Zachary you are 8! – Mummascribbles

Dear Zachary,

Another slightly delayed posting, as your birthday was on Saturday, but I am finally here with your birthday post. It would be wrong not to do it, so better late than never!

First of all, happy belated birthday! You were so excited about turning 8 that you woke up at 3.20am to see if it was time to get up. Which it wasn’t was it?! You then woke pretty much every hour and by 6.30, I was fed up of saying no, so we got up, very tired beings!

Now, you had already had your present from us because we bought you a bike. We ordered it thinking that it would come not built, but alas, it was fully put together and so our plan to hide it in the loft would not work because of the size of it. So 2 weeks before your birthday, you came home from school to see your brand new bike in the garden! It worked out pretty well actually because we had a really gorgeous week of weather and you were out on it every day.

So, on your birthday, you had some presents from the rest of the family, and some clothes from us and Oscar, and we made sure your bike was sitting in the front room so that you remembered that you’d already had your main present from us!

And now you are 8. Where do I start?

I guess first and foremost I must start with your amazing adapting skills. It has been an almighty terrible year. In March, the Coronavirus pandemic got bad, and in the middle of March your brother and I got an awful cough. This meant that when Boris announced that people in the same household as those with any symptoms had to also isolate, it meant you suddenly couldn’t go to school. One minute you were there and the next day you didn’t go back. And then the end of that week was the start of lockdown and boom. School was over for six months.

I was worried about you. So worried. And I was sad. So sad. Sad that you never got to say goodbye to your friends and your teachers. That you were about to miss out on a huge chunk of your education. And of course, I was worried that you would catch it. We kept you safe. So safe. Those first few weeks we just kept you at home. We are lucky that we have a garden which meant you could go outside as much as you wanted to, and we were blessed with some lovely lockdown weather. When it was clear that you needed to get out, we took you to the Country park where it was easy to social distance. And to the forest which you utterly loved.

We did our learning from home which you were pretty epic at, and actually, I think you thrived for most of the six months that you were off. It was only really towards the end that we could see the struggle. The struggle from not seeing other people, from not getting out and about, from not having a routine. And you have gone back into the next year, Year 3, and you have started where you left off. We are pretty fortunate that you are a clever little boy. You read well, you are quick to learn your spellings, you are good at Maths. So you don’t have a huge amount of catching up to do. Some catching up of course, but not masses. And I am confident that you will continue to strive, and learn everything super quick like you do.

As I mentioned, you got a new bike for your birthday and you absolutely love riding it. It took us soooo long to get you riding a bike, and I was a bit worried that the size of this new one would scare you a bit, but it didn’t. You were straight on it and off you went, and now I love watching you cycle with confidence.

We went big with this bike so that it lasted you a long time! You grow out of them so quickly. Which leads me to the next point…

You are so blooming tall. You are only a foot shorter than I am and growing more by the day. I think lockdown helped because you were eating so much! We think you are going to be like your Grandad and be a tall boy – I know you’ll be towering over me before long!

Something else that lockdown brought was your love of your curly hair. We couldn’t take you to the barbers and you wouldn’t let us cut it at home, and that meant that it got long. Longer than it has ever been before. And all your curls came out, and then you didn’t want us to cut any of them off. After lockdown (a while after as it took a while for me to brave it), I took you to the barbers and you got it cut but made sure they kept the curls. You totally rock your curly hair and it gets a lot of comments!

You have so much energy. I don’t know how you have so much but you are always on the go. We will go out for a massive walk thinking that we will then have a restful afternoon, and you are ready for action pretty much straight after lunch! It can be exhausting! You also Never. Stop. Talking. Like ever. When you are eating, watching TV, playing games, brushing your teeth. I mean how do you manage to make so much noise while you are brushing your teeth?!

You have just discovered a love of Minecraft. I downloaded it onto the tablet ages ago and you didn’t quite get it. Then suddenly you picked it up one day and boom, you just knew how to play and work it all out. You then begged us for it on an actual gaming platform and your Nanny and Grandad got it for you on the Switch for your birthday! And you absolutely love it! You have never really had the patience to sit down with stuff like computer games but as you are getting older, I see that will be happening more and more!

Along with Minecraft, some of your favourite things are: Pizza Hut, Scones with jam, Harry Potter, talking, drawing, colouring, and annoying your brother!

Speaking of your brother – you do love him! And you do annoy him in equal measures! You fight a lot, you often hurt each other, but your bond is so great. And he has this special laugh that is reserved only for you. I love watching you both when you are playing nicely together, and especially when he lets that cackle out! You really do adore each other and I know your relationship really grew over that 6 month period that you were off school for. You were so lucky to have that time together when under normal non pandemic circumstances, you wouldn’t have had it!

Now you are getting a bit older, you like to have the odd cheeky late night! Your bedtime shifted a while ago to 8pm and while Oscar falls asleep a bit earlier, you will sit in bed and read, colour, or draw. But occasionally you stay downstairs with us for a little while, the other night you went out on the evening dog walk with Daddy, and even then you still have energy! During the week it is mostly lights out at 8pm because you have school, but on the weekend, I can see we are going to have to be a bit more flexible from now on!

On that note, it is getting a tad late in the evening and I have some photos to add to this post, so I had better sign off.

Know that we are both so super proud of you. For everything you have had to deal with this year, everything that you have done, and everything that you do. You are our little superstar and we love you so very much.

Love Mummy and Daddy

xxxx