It's 'Ed', not 'Eb' Darling and the Christmas Card Tragedy.

Ed had a go at writing his Christmas cards this year.
He started school in September and he LOVES it.
He has the sweetest teacher, who has got him to do things I couldn’t dream of. He sits down when she tells him to, hangs his coat up, helps tidy..all the things that I ask him to do at home and he just ignores me.
She has also managed to teach him how to read.
Don’t get me wrong, we’re not one of those families who don’t read and then wonder why are kids can’t. Our house is full of books, the boys have had shelves full of their own books for years, and I have plenty more. They see me read and write regularly, and we read to them every single day, but Ed seemed to think it was a grownup thing, something he couldn’t even attempt, despite my efforts. He would read himself a book, not because he knows the words, but because he loves the pictures and he knows the story, which is absolutely fine. There’s nothing wrong with a love of books.
Being faced with a class full of his peers, they have learnt jolly phonics together, and Ed is doing fantastically well.
I’m so pleased.
But he doesn’t really care for writing yet.
That’s fine, he’s only 4, he’ll do it when he’s ready.
For now he’s happy to write ‘Ed’ (his full name is too much, he says), so that’s what he wrote on 20 cards. It took him one evening and one morning (we had a break half way through because he got fed up), probably only half an hour in total, which is fab.
So this morning, he proudly took them into school. He wouldn’t let me hold them, he HAD to carry them but they wouldn’t fit into his pocket. However, on the way out of the car, he dropped them in the gutter, where they landed in an inch of leaf-littered rainwater! Argh! He was so upset. I quickly fished them out and dried them off with a microfiber cloth (bloody brilliant those things) and popped them in my coat pocket for the rest of the journey to school. There was a point where I was trying to decide if it was worth it, but he was so proud of himself, and he was so gutted to have dropped them, and we’d got to school early so he could give some out in the playground so it’s not like we were running late.
So my little man is happy and has all his cards to give out to his friends (even if some of them are a little dog-eared). Thinking about it, he didn’t thank me for my efforts but I know he’s grateful.
And the best thing about it for me is, Ed no longer write ‘Eb’, he gets his ‘d’ the right way around, AND, despite the standoff between us when he wanted cards for his friends but wouldn’t do any writing at all, Bean wrote some of his own too. I finally managed to get him to write the first letter of his name and I wrote the rest.