The Children's Hobbies

I felt it was time to make a few changes to the house.  With Bernice becoming more of a young lady I thought that she should have her own room to give her a bit of privacy from her brothers.  Accordingly we partitioned off one section of the upstairs room and everyone pitched in to try to make a pretty little bedroom for our lovely little princess. 

I ended up really liking the result and vowing to redo the rest of the walls of the house in the same style, bit by bit. 

Everyone else is growing up as well.  I looked at Tommy the other day and realised that he's now a young man.  Where did his toddler days go?

He's turned out to be such an artistic soul.  As soon as he was past the age of shoving everything into his mouth he was scribbling pictures in anything he could find.  Ron nearly had a heart attack when he caught him decorating the pages of one of our Time Machine books.  But, then, Ron quite likes reading.  I think it gives him an excuse for lying around and not doing very much.

Once Tommy got a little older he moved on to making more serious art.

Victor would often keep him company which I was glad of.  My eldest (sort of) does have a tendancy to take things a bit seriously - it's nice to see him relaxing.

Tommy didn't stay on the small canvases for long, in no time at all it seemed he was making some very decent artwork.  I'll be thinking about putting some of it around the house soon.

Wilbur's tastes were a little different.  I saw him talking with his father and Edwin shortly afterwards began spending time up at the mine again working on some project for his son.

They wouldn't tell me what it was but I wasn't kept in the dark for too long. 

Ah, something my athletic son will really enjoy. 

Other than a pulled muscle that is one hobby here that I don't have to worry about.  I can't see my son getting into much trouble while he's pumping weights.

Victor on the other hand...

Sliding down bannisters wasn't really going to cut it on the excitement meter; at some point I knew I was going to have to let him go. 

So, with a great deal of reluctance I watched as my boy finally got his dearest wish.

He didn't seem to feel any of my trepidation.  The over confidence of youth?  Or perhaps it's just his nature.  Either way he got a real taste for time travel and was always disappearing off there.  He nearly always chose to go to the future.  I don't know if he is trying to look for his biological father or quite what. 

He does seem to like the clothes there though.  Here he is, showing off his latest acquisition. 

Bernice on the other hand had other hobbies.  From showing no interest at all in reading she suddenly became almost obsessive in reading anything I had written from my early days on the island. 

Bernice grew absolutely fixated with finding out everything I knew about Nemo.  Which was precisely nothing. 

When she wasn't reading she would spend hours by his grave.  She told me how unfair it was to be so alone, to be cared about by no-one, to be loved and missed by no-one, to have no family, no friends.  Nothing. 

She would seem so sad and be so convinced that Nemo's personality was a sign of a soul that had been deeply wounded that I began to think we were talking about two different people.  Maybe he had a twin brother or something.

It was around this time that we also began to notice other things about Bernice.  She would often seem to be talking to herself, sometimes bursting out with passionate exchanges to people or things that we could not see.  She told us that she was speaking 'with the spirits'.  She seemed to think that there were a lot of them on the island and was surprised that we didn't know.

Come to think of it, even as a baby she would talk to herself, but I just thought it was baby behaviour and thought nothing of it.

Perhaps I need to stop her visiting Nemo's grave as often as she does.  Dwelling on the past may be putting an emotional stress on her.  With everything else that is bizarre about the island, I don't want my lovely young daughter lost inside her own fanciful dreams.