A maturity landmark

Large boy has just hit a landmark in his growing up path to adulthood and independence.

He’s 10 and a bit, relatively sensible most of the time but also capable of being a prize plonker in the company of his best mates.

What’s going on?

This is the first week of two weeks of the Easter break from school. For the first time we haven’t booked him into any clubs. No rugby. No sports at school. No holiday activity club at another local school. No sports club at himself’s work. Nope. He’s spending the whole week in the house, having made a commitment to not spend it glued to Clash of Clans and Fortnite.

More than that, small boy is spending two days in a holiday activity club at another school. He’s going to have amazing fun hunting bugs, making boats and mucking about with a friend from his swimming class. So large boy will have two days at home with me, without his brother to play with and not allowed on his Switch or to play on his tablet. He’s also getting left at home on his own while I drop small boy off and pick him up. Oh and he’ll be on his own as well if I decide to go for a run too.

Wow.

That’s a lot.

Large boy has to occupy himself and be responsible alone in the house.

Only for 20 minutes at a time though.

How’s he handling it?

So he’s got a few things planned.

He’s re-doing an OpenLearn Python course that we did together a few years ago, but on his own this time. In my efforts to encourage a “proper” approach to IT skills, I’ve shown him how to use his tablet to read the course and his RaspberryPi screen for coding (who uses a single screen? eww it’s just too hard). But then the problem is the course had example code embedded in widgets, so he’s going to have to learn to write the code from scratch, not just amend something existing.

Large boy is also planning to either run or walk up to our local rock snake, again on his own. The weather’s pretty horrid though so otherwise he also has the option of jumping on the treadmill (and exercising while watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer of course).

His other planned activities to keeps himself busy are:

• Loom bands – you can never have enough bracelets apparently
• Reading – you’ve come across large boy before right?
• Zooniverse citizen science
• Solidworks for Kids app building spirographs

So that’s the plan, I’ll add a “how it went” on Thursday night to share whether he managed to keep busy and not burn the house down, get kidnapped, or let burglars in.

How am I feeling?

Do you know what? I’m really not anxious about this at all. Large boy is sensible, responsible and knows how to call my mobile from the house phone if necessary. Moreover, he’ll be occupied and only left for a short while. It’s not like he’ll be left for hours or need to make lunch for himself or anything – no need for boiling water or using knives. I guess that just shows that he’s ready and that we’re ready for him to be left on his own. We trust him and he deserves to be trusted.

Well I hope so anyway.