Keir Royale

What a great weekend activity, I think, still labouring under the delusion that my children are happy to go along with my idea of a good, family day out.

So I suggest it, without thinking carefully how to lead them into it gradually, but by bit, until they’re hooked.

“What’s Beachwatch?” asks Ben, suspicious already.

“We’d be helping look after the beaches, by walking around…”

“Walking?” demands Hannah, always on the lookout for the “W” word, and not in a canine way.

“.. and picking up all the litter that gets left there. Then we’d list what we’d found so…”

I don’t get to finish my lame explanation.

“What, you mean we’d be walking about picking up rubbish and then writing about it?” says Ben, the scorn spilling from his lips.

He has a point. So I laugh.

“Yes, I thought it’d be educational and ecological all at the same time. A good, family day out.”

“I don’t think so.”

I know when I’m beaten.
So we went to the zoo, ate our picnic on the grass and bothered the orangutans and gorillas instead.

By the by, I’ve been awarded a lovely picture by the even lovelier Cartside.

I now pass it on to …

Potty Diaries

Not Wrong, Just Different

From Dawn Till Rusk

Enjoy.

Of course we limit their screen time, and of course they do everything they can to get around the rules.

“Dad, Mum says I can watch telly,” they whine, when I’ve said they can’t but am still at work so unavailable to lay down the law.

“Mum, Dad hasn’t let me on the computer for three days,” they squeal, a desperate look in their eyes that I am unable to ratify until Blog Fodder returns from hashing. By which time they’ve had twice their daily limit.

So I have a look to see what they’ve been doing.
I know what games they play - miniclip mostly, as I won’t pay for anything.

But Hannah’s learned to create folders, and has made worlds within worlds in a virtual construct which exhibits far too developed a sense of organisation for one of such tender years.

I spot a folder called “secruts!“.

Should I? Is it a betrayal of my child’s autonomy?

Sod that, she’s only 7. Her secruts! are fair game for her mother.
So I open the folder.

Inside I find 3 more folders and 2 Word documents. One of the folders is called “persnl stuff“.

I hesitate for, ooh, a second? And then I remember a coach who, when I realised I was late home from a swimming club event counselled -

“May as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.”

I looked at him blankly, and when he explained what it meant I stayed an extra few minutes to show I wasn’t a sap. I was too scared of the welcome I would receive at home if I stayed any longer.

But I’m a grown-up now. So I open the persnl folder. And inside are 3 Word documents and yet another folder.

The folder is called “Bbeenn!“

What better way to find out what she really thinks of her brother.
So I open it, expecting a tirade of fury or a list of crimes perpetrated by him against his little sister.

But again, there are more sub-classifications. I wonder if my second-born is heading for a career as a librarian.

I remember an interview I once did with a man who started off as a librarian and ended up as a purveyer of fine rubber bondage gear for the slightly kinky masses. So her career path may be anything but straight.

Inside Bbeenn! are 2 folders and 3 Word documents.
I begin to feel like Indiana Jones on a quest to pick the correct folder - the one that gives up its information without making me feel like a devious, diary-reading snoop of the lowest order.

I wonder if that is where I will end up - as a secrut! reader of my children’s teenaged diaries. I will have to advise them never to start writing one, for fear I won’t be able to resist.

The folder entitled “sroundins being good or not” intrigues me. What does she think of her surroundings? Does she mean her new, tiny bedroom with no space to lay out her playmobil? Or does she have more cerebral aspects of her life in mind?

I click. And I begin to fear I will never get to the bottom of this child’s ever-decreasing gyroscope of a mind.

Yet more folders and Word documents.

Eventually I find a document called Maths.
She doesn’t even like Maths - or so she says.

In it I discover -

Martha has 2 bananas she eats 3 how many does she have left - m1
my cat has 4 chooeys she eats 9 how many does she have left - m5
sooky my dog has had an operashon and I don’t know how much it costs
it was 20p more then the current people
there operashon costed 50p
how much did it cost
70p

So not only a closet librarian, but a secrut setter of spoof examination questions.

Which reminds me of a Maths teacher I had who set us a simultaneous equation.
He then spent the lesson wandering about trying to decide which of us to chuck the blackboard rubber at.

By the end of the lesson none of us had solved it. He smiled, rubbed a bit more chalk into his jacket, and chuckled.

“It’s impossible,” he said, “there is no answer!”

Hilarious. 40 minutes of our young lives - wasted.

Mind you, I’ve probably spent the odd 40 minutes on even more fruitless endeavours in subsequent years.

Science kits - don’t you just hate them.

Ben was given one for Christmas/Birthday at least 8 months ago, and I thought I’d managed to hide it somewhere he’d never find it.

But I’d forgotten that this is the child who can smell a confiscated Nintendo DS at 20 paces.

Se he found it, carefully buried beneath toys I thought he’d given up years ago.
It’s amazing how appealing a few toy hamsters can be when it’s raining and your weekend TV limit has been decisively breached.

So he found the big box filled with dangerous chemicals, evil-looking implements and unintelligible instructions.
And I was the only adult at home - Blog Fodder having slunk off in shorts for his weekly hash with the Crapauds.

I did my best.
Chemistry was never my favourite subject, and just distinguishing the Iron Sulphate from the Sodium Sulphate sends me back in time to the days of Miss Mason and her infernal Bunsen burners.

Ben is keen to get started with the explosions, but first I have to find some old yoghurt pots to use as petrie dishes, and a ruler to measure stuff.

It doesn’t take long before I get cross.

Ben spills iron sulphate all over his pyjamas, leaving 2 large yellow stains.
And he’s wearing the bottoms from one set and the top from another - so that’s two pyjama sets with no re-sale value.

Then he moves on to the next experiment before finishing the first, which, as a main-lining Completer-Finisher, sends me into a sharp decline.

And this second experiment requires the mixing of sodium hydrochloride solution before we can even start.

It’s like getting half way through a recipe and finding that before you can cook the cake you have to make your own chocolate. It’s just too much.

Before my brain explodes, Blog Fodder arrives home. Sweaty, yes - but up for a bit of chemical mixing.

So I pass on the baton and retreat to the Archers.

Five minutes later I decide to pop back into the kitchen to check all is going well and spillage is not on the horizon.

As soon as I show my face, Ben makes it clear I’ve had my chance and blown it.

“Mum, it’s my job to think. It’s your job to screech and complain.”

“And isn’t she good at it,” Blog Fodder adds, helpfully.

The Archers win the day. They don’t answer back.

My little boy - well, he’s 9 now - asked me a question at bedtime tonight.

“Mu-um.”

“Ye-es.”

“Can you change your job?”

Uncertain silence from me. Then the question to which I do not want to hear the answer.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t see you enough.”

And with that his voice wobbles and breaks and he starts to cry.
Not for effect or from anger or because he’s really hurt himself.
But for real.

“I ’specially miss you at bedtime.”

Now this is odd, because it’s almost always me that puts them to bed.
I point this out, and he sobs,

“When you went out with your friend the other night Daddy didn’t even bother to come up and close my curtains. I had to go down and get him.”

I refrain from starting a rant along the lines of -

“Curtains? He didn’t pull your curtains? He wouldn’t notice a curtain if you wrapped him up in it and rolled him down a mountain. He’s the same with unmade beds, empty loo rolls and dirty socks scattered across the floor. They do not reach his cerebellum. They stop somewhere around the level of - its only a duvet, it’s not that hard to chuck it on a bed, can’t you do it? - with a note of injured fury in his voice.”

Instead, I climb up into Ben’s very high bed for which there is no ladder, and lie next to him for a cuddle.

We talk for 20 minutes or so, about working, school, Mums and Dads and bedtimes, until he’s feeling happier.
Then I have to climb down again, without the aid of a ladder, to communicate our conversation to the Father Who Does Not Notice Curtains or Other Minor Irritations Because he has his Mind Fixed Firmly on the Bigger Picture.

He’s in the middle of his crossword, but when I tell him of my conversation with our son he shows a modicum of remorse and leaps up to pull the curtains closed against the gathering darkness.