I enjoy watching Dorje’s creativity. When he learns or plays a new game, after a few times he’s adapting it, inventing his own rules.

I haven’t always been as encouraging as I could have. Sometimes the new rules are “creatively” skewed in his favour, and I, being the ungracious loser I am, haven’t applauded his creativity.

We’ve played Monopoly over two boards (he owns three sets!), we’ve played Totopoly with obstacles and magic powers, Sorry with 5 dice and, most recently, he adapted Pyramid (a difficult form of solitaire) to make it easier by reducing the levels and using another pack.

Dorje hardly ever volunteers information about school – it’s a black hole to me – so I was asking him about what he enjoys and what he’s learning.

“Sums” seemed to be his favourite, except that he claimed they were too easy. So, we did a few more difficult ones, and for fun we went beyond addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, looking at powers and square roots.

But that soon got boring, so Dorje invented some new sequences. It became quite fun for me too, as I had to work out the sequence. For example, 9 “humph” 6 (“humph” drawn as a plus sign with a circle around it) equals 6, while 6 “humph” 3 equals 3. Humph basically disregards the first part, and always equals the second part. Highly useful I’m sure.

It was even more fun for me coming up with sequences that he could work out, but were slightly more challenging than “humph”. Of course the sound and the symbol were an important part of the sequence, with me being told off if I didn’t draw them accurately enough!