Dr Mr Hamley, I'm sorry for...

Just a short one, this.

It occurred to Tom and I the other day that Richard has been extraordinarily well behaved at school this year.

Richard is a shy-natured boy, but with gentle encouragement and a little push he finds his place and his confidence gradually starts to shine through (I'm welling up a bit!). He's adorable.

When Richard first starts a new academic year at school, he becomes shy and quiet again, observing things from the sidelines. This usually happens for a couple of weeks, until he finds his feet in his new surroundings.

It's something that we're able to plan for and Rich's wonderful SEN teacher (who just happens to be a great family friend), Miss Cooper keeps an eye on progress with him.

When he has found his place, he has in previous years become a little bit too comfortable with his surroundings. We were beckoned in to chat to his teachers a couple of times about daft behaviour (standing on his chair every time the class is told to stand up, hiding the teacher's glasses, saying a rude word to a year-six girl who tried to force a cuddle, for example). It's all fairly low-level and not something we've worried about; to us it's all an indication that he's happy with his environment. The rude word was 'ambassador', by the way which I can only assume he thinks should be 'b*stard' - needless to say we haven't corrected him.

We're in February now and Richard's behaviour at home has been a tad rocky - nothing too bad, he just has an air of cockiness about him, a kind of nonchalance (nice word, eh?) when he's told to stop licking the mirror, or flicking socks at grandma's expensive Swarovski candle sticks, or eating one baked bean at a time to irritate Dad who's asked him to eat his beans.

Despite this nonchalance at home, Richard's been perfectly fine at school so far this year with his new (and first ever male) teacher Mr Hamley. Ten-out-of-ten in most spellings tests, a small part in the year three play - everything's pointing to 'good' on the Richard scale. Until yesterday. Sigh. I was called over with a beckoning finger by Mr Hamley and the dreaded words, "Could I have a quick word with you in private please, Jamie?". "FFS", I thought. I turned to Richard and over-dramatically rolled my eyes. Richard returned a shrug, raised his cute little eyebrows and muttered "I dunno?".

Anyway, to cut what was going to be a very short but turned out to be a long story short, Richard's been a pain in the arse for the last couple of days, dancing around like Kylie in the classroom.

Here's a beautiful letter he wrote to Mr Hamley to say sorry. Panic over.

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#behaviour #naughty #development #childdevelopment #Richard