Keir Royale

First, you long for them to utter a word, any word, but preferably Mama.

Then you’re waiting for something that could be loosely described as a sentence. You marvel over their first complex construction involving prepositions, adverbs and the like, and you boast that no child of yours is ever going to use an adjective as an adverb, so help me God.

They start school and learn about things like alliteration, and then they take to dropping their aitches and perfecting the glottal stop to see what you’ll say.

“I think water has a “t” sound in the middle of it, darling.”
“Well Jordan says War-uh.”

While thinking, “Yes I bet Jordan does,” you have to come up with a reply that won’t criticise his friends but will convince him that pronouncing things correctly is important.

“He probably misheard it, it’s definitely war-tuh.”
And then you are treated to the first of his new uses for formerly innocuous words.

“Whatever.”
You let it go because the main point here is “water” with a “t”, and “whatever”, with or withuot a “t”, can be tackled another time.

But before that other time, there comes another handy little word that suddenly prompts you to seek a modern day equivalent of soap and water.

It starts with one of your regular complaints.
“You left your coat on the floor in the hall, darling.”

And then he hits you with it.
“And?”
“What did you say?”
“And?” said in a slightly quieter voice, but still audible.
“You know I don’t like rudeness.”
“What’s rude about And? It’s not swearing.”
“It’s the way you said it. You didn’t say And you said And? with a question mark after it, and that’s rude.”
“Is why rude too? That has a question mark after it.”
“You know exactly what I mean, just pick up your damn coat.”

And with one small utterance he’s manoeuvred me into being ruder then he was in the first place. Such is the skill of a contrary eight-year old boy who strives to have the last word.

I know I should ignore all provocation and hope they end up pronouncing most of their consonants, but I can’t ignore the And? thing. Even my daughter understands the difference.

The other day she came belting into the kitchen with a new complaint about her brother. He hadn’t whacked her, teased her or dangled her dolls over the edge of the banisters.

“Mummy, Ben said the rude And to me.”

I managed not to say it, but I did think it,

“And?”

Well, it wasn’t as bad as her brother’s last party.

When he was eight we agreed to a sleepover - four of his friends from 6pm until 11am the following day, a night which felt like a lifetime and featured a lot of marauding and stampeding with loud weaponry, and very little sleeping.

My partner said it was like Lord of the Flies without the ritual slaughter, although we did consider it at about one-thirty in the morning.

Hannah chose to spend two hours at the local indoor play centre.

Lemon squeezy.

Just copious bottles of water (tap water, from home, after paying to get into the place we were loathe to put a single extra penny into their coffers)  and only three lots of tears to dry up.

1 – Guest lost her bracelet in the ball pool. Partner spent fifteen minutes scrabbling around among hundreds of sticky plastic balls. He complained they kept piling back on top of him, but he found the thing. Plastic beads on elastic, well worth the trouble.

2 – Son hurt his knee playing football. Quick cuddle.

3 – Another guest bumped her head in some incomprehensible way which was obviously very traumatic. Longer cuddle, followed by accompanied trip to trampoline.

Back to our place for tea, Pass the Parcel and Musical Statues. In the year that’s passed since her last birthday, Hannah and her friends seem to have got the hang of losing, so this was the least problematic party games session so far.

At least school’s taught them something – other than rolling their eyes and using the word “And?” as a weapon.

I was talking to my son while he was on the loo, as you do, and he said,

“I’ve decided Jay isn’t my friend any more.”
“Why’s that then?”
“He doesn’t know how to play Dodge Ball.”

I don’t even know what Dodge Ball is, so does that mean he’s decided I’m not his mother any more?
That’s what I think. But what I say is,

“That’s no reason to decide he’s not your friend, can’t you teach him how to play?”
“And he tore up my work. I had to start again. So I haven’t finished your Mothers’ Day card.”

Aha, so that’s where we’re going. And there’s more.

“I thought we had to do our seascape then finish our Mother’s Day cards, but by the time I’d finished my seascape I had no time to finish my card. I didn’t know we were supposed to finish our Mother’s Day cards and then do our seascapes.”

Well, at least the school has its priorities right, even if my son hasn’t.

Never mind,” I say, light heartedly, “you’ve still got a day to finish it off before Mothers’ Day.”

And he looks at me all squiffy-eyed. He’s either dealing with a problem poo or he’s about to say something he thinks is funny.

“I think your card’s going to have to come from a shop this year.”

I return the squiffy smile. There are worse things than a shop-bought card, and I’m sure we’ll find out what they are in the years to come.

For the first time yesterday, my son (8) asked me to teach him something. He then retained interest in that thing until I’d finished teaching it to him, learned it willingly and was pleased with the result.

“So what?” you may think. Perhaps you have eager, biddable children who love to ape your every accomplishment.

At our house, this is not The Way.

Chez Beta Mum, The Way is more like this:-

“Time to do your homework, Ben.”
“Mummeeeeeee, no-ooooooo!” said with a blood-freezing shriek that would have the neighbours vaulting over the garden wall if they weren’t already hardened to the sound of children being tortured with hair-washing, coat-hanging-up and putting their dirty clothes in the laundry basket.

“‘l’ll help you. Look, this one’s easy. Just add three to six and then you can…”
“No, that’s not how you do it.”

And he proceeds to do it His Way, which is not quicker, not more efficient, and often not correct. But try telling him and the neighbours really will be vaulting the wall.

Last night though, not only was he voluntarily practising his guitar, but when I demonstrated the first section of the “Tales of the Riverbank” theme tune (taught to me twenty-five years ago in a squat in North London, but that’s another story) he asked me to teach it to him.

I managed to remain cool, not show how pleased I was, (essential when he’s showing an interest in something I want to encourage) and he picked it up as quickly as was possible for a boy with two dirt-encrusted plasters incapacitating his guitar-playing thumb.

Perhaps now he’ll let me teach him how to wash up, eat with his mouth closed, tidy his room and how to use a knife and fork without catapulting his food across the kitchen.

Perhaps not.

I thought it was time to let the kids have a go. Hannah (5) dictated this to me after we spent an afternoon walking on Dartmoor.

Things went a little, just a little, wrong.
But everything was fine, eventually.

Hannah’s story

We walked along the river and stopped for lunch. We saw a cow. Daddy went to fetch the car. So Mummy and I and my brother walked down the hill with lots of sheep.

Then we saw some men cutting down trees, and we asked them the way. We went down to the river and we saw the water was too high to get over the stepping stones. We looked for a bridge but we couldn’t find one because there was another river going the other way and it went over that one.

We decided to go back up because it was going to get dark soon. My Mummy said “hurry up” and hurried me up the hill.

It seemed to be rivers everywhere. I felt scared. I thought I was going to be in the newspaper for news because I thought we were going to stay in Dartmeet forever and not get found.
 
We found the cutting tree men were leaving in their truck. We asked them if we could borrow their phone and we phoned Daddy to see if he could pick us up but he was on voicemail. We walked up another hill with the sheep in it again.

Then we got to the road and Mummy didn’t know which way to go.

Then Ben prayed for Daddy to come and as soon as he opened his hands there was Daddy’s car.

The End.

This experience confirmed their emerging belief in a deity, but did not enhance their confidence in their mother’s resourcefulness.
A little unfair I thought, but that’s kids for you.

Is blogging a better use of time for a freelance writer than playing Spider Solitaire? (with four suits of course, and I have managed to get it out twice, which shows how much I play it).

Does it reveal that I’m underemployed and desperately seeking work?

Or does it show an admirable willingness to engage with new media, and prove that I’m not really an old fart who still reminisces about how the Amstrad 8256 used to suddenly decide its disc was full and push all the words upwards until they disappeared off the top of the screen?
This neat little move lost you everything in the open file without a word of warning.

Neil Baker has his doubts about the usefulness of blogging, but does it anyway. Google, perhaps not surprisingly, says all journalists should blog, and many have taken up the challenge as a way of updating the content on their websites.

I’m a newcomer to it, and the more I look online the more I find a seemingly limitless cosmos of interlinking ether-existences, all posting when - like me - they should probably be doing something else.

Time to get on with that something else then.

“Have you brushed your teeth?”
“Oop, i forgot.”

Forgot? How can an eight year old, who seems of sound mind and body, go up to the bathroom specifically to brush his teeth, and instead spend five minutes wandering about in a dream, pick up a few toys and put them down again, fiddle with his socks so the seams line up straight, and then come down to put his shoes on, his teeth still encrusted with Cheerios?

It’s the kind of thing I’m starting to do, but I have a few years on him. He’s contracting early onset middle age, but without the excuse of a head full of worries.

I’ve read that the children of hyper-efficient parents are often less organised themselves. So does this give me the reason I need to sit back and watch him forget his packed lunch/library books/homework/football kit/coat/trousers?

I’m not sure the school is ready for the full Ben flying solo experience.

Why do they do it? Why do they watch you, struggling with a toddler flailing at your side shrieking “Want toklit now” while the baby grizzles in the pram that you’re rocking violently in the vain hope that she’ll fall asleep despite the roaring fury of her brother, and then say;

“Time goes so fast when they’re little.”

Oh no it doesn’t. Not when you’re living through it. It goes appallingly, unbelievably, frighteningly, life-sappingly slowly. Every minute takes an hour, every day consumes enough patience for a year.

At the end of the week when you take the baby to be weighed - assuming it’s your first and you can still be bothered to go to the health centre, although when you’ve got two, any trip out can seem an attractive alternative to sitting in your kitchen wishing you didn’t live in a pit coated with primary coloured plastic - the baby has put on less than a pound, but has consumed enough of your energy to weigh at least ten stone.

You smile, thank the health visitor and say “fine” when she asks how things are. Because they are fine. The kids are fine, you have a house, maternity pay, and a husband who comes home as early as he can to see the kids and help with the dog end of the day. What’s not fine? Well, in a word, time.

Time was when time was money. There were tasks, deadlines, more tasks, more deadlines, congratulations on tasks completed on time, extensions to deadlines when tasks just wouldn’t fit into the allotted time. It was all measurable and containable. Time to go to work, time to go home, just time for a quick drink.

And then, after children, time starts to betray you with its perverse inconsistencies. A minute is no longer just a minute, an hour is not always an hour and a week can stretch out into a lifetime. It’s like a science fiction film I saw, in which an astronaut travelled through space for many Earth years, and returned only a few months older to find all his contemporaries dead and his children grown up.

I blame Einstein.

He said time passes at different rates depending on the observer. Well I’ve observed that spending a lot of time with babies and young children takes you back, not just to some primordial sludge where we exist in synch with all the previous generations of humankind, but even further back, to before the Big Bang, when time didn’t exist and therefore didn’t pass AT ALL. It just sat there, waiting.

I met a woman in a park when my son was two and my daughter a few months old. I’d meandered my way there, feigning interest in my son’s observations about this piece of mud and that lump of dog poo, staring into space and trying to root myself in the here and now instead of looking forward to bedtime, mine even more than theirs. The woman and I sat next to each other on a bench, and as I breastfed the baby we chatted a bit about the children, the weather, the tiredness, and I asked her what she was doing next, after the park.

“Oh, just passing time until tea,” she said.

And I nodded. I knew exactly what she meant, as that was why I was planning to take the long route home, not just to quench my hormonally driven thirst for Homes and Gardens magazines at the local newsagent, but to allow a bit more time to pass before getting them home and waiting for the clock to shift its reluctant hands to five o clock and tea time.

Sometimes I’d crack at four-thirty, move everything forward by half an hour and have them in bed before their father got home.

“Oh,” he’d say, disappointed and yet guiltily relieved, “are they in bed?”
“Yes,” I’d say, between gritted teeth.
“Bad day?” he’d ask.
“Not particularly,” I’d say, “just long.”

And I’d leave it at that. There’s no point trying to explain to someone who exists within the space-time continuum that I’ve just hitched a ride in the Tardis to a land that time forgot. He’s still existing in real time, while I have journeyed for days, nights, months and years back to non-time.

“How was work?” I’d ask, trying to show as much interest in his livelihood as I’ve been showing all day in throwing balls, picking up worms and explaining what’s behind the sky.
“Fine,” he says, “bit slow.”

Too right, I think. Much too slow. But that’s the point of little children isn’t it? They need to take life slowly, they’ve got so much to learn. Dawdling along the pavement poking things with sticks isn’t a waste of time for them, it’s educational, and as long as the things that are being poked aren’t living things, it’s to be encouraged.

And once they start school, you look back on the previous few years of bimbling about with buggies and think,

“Gosh, that went quickly,” forgetting the almighty time warp you’ve just lived through.

It’s at precisely this point in time that you start looking wistfully at other people’s toddlers, appreciating their idiosyncratic attitude to time from afar. You might even find yourself wanting to say, with the benefit of hindsight,

“They’re not little for long you know, time goes so quickly when they’re small.”

Well just DON’T SAY IT!

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You can also read this piece in Shaggy Blog Stories - a book of jolly funny blog posts put together for Comic Relief 2007.

When they first mention it, you think “what a lovely way of getting used to public speaking”, then you start wondering what your child is revealing about life at home. I’m talking News Time. My daughter has just started sharing her weekend activities with her Year One classmates.

 “So what did you tell everyone today?” I ask after school, partly as a way to talk about her day, and partly to check she chose one of the healthy outdoor activities we inflicted on her and her brother, rather than the Saturday morning they spent slumped in front of TMI.

 “I said I played in my room.”
 “All weekend?”
 “No, but you’re only allowed to say one thing.”
 “But we went for a walk on the beach, you rode your bikes in the park….”
 “I can’t say everything I did Mummy. Anyway, Ciera said she’d been to the park so I couldn’t say that as well could I?”

 So, do I plan such a punishing programme of activities each weekend that she has no choice but to share her tales of abseiling down Brent Tor, walking the entire length of the South West coastal path or pony trekking across Exmoor?

No, that way madness lies. Instead I resolve not to ask her what she said, so I can relax in ignorance of the impression her teacher gets of family life Chez Keir.

Then I start to “help out in the classroom” for an hour on a Monday morning, the very day they sit in a circle and tell each other their news.

I sit quietly and endure her telling the class:
“We dipped marshmallows in melted chocolate…” I smile, shrug my shoulders, and she continues, “… because Daddy gave them to Mummy for Valentine’s Day.”

The teacher says “Ah!” and my reputation as a mother who feeds her children squishy sugar dipped in melted sugar is saved by the once a year nature of the occasion.

“We went hashing and my mummy dropped me into the river.”

This had nothing to do with dodgy cakes and everything to do with running, following a trail which traverses streams and hedges with no thought for the state of a runner’s trainers, and carrying her over a particularly muddy river bank. But does her teacher know that? And even if she does, it still makes me sound like an adrenalin-junkie who drags her children across inhospitable terrain for fun without a thought  for their safety.

 But this was the worst of all:

“We went to Toys R Us. Ben got a gun and I got a Bratz doll, called Chloe. Her feet come off, she’s really cool.”

Their gran had sent them some money, what could I do?

Time for a comprehensive programme of punishing outdoor activities…

You must have seen the ads, they’re everywhere at this time of year, and if they catch you in a hyper-parenting mood you can find yourself thinking, if we don’t do it now it’ll be too late.
Then you look at the cost and think, perhaps next year.

Except we didn’t. We took the kids, Ben and Hannah, to meet Father Christmas – the real one, in Lapland, not one of the ersatz ones that stalk department stores, putting the grot into grotto.

To read the rest of this article, see Guardian Travel or Bad Mothers Club