Today is Ilias first day of school. I’ve dropped him off succesfully and he seemed right at ease. His teacher is called Miss Rundle so his class is RJR (Reception J. Rundle). The first two days he is only going until 1.30 pm so he has a packed lunch there and then comes home early. From Wednesday, he can stay all day from 9 am to 3.30 pm. He’ll have the school dinners then. I think those will be alright, since Jamie Oliver recently saved the world.

Ilias came home from school tired but happy. He said he had fun and played a lot. Miss Rundle told me he fell while running, and he did have a little sticking plaster on his knee, but he wasn’t very bothered about it. He is looking forward to going again tomorrow. I must remember not to put Nutella in his packed lunch as they’re not allowed anything with nuts in it because others could be allergic. This evening at bedtime, Ilias wasn’t sure whether maybe he wanted Bush to come along to school tomorrow, but we settled on it that Bush would stay home and wait for him.

The following played out while reading a book with Ilias.

Ilias: Look bananas. I must count them. It’s one… two… two bananas.

Parents: Yes that is a pair of bananas.

Ilias: Noooo, that’s not pears. That is two bananas.

Parents: Two of someting is a pair. So these two bananas is a pair of bananas.

Ilias: But it’s not pears, it’s two bananas.

After a lot of laughter Ilias decided we where joking and told us we where silly. I guess this is a great example of the classic English problem of words looking or sounding the same.

B.t.w. Ilias still doesn’t get the concept of a pair but he has a while before he is due for that kind of math.

… is what the sticker on Ilias said today when I picked him up from school. Isn’t that cool? Besides having stickers to reward the children for good behaviour, they’ve also got ones to alert parents to bumped heads.

As far as I could get Ilias to tell me, he tripped over chairs and hit his head on the door. And teacher put ice on it but he didn’t want that because it was too cold.

Recently, Ilias was examining himself in the mirror. He said he was looking if his eyes were red. Upon further questioning, it emerged he had seen they were red on a photograph of himself!

When I was changing Thor’s nappy, Ilias spotted the poo in it. “The baby should go to the toilet!” he said. He is always being told quite forcefully to do poos in the toilet, so he really feels this rule needs enforcing in others. I explained: “The baby is too little to go to the toilet.” Whereupon he said: “We must get him a little toilet!”

Just a few days ago, we were in the airport dropping Lukas and Farfar off. Ilias saw a big sign that had several pictograms on it, including a car (Car Hire) and a little man and woman (Toilets). He put the two together in a wonderful piece of logical reasoning. “We need a car,” he said, “so we need some tiny people. Babies are tiny. Babies are tiny people. We need two babies to get a car!” I asked him: “You think we can trade two babies for a rental car!?” “Yes!” Unfortunately we only had one baby with us, so we couldn’t test his hypothesis, but fortunately we had come in our own car, so we got home without having to trade any babies at all.