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Monday 24 July 2017

A Life Lesson and Cake


One of the curses of being a “parent blogger” is the amount of parents that are seemingly winning at this parenting lark when there are days where I feel like I am just about holding it together. I know the reality behind everything; some days are better than others, we are all in it together and all have our highs and lows.
Yet, sometimes it’s hard. The idea that I have to somehow do all the adult things, all the home educating stuff and help guide my children into being “upright and well-rounded citizens” is a bit much. But, sometimes life throws a lesson at you and you have to grab it with both hands and run with it.
William and I recently had one of those moments.

When William was in preschool he was a really loving, friendly and generally happy little chap. The first term of school he was happy, excited and was keen to go to school. He was put in the top group in his class and the teacher was praising him for his ability but then it all changed; William became emotionally unstable.
Every single day we were dragging him to school kicking and screaming. His nature of being a gentle soul changed and he was aggressive, unhappy and something would “snap” and he would go into full meltdown stage.
He was in a predominantly male class and there were lots of arguments, bullying and fighting and in the end my little boy wasn’t surviving let alone thriving.
It didn’t take long for William to return to the boy that he once was. Home education was definitely the right move and I haven’t looked back or regretted the decision to teach him. However, William still has real surges of emotional instability.
There are some very clear triggers: Large social situation with 10 or more people, injustices where something has “wronged” him or gone wrong and if he hurt himself and is in pain.
One thing that calms him is his cooking and baking. He takes his role as “My Little Chef” very seriously and the meticulous aspect of building his creations allows him to concentrate on an end goal.
Something that has become a little tradition for him is to design and create his Uncle’s birthday cake. Last year he really upped his game and made a Lacoste shirt cake knowing that Uncle N loves Lacoste products.



It was his highlight achievement last year and the pressure was on to create another masterpiece. His idea, following his Uncle’s love of campervans, was to make a Victoria sponge VW cake.
He isolated himself in the kitchen and the baking commenced. With two mixtures now in the oven we waited, as we always do.



Time was up and it had fully baked but it hadn’t risen. It was flat and a tad doughy.
Oh well. These things happen. It could have been a number of things that made it go wrong.
He rolled up his sleeves and got on with his second attempt. Yet, it went wrong, again. From the same batter only one had risen. Using the remaining batter he placed one more attempt into the oven. Luckily, this time, it was a success.
Time to make the buttercream; every attempt was a fail. The sheer heat of the kitchen was against us and the buttercream was literally melting. Yet, we finally made one and got it into the fridge.
We then had to roll the icing and you can probably guess that this didn’t go well either. We couldn’t get it even when rolling it out and when we did it tore when we lifted it.
This all was around 4 hours from start to finish. William, understandably, was becoming frustrated and upset. Every stage we went through something went wrong and you could see the little pressure on his face. I realised that it was futile to continue but every time I asked him he wanted to persevere. The last and final attempt with the icing and something clicked with him. He shouted, he got angry and I was ready to jump in and calm him down.
Yet, he took a deep breath, looked at me and just said “Daddy, I think we need to stop and give up”. We made ourselves drinks, sat to calm down and tried to run over all the things that happened and came to conclusion that “sometimes things just don’t work the way we want them too and that’s okay”.
In many ways this probably seems like a minor thing but for me it was a big move for him. He could have snapped and gone to 100% instability but he didn’t. He got angry and quite frankly I don’t blame him but he took it on in a calm way and moved on. The lesson, from my point of view, was learnt and, as William kindly pointed out, we had cake to eat.
I forget sometimes that he is still really young and these things can come at different times. A lesson was learnt and we grabbed it with both hands. It may have been a struggle but I took it as a parenting win! A parenting win, a lesson learnt and a cake eaten must be a good day.

4 comments:

  1. Brilliant story. We home schooled our daughter for a spell.
    Love how you are building resilience in him. Ofsted would so happy 😉

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  2. Glad it worked out in the end and to be fair, I did offer to eat the cake that didn't quite work out ;-)

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  3. He is so clever Martyn. I had my own cake business until Alice came along and even I had days were it just doesn't "work" He's very talented and I'm placing my bet now for a future bake off star!!

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  4. Ahh he's so good teaching you to bake, bless him. It can't go right every time can it? It does sound like he's managed to take an important lesson from it.
    Nat.x

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