So Eldest is revising for his next science test. On reproduction.
The topic started off quite benignly with pollen and wind assisted fertilisation and stamen. There were pretty pictures and bee attracting strategies.
The life cycle of a frog was mentioned at dinner one night.
And then things went quiet. I think they had started on human reproduction. Not something Eldest cares to discuss over meatballs. And who can blame him.
So tonight I was helping him fill in his key word sheet. They have one for each topic and it helps revision. This one didn’t hold any punches.
We meandered through the gamut of sexual organs, menstruation, hormones, birth, placentas and such.
I corrected some misapprehensions. For instance that the cervix is the gap between the vagina and the anus.
That in-vitro fertilisation is ‘how frogs do it’.
That the process of labour is like having leg cramp in a ‘delicate’ area. Well his teacher is male and I guess this is the nearest men can get to understanding it.
That Urethra Franklin was not a soul singer. OK I made that one up. Because I can. Ha ha.
But overall I was quite impressed with his knowledge and lack of tittering. Although it wasn’t completely absent. The tittering that is.
There is a diagram of the female reproductive system hastily drawn by me on the dining table. Without an anus. But with a cervix. To clarify it is on a piece of paper on the dining table in case you were worried.
And my son now understands that his parents had sex at least three times. He is grossed out.
So Eldest. We gave him a phone when he started Senior school in September. It was an old handset of husband’s with a SIM only, well SIM.
Almost as soon as he had it and the novelty had worn off he was on the internet researching better models.
And then regaling me ad infinitum about the advantages of the Samsung Edge or the I phone 6S. Or some other such technical wizardy. In which I had no interest. And no intention of indulging him.
The deal had always been that he would keep the old hand set (which actually is an I phone 4 and so not too shabby, certainly better than my entry level Samsung touch phone) until at least Year 9. When apparently phones become so important it is impossible to live without the latest model. Well certainly not at Eldest’s school. Where ‘everyone else’ has a better phone than him.
Ah school. The one-up-manship. The ‘my phone is better than yours’ ship. Every time Eldest whinged about his phone’s short comings I was transported back to my own Year 8. And red shoe gate.
I suppose I should explain. I always wore ‘sensible’ shoes to school. Anyone born in the seventies and growing up in the eighties will know that this meant black lace up Clark’s shoes. In a time when Clark’s shoes were not fashionable. In any sense.
I was teased mercilessly about my sensible shoes. Others persuaded their parents to buy them court shoes. Slips ons with bows and tassels. It was the eighties after all.
I finally got my mum to buy me some of these beauties. To wear outside school. They were bright red slip ons. With bows. And they were shiny. Finally I was going to be accepted by the teenage girl elite. Of course they were not regulation black and so I had to sneak them into school in my back pack without my mother seeing. And change into them in the loo. I should also probably point out at this juncture that our school uniform was maroon. And the shoes were crimson. One does not have to be a fashionista to work out that that combo was not all I thought it was.
Suffice to say I got more ribbing wearing the red shoes than the sensible black lace ups. In fact I wanted to click my heels and forever disappear to Kansas. I never wore them again.
So there you have it. I have no interest in keeping my children up with the latest trends in order for them to ‘fit in’. It didn’t work for me.
And then of course Middlest is hard on Eldest’s heels. He was recently accepted into the same Senior school and is, of course, expecting a phone. To be able to function.
So actually it is not just that I didn’t want to get him a better phone so he could fit in. It is also that I didn’t need to. Nor could justify the cost.
And then a series of ‘incidents’ occurred. Eldest swears all accidental. Which may be true. At least consciously.
He first disabled the phone by changing the PIN on the lock screen and then forgetting it. And inputting it wrongly so many times the phone disabled. Well suffice to say about four evenings and a trip to the phone shop later we finally managed to un-disable it. I think much to Eldest’s disgust.
Then he took it out when he went to play football with a mate. I asked him to take it. Because it is a mobile phone and not much use sitting on my kitchen counter. Communication wise. So what happened next was of course all my fault. Namely that it fell out of his pocket during a rainbow flick. And smashed. Not beyond help. But enough to threaten cut fingers during screen swiping.
So of course now he has a better phone. Only up one level to an I phone 5 but still.
Twelve year olds are damn cunning.
I made him give me ALL his birthday and Christmas money though. All £110 of it. And spend some of his Amazon vouchers on a proper case. So now he is broke. Until next Christmas.
Serves him right. And at least now he has a better understanding of the value of things. After all it has cost him everything.
For the last three days Eldest has been on a County Chamber Music course. Playing his cello.
When the invitation to sign up came out he met all the criteria and so I asked him if he was interested and surprisingly he said he was. I might have mentioned his old cello teacher would be there. And he might have been slightly distracted by Minecraft but he agreed readily.
Of course on the morning of the first day he was less keen. He didn’t want to go. He was nervous of meeting new people and of not being a good enough player. I assumed that he would be with others roughly his age playing music roughly of the right standard.
Well he got through that first day and had texted me during it with reassuring little messages. He was exhausted, as expected after concentrating for five hours, but went to bed happy enough.
The next morning however he was weeping into his Weetabix refusing to go back. He felt that he wasn’t good enough, that he would let his other quartet members down, that he had no one to talk to. Suffice to say that a combination of the lack of the promised teacher, three girls in his group much older than him, and apparently much better players than him, and not being able to find the toilets had put him off.
And then I had that dilemma all parents face. How much to push.
It doesn’t matter in what field or at what level, at some point every parent has to decide whether to push or not. It can be anything, anywhere. A party for five year olds when they just want to cling to your leg. The decision to send them on a Cub camp or not. The first residential school trip. Your toddler screaming on the side of a swimming pool refusing to jump in for the teacher. When they are stuck up a large tree you have no hope of climbing and the only way forwards is for them to come down by themselves. How to leave your sobbing four year old on the first day of school.
All of these, and a myriad others particular to each child, involve this knife edge decision.
In this case the instinctive part of me wanted to just ring up the course co-ordinator and say he wasn’t coming back. And tear a strip off him for the lack of introductions, support and basic venue familiarisation undertaken for my 11 year old.
But then the rational part of me remembered that my son is highly strung, a perfectionist, liable to remember only the negative. And a brilliant cellist for his age. Who played a solo in front of 250 people at the end of year school shin dig without much fuss.
I realised that if he quit those three violinists would be left in the lurch.
I knew from experience that although the performance aspect would be scary it would also be exhilarating.
And so I rang the co-ordinatior, bit my tongue and merely explained the facts. He spoke to Eldest and reassured him and he agreed to go back. I made a separate deal. That if he could ring me at lunch and tell me hand on heart that he had hated the whole morning I would fetch him back, no questions asked.
Of course that didn’t happen. His old teacher materialised. The girls found out he was only in Year 7 and took him under their wing. He rang me at lunch to ask if he could order pizza and stay between the end of the dress rehearsal and the actual concert so he could spend more time with them.
We are leaving soon to watch him. He will probably go wrong. And be a bag of nerves. That is fine. But he will also get a massive high from the experience.
He will feel braver and more self confident as a result of pushing through the fear. Let’s face it life is full of things we do not want to face.
And I was right to push.
But it is a balancing act.
Too much pushing will see him resent me for making him do things that made him miserable.
Too little and he will miss out on experiences that could really enrich his life.
We have a saying in our family. And it goes like this.
“Have you used your Lady Eyes?”
There are a lot of us in this house. Sometimes it feels like there are far too many of us. But the number of children I decided to have is maybe an issue for another day.
So there are a lot of us. And so we have a lot of stuff.
And it appears that it is my job to keep tabs on it all.
I spend a fair amount of my day mentally logging the position of many useful objects, most of which do not belong to me.
For instance my husband finds it really hard to keep track of his spectacles. They appear to be a mobile object despite having arms and not legs. Whenever he is home and I walk past them I make that mental note so that when the inevitable enquiry is made I can respond with a GPS location. Arm of sofa, window sill in bathroom, atop the laundry basket, on the patio furniture, beside the toaster. And such like.
Last Christmas I stumbled upon a fantastic stand for him to use. That is a picture of it up there. It is positioned on the window sill next to the front door. (And incidentally whilst we are there that is the place everyone should look first for any missing item. Just saying). And the stand helps slightly. He uses it when arriving home. Or when swapping from sunglasses to indoor glasses. But it hasn’t eradicated the whole problem. I believe a string around the neck is the only sure fire way. Or he could just wear them all the time…
And then we move on to my children. I suppose we must. The current items which cause the most issues are Eldest’s phone and Middlest’s I pod. In the case of the former we could ring it to find it’s location but unfortunately it is set by default to silent so he does not fall foul of the ‘no phone use in or between lessons’ rule at school. And Middlest’s is not ringable. We lost both yesterday. And then I found them almost entirely camouflaged on the black granite fire surround in the family room. I have suggested that putting their entirely black electronics on the hearth is maybe not such a good idea moving forwards. Especially when we begin lighting the fire.
When things are actually leaving the house the pressure ramps up. I seem to be the only person who does a mental check list when leaving a sports field. This weekend I had a ‘Lady Eyes’ fail. We discovered this at 7.45am this morning when their school lift was revving on the driveway and Eldest decided he had better check his Games kit and found his Ripstop was missing.
The Ripstop is a compulsory item. A sort of semi-waterproof, pull over the head tracksuit top. There are three in this house. People scoff at my diligent name label sewing which I undertake annually each Autumn. They say I should use a laundry pen on the care label. They don’t have three sets of everything in very similar sizes to out sort from the laundry. A name in the collar is actually as useful for me, the laundress, as it is for keeping the kit ‘safe’. I do not want to waste time hunting for initials on a care label on a side seam.
They all have red and black stripy games socks. I decided not to bother labelling them as it is quite hard to sew a name label onto something as stretchy as a sock. What a mistake. I often have 6 socks that look almost identical but are actually slightly different sizes hanging from my airer. I am sure I am probably ruining Eldest’s feet in the manner of Chinese babies and it probably explains the blisters Youngest sometimes gets after football training.
So anyway Eldest must have taken his Ripstop onto the field for his (very sunny) Rugby match on Saturday. And left it there. At the end of the match I did send him off for his water bottle which was clearly missing but as I hadn’t seen the Ripstop come onto the field and it was about 20 degrees it slipped my mind.
It will serve him right if he gets into trouble at Rugby training today. When heavy rain is forecast. I would laugh but it really isn’t that funny at £20 a pop.
Generally my kids do quite well at not losing their stuff. That is because I get very cross when they do. And I have a rule that if they lose something they will pay to replace it. I am training them early to do their own mental checklist. Obviously there is still someway to go.
I am also a name labelling maniac. I put sticky labels on everything. Including Eldest’s phone. Which he is surprisingly sanguine about. I put a sticky label on every one of the fine liners in the pack of 10 I bought Middlest this weekend. They cost nearly £1 a pen. I felt justified. A lot of stationary gets ‘borrowed’ at school. If stuff is labelled some other child cannot claim it is ‘their’s’. Middlest explained that actually each pen cost 99.90p. I retorted that I would allow him to merely pay 99p for the last pen he lost but £1 per mislaid pen up to that point. I think he got the message.
Compared to their school mates, and possibly because of my mercenary approach, they do OK. Already this term there have been impassioned e mails from other parents pleading for the return of black jumpers, entire Games bags with contents, mouth guards, blazers (yikes £75 a go) and odd shoes. The latter really worries me. How did they get home? Hopping?
When they come out from sports clubs in kit my Lady Eyes checklist follows a certain order:- Blazer, school shoes, mouth guard, other branded items, generic clothing of which I have a spare pair at home, generic items of which I have 5 others at home, black socks. I also try to remember to mentally note any lack of musical instruments but to be fair it is quite hard to miss that a cello is missing. If you see what I mean. The absence of a violin my slip through the net however.
And so I am chief ‘finder/ retainer of all things’. Here are my maxims:-
Always put stuff in the same place.
Always label everything.
Ensure kids are on board by employing a mix of ‘mummy is very disappointed’ and financial penalties.
It helps. It hasn’t really dealt with the husband problem though. I guess he will get so short sighted at some point it will solve itself.
Every Bruce Forsyth fan (and I count myself amongst them, fond memories of watching idiots try to throw pots and ice cakes in 30 seconds on prime time TV in the 70s) knows the answer to that question, all together now
‘Prizes!’
It is soon Prize Giving Evening at my children’s school. All the teachers wear their university robes, which is a bit startling when you have only seen some of them in shorts all year. They get some old boy (there are not yet many old girls it being only 10 years since the school went co-ed) to present books with a plaque inside to children who have presumably shone in various areas.
We knew eldest would be there as he recently co-won the Year 6 Humphriss Prize for Music at the Music Prize day.
All three of mine took part. Eldest played the cello and clearly must have done quite well with his Tudoresque, semi quaver fest. Middlest played his violin and the piano (not at the same time) and got lovely feedback from the adjudicator but was pipped to the Year 5 prize by a wonderful flautist. Youngest banged out ‘What shall we do with the drunken Sailor’ in her pre grade piano way. I think the adjudicators words were ‘great enthusiasm’…
Then today the prize winners were awarded with their book tokens in assembly. Eldest has surpassed himself and also won the Robinson Cup for the Most Improved Sportsman and duly received 2 book tokens. Youngest won the ‘something something’ prize for best person at PE in Year 3- probably because she won the Cross Country for the Year 3 & 4 girls and also the ‘how far can you throw a rounder’s ball’ event at last week’s field sports day. And she can run up House Point Hill very fast.
And middlest won nothing. Nada. Which is fine. Unless you are middlest, sandwiched between your award winning siblings. He had some hopes for the Year 5 Science Prize as all his exams this year have been in the 90%s. But, no, clearly there are many brilliant scientists at their school.
And so here is the very fine tight rope that is parent hood in perfect relief.
I am of course pleased for eldest and youngest. Eldest works incredibly hard. He deserves that Sportsman prize as he regularly falls into bed in a state of physical exhaustion after yet another training session. He was determined to shine with that cello piece after (and maybe I am being a bit partisan here) the really harsh examiner in April provided him with barely a pass for it in his exam. It was better than that even then. Now after a few more weeks of practise we can play it in our sleep. And it showed on the day.
Youngest is a born sportswoman as I may have mentioned before. And whilst this prize may be for something she is naturally good at she does attend every sports club going and she did go out training for that cross country, including taking part in a very cold Duathlon despite being terrified. She has an amazing untaught mind set- when I asked her how she ran through her stitch during the 2k cross country she told me she merely thought about how good she would feel when she won. The rounder’s ball thing was a surprise though.
So I feel they deserve their accolades and want to tell them that. It is hard to do so without middlest in ear shot and actually he should hear it. But how to do that without middlest taking it all the wrong way. My kids cannot understand that when I praise one I am not automatically denigrating the others. That just because I say ‘Well you worked hard for that so you deserve it’ I am not saying ‘And you, you just don’t work hard and deserve nothing’.
Middlest works hard, he isn’t a natural sportsman but tries his best, he is a fabulous musician (who won over that tough examiner in his violin exam to get a merit and leads the school orchestra), he is a brilliant scientist. On this occasion though others were just that bit better.
I feel for him. I told him that in my entire school career I never won a thing. Ever. And yes it hurts. But then I turned out alright didn’t I? He looked a bit askance at this, as he thinks I am a bit mad, but I think it helped. A bit.
And yes this is life. Life is tough. Get used to it. And all such platitudes. But when he is dripping tears into his cottage pie I don’t want to say that. I want him to have a damn prize. Damn it.
Anyway by bed he had become more philosophical. He has decided he would win the prize for ‘Best at Never Winning Prizes’. I may buy him a book and put a plaque in it for him. Not sure I will use his category though… maybe he should just win a prize for being generally wonderful…because he is.
musingsponderingsandrants 
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