All posts by LearnerMother

On highwaymen

Family, LearnerMother, , , ,

What’s that Sinatra song – ‘Love and Marriage, Love and Marriage, Go together like a horse and carriage’…cute song, full of the joys of love, and, er, marriage. But like all good love songs, it seems to end before the kids arrive, doesn’t it? Just as well, I suppose – ‘Love and marriage and kids, go together like a horse and carriage AND DICK BLOODY TURPIN’

Not that I would wish to compare children to rampaging highwaymen. I mean Dick Turpin by all accounts was single minded in pursuit of his plunder, creating chaos to ensure he got what he wanted, and leaving dire consequences all around him if he didn’t. Nothing like kids at all…oh. Come to think of it, Dick Turpin actually comes out of this looking bit better – after all, he only wanted your money OR your life.

Seriously though, how the effing eff are you supposed to maintain any sort of grown up relationship with young children? If you google the top ten tips for a long lasting relationship  (I haven’t googled this by the way, and if I were to google it, it would TOTES OBVS be for a friend) but just say someone were to google it, while researching a blog article or something, and I bet the top 100 search results would be all spaff like  ‘Make quality time for each other’ and ‘When you talk to each other, make eye contact and listen carefully before responding’ and ‘Have a sexy weekend away’ and ‘Don’t forget the romantic surprises, how about a note in the fridge to tell him you love him’ and ‘Do a relationship MOT once every few months’ and ‘Make sure you have time away from each other with your respective circles of friends’ and blah de bloody blah.

Are you having a LAUGH, internets? Quality time? When, exactly? We used to put the kids to bed at 7 and know we’d at least have a couple of hours to do something together, even if it was only the VAT return…now they are bigger, bedtime is later, and our ‘us’ time is squeezed – and at weekends it’s non existent. Eye contact? We could probably do that, if we slept facing each other and propped our eyelids open – would that count? Romantic surprises? Do you mean the ones that appear from nowhere when you just might be having a bit of cuddle that just might lead to something else and – oh. SILLY ME. Hahahahdebloodyha. What’s next – ah yes, a relationship MOT. Right. So if it’s anything like the car MOT, you remind each other for weeks that it’s due, fail to book it, blame each other for said failure, finally book it, and then wish you hadn’t because you get a whopping great bastard bill to get the stupid car back on the road for another year, oh and a sheet of advisories just to tell you that despite all the cash you’ve just thrown at it, the car is probably going to die in the next 12 months anyway…Nah, not feeling the love for the whole ‘relationship MOT’ thing. And finally, make time away from each other…what the WHAT? If we don’t have time FOR each other, how on this earth are we supposed to make time AWAY from each other? And in all this time making, what do we do with the kids???

Admittedly this is made more tricky by the fact that we mostly work different hours to each other. We worked it out like that so that one of us could always be around for the kids before and after school, but the flip side is that one of us is working at least one evening a week and often two, and one of us is always working on Saturdays and sometimes Sundays. Throw in Welsh classes another evening (which are essential as the kids go to a Welsh speaking school) and weekly admin for the business, and it’s not unusual for us to go weeks without having time for a proper conversation. Weeks? Possibly months, come to think of it…

So, oh grown up ones who are out the other side, how does it work then? Is it just keep your head down and get on with it? Does it get easier? And when? Are we the only ones who are finding that our kids, desperately wanted and loved as they are, are Dick Turpinning things?

As always – pearls of wisdom welcome!

…16 months on and this remains as true as ever, so I’m linking up with ‘The Truth About’ over at Sam’s blog ‘And Then The Fun Began’…pop over for a root through truth, truth and more truth from some fab bloggers!

And then the fun began...

On homework and hand holding

Family, LearnerMother, , ,

Do you ever get that thing where you are so sick at the sound of your own voice saying the same sentence over and over again that you start to want to cut your own tongue off? It was bad enough when I just had one inattentive husband to contend with. Now I have three selectively hearing kids as well….my vocabulary has reduced to about 20 words, which I seem to repeat over and over again. Annoyingly enough, though I have lost ALL the words which used to make me sound reasonably well-read and intelligent, I seem to have kept the sweary ones and there’s no bloody selective hearing when it comes to that, I can tell you. They just can’t WAIT to repeat a lovely juicy swear word on the bus, or in front of the in-laws…anyway I digress…

This weekend, it was the homework chat on repeat. Number one son had quite a nice homework this week – to design a front cover for a project on their new school, which is being built for them ready for September. That’s a pretty fun task for a seven year old, especially as they can use the iPad or computer to design it. FFS, these kids don’t even know they are BORN, doing homework on kit like that…not that my boy saw it that way. I mentioned it to him on Friday, and on Saturday, and then several times on Sunday, and then again (and again, and again) on Monday night. Funny that – mention homework to them, there is a thousand more interesting things to do, and yet at 7am on a Sunday, they just can’t find a SINGLE THING to entertain their little brains with so you can have forty winks or even some rare – um – action – in peace and quiet. FFS. Again.

Anyway, I mentioned the homework so often that even the cat was getting bored of hearing it. In the past, if this situation has come about, I’ve just put on my firm-but-fair face* and enforced it. Because they are kids, and they have to learn stuff, and I’m the boss, innit. And also because I want them to do their best at school so they can have choices in later life. And, just a teeny bit, because I am a secret authority fearer and the thought of someone not doing homework, even though it’s not my homework that needs doing, makes me twitch slightly.

This time, I couldn’t face the battle. There’s so much going on for us at the moment – work is full on, we’re in the middle of a shop move, I’m job-hunting, we’re trying to get our house reconfiguration project off the ground, two of the three of them have birthdays coming up…I am run ragged right now, even by my standards, and I just did not have the energy for a fight. So I told him it was fine by me if he didn’t do his homework, but he would have to explain to his teacher why he hadn’t done it, and left it at that. Well, not quite – I also wrote a note to his teacher explaining that there were NO extenuating circumstances AT ALL for the lack of homework this week. Because I’m a Tiger Mother. Grrr.

I’m stressing about all this a bit now. Should I have insisted he do it? You know, with the firm-but-fair face? What if there is no comeback in school on this and he thinks he doesn’t ever have to do homework again? Is nearly eight too young to start taking responsibility for this? Was it a terrible thing to effectively grass my son up? HAVE I RUINED HIS LIFE? AM I BEING OVER-DRAMATIC?

Pearls of wisdom to share? Be my guest!

 

*yelled

On giving a dog a bad name

Family, LearnerMother, , , ,

So I found one of the kids in tears yesterday. When I asked them what was wrong, they said it was because they hadn’t been invited to someone’s party. Now I tend to be quite unsympathetic on this sort of thing with my kids – they can’t expect to be invited to them all, just as they can’t invite everybody in the class to theirs – and I was reminding said child of this when they came out with something that stopped me in my tracks.

‘They wanted to invite me, (sob, sob) but their Mummy said they couldn’t, because she said I stole something from her Mummy’s bag once when I was in reception, (sob, sob) and I don’t steal things and (wailing now) I don’t remember stealing anything and I don’t want to be in trouble’.

UUUUh. Right. Once we’d calmed things down, I did some more digging, thinking that there must be a bigger back story to it all, but that’s still the sum total of the information I have about this. That, and the fact that I have a devastated child on my hands. Not because of the party –  that seems to be neither here nor there –  but devastated because they think they are in trouble, though they can’t remember doing whatever it is they are in trouble for.

Ok. Because I have nothing else to go on, lets start from the premise that my child did take something from someone’s mother’s bag, at some point during their reception year. I’m not really clear how this might have taken place, since the child in question doesn’t spend any time with this adult, but I suppose it could have happened on the yard, or in the park, or at a party.

Reception year would put the age of this child at between only just four, and only just five. Clearly children should not take things from people’s bags, but stealing? Really? A four year old doesn’t STEAL. A four year old might well think ‘I see that, I want it, I will have it’, but I don’t think at that age that stealing is really a concept they have, do they? Of course, a four year old should certainly be aware that they can’t just take stuff they want without asking. But knowing the correct behaviour, and then acting on it at all times, is something that comes with age, and with adult guidance. And if I had known about this incident, I would have dealt with it at the time and used the opportunity to reinforce the fact that you can’t just take stuff, and I would also have insisted that the child apologise to the adult in question. BUT I WASN’T GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY.

So given the fact that this incident wasn’t seen as serious enough to mention to me at the time, and that it happened aeons ago, and that we are talking about four year olds, I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that my child is being told by a classmate that their Mummy doesn’t want them coming to their party, because they ‘stole’ something. If this parent doesn’t want our kids to socialise together, for whatever reason, that is totally and utterly up to her and she has every right to make that call. I just feel that the way it has been done is unkind and thoughtless and unnecessary.

I don’t know whether to tackle this with the parent in question, or whether it will just make things worse. What would you do?