Grandkids: the angelic and the calm

It was a joy to have a visit from our two youngest grandchildren recently.

Not on their own, you understand. They were kind enough to have their parents come along too. Which is just as well, considering that Matilda’s two, and Elliott, at the time, was just four months.

Now, it’s a bit of a crazy game to try to predict the future personality of a four-month old child. But just because a game’s crazy has never been an obstacle to my trying to play it. Elliott, as well as developing a charming smile, had by the time he got to us begun to show a refreshingly unusual character trait in my family: he has all the makings of a strong silent type. He smiles often but complains little. And, generally, when he does complain, all he needs is a little feeding. 

That’s what we look like
The cool, calm, quietly observant types

The rest of the time he seems perfectly content with watching the goings on around him – particularly his sister’s – making the odd comment from time to time, but little else. Since he doesn’t yet speak any known language, I can’t be absolutely sure what he’s saying, but something about how he holds himself tells me those remarks are full of wisdom.

While here, he learned how to roll himself over from front to back, and since he got home, he’s been making huge efforts to do a bit of crawling, so it’s clear that progress is happening at speed. So it won’t be long, I’m sure, before we can test my claim that his future character will calm and self-controlled. I say “test” although, of course, in reality I’m certain he’ll confirm it.

Part of the reason that I see his character that way is, no doubt, the contrast with his sister. There are many adjectives to describe her: bright, self-assured, affectionate, amusing. Quiet wouldn’t, however, appear near the top of the list. Any more than contemplative or self-effacing. When Matilda’s in the room, you know it.

In the village near Madrid where Matilda and Elliott live, in a home they have generously agreed to share with Sheena, our daughter-in-law, and Nicky, our youngest son, there’s a school – a state-school, not fee-charging – that admits children from the age of three months. Elliott will be starting there shortly, to my astonishment. But Matilda has already completed a year at the school, being taught entirely in Spanish. With English at home and Spanish during the day, she has been a little slower at leaping into actual articulate language than some, even though she did master a few words some time ago. One of the first was, in fact, in Spanish: ‘agua’ for when she’s thirsty.

Well, she’s now moved on significantly, and the latest progress, over the school holidays and therefore principally in an English-speaking environment, has been in English. When she wants something to drink but not ‘agua’, she can now make it clear that what she’s after is ‘juice’. There’s also a favourite form of food, ‘cheese’, and to my horror, ‘marmite’.

Naturally, like most kids, her understanding of language is well ahead of her ability to speak it. We took great pleasure in asking a series of questions of her at one point during her stay.

“Where’s Mummy?”

She pointed at Sheena.

“Where’s Daddy?”

She pointed at Nicky.

“Where’s mamama?” That’s what we call my wife, Danielle, because of her origins in the eastern French province of Alsace.

Again, Matilda pointed in the right direction.

“Where’s granddad?”

My turn to have the finger directed towards me.

So I decided to take the test to another level.

“Where’s Matilda?” I asked.

She looked at me for a moment as though I were crazy and then pointed triumphantly at herself. Self-awareness! A breakthrough, in my view.

She coped well with identifying her nose, her eyes, her ears, her feet. In fact, the only one she got wrong was when we asked her to point to her tongue. She pointed at her belly instead. But that’s a perfectly pardonable confusion, isn’t it? ‘Tum’ sounds so similar.

It’s a pleasure going out with her. In pursuance of her anything-but-strong-silent character, she shows apparently boundless energy in the playground. She runs everywhere, climbs what she can, slides down the slides, bounces up and down on the seesaws (that’s with Granddad’s help), and generally has a fantastic time, wearing me out a lot faster than she tires herself.

It’s never too early to set out
on your way to the top

In all this she displays another striking aspect of her character. The one for which I named this post. She has an angelic disposition.

Take tidying things away. We have a shoebox near the front door, made up of little compartments closed by plastic flaps. We were amazed to see her at one point, sitting on the ground next to the shoebox, and carefully loading three pairs of her shoes into an empty compartment she’d found. It was wonderful to see that she’d worked out how the system worked, and as surprising as it was gratifying that she felt it would be a good idea to use it for its intended purpose.

Given the progress she’s made in understanding English, she no longer has any difficulty grasping the instructions we give her. “Don’t go there”, “come over here”, “sit down a moment”, she understands them all and is very good at obeying them. And underlines her angelic disposition by doing that nearly all the time.

The only exceptions? She obeys every instruction we give unless she doesn’t feel like it. At which point she turns entirely impervious to the language that she seemed to master so well only seconds before.

A live wire. A delight to spend time with. Though it will be a wonderful complement to her, and a relief to the rest of us, if Elliott does indeed turn out to be the strong silent type I predict.

Of course, there are times when Matilda really is as angelic as one might wish. I said before that her energy was apparently boundless. It became clear that the boundlessness was indeed an appearance when I got her home from the playground on the last day of the visit she and Elliott paid us.

In her father’s arms, she proved that there were bounds to her energy after all. She showed how truly angelic she could really be. In repose, at least.

Angelic in Nicky's arms
and proving the energy isn’t boundless after all