I was sorting out my shoes after some gardening and a quick swim, when I suddenly asked myself, “What exactly is Eli doing at that chair?”

What he was doing, was poking holes in the dining room chair with a paint brush. Hmm.

The damage and the weapon

I surprised myself by remaining calm in the light of serious damage to our chair. Normally he would have been shouted at, given a smack and sent to his room. I thought, “How would a Montessori teacher handle this?” I spoke to him calmly, but seriously and told him that I was very upset and explained why, and then sent him to his room to think about what he had done.

He came down and apologised, but seemed to have a bit of a destructive vibe about him, so Donné redirected that into some hammering.

Working the need to bash things

And giving his brother some entertainment

He spent a long time hammering nails into the polystyrene. He eventually hammered an entire bag of nails into it, and then set out trying to pull them out with the back of the hammer. A while later and he seemed to have worked out that destructive streak.