); with Sophie, Nick, and Isaac; and then at a lovely hotel near Cuffley who were very good to us. In Cambridge we stayed with Allie and Ken; Aidan loved playing with their expensive wedding presents, particularly their Dualit mixer. Towards the end of the week Aidan became unwell, with a cough, high temperature, and croupy-sounding breathing. After we left it got much better, so we think Aidan's lungs get on no better with the fenland air than Daddy's did.

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