On scheduling, for parents.

You’ve always rather resented the whole ‘women are better at multitasking’ thing because you are not. Your ability to tune out the world while you focus on one thing at a time is infinite. Your ability to type this journal in English, feed the baby, watch the news, do the washing up, get breakfast for the toddler, prepare for an OFSTED inspection at work and load the washing machine while simultaneously chatting in Russian to your MiL, taking the toddler upstairs for a poo, perusing the instructions to eliminate a particular type of punctuation from some Internet code, rescuing a climbing baby from the hi-fi separates, (or, possibly, rescuing the hi-fi separates from a climbing baby), reminding the toddler 26 times to put his pants back on, composing comprehension questions in your head and reading a book called ‘Sumita’s Pink Bicycle for the 3 millionth time is…

[Brief pause while you wash yoghurt off the back of the baby's head.]

[Another brief pause while you disinfect the high chair, sweep the floor, and take the rubbish out.]

["If you eat that all yourself, I'll read you a book."]

["Yes, sweets, that really is an excellent seagull impression."]

[Another brief pause while you muse on the fact that, having been forced to move to Salford, BBC Breakfast is gamely trying to make Manchester the centre of the universe. Although, to be fair, the fact it isn't raining there is news.]

[Less brief pause while you try to convince the baby that the computer is not a 22987v9c8g??????)(*&^%$£" toy.]

[Brief pause while you finish cleaning yoghurt off the floor.]

[My word, what a surprising number of towns conveniently situated for soundbites from the average punter in the Midlands there are.]

[Hang on, there's still yoghurt on the baby.]

[...reading a book...]

["Noooooo! Not the iPhone!"]

["Put you pants back on!"]

[What are we going to have for dinner tonight? *Much discussion in Russian*]

OK, I’ll finish this later.

Two days later

Anyway…

[Noises off]

Rather more days later

Anyway, it’s not just the inability to finish anything you start that annoys you, although you did realise the other day that the reason you like taking the kids out on trips is at least in part because it is one of the few activities which has a beginning a middle and an end all on the same day.

It’s the inability to schedule that quietly drives you insane. You may prefer to finish one thing before moving on to the next, but modern life is rubbish and that wasn’t always possible even before kids. But at least you knew how long, roughly, stuff would take, and you could create satisfying little to do lists and timetables in your head and, generally, win them.

Children, however, are frustrating to diarise. Something that lasted 15 minutes yesterday may take 2 hours today. Or 2 minutes. And their interruptions are unpredictable and, usually, unignorable. It is quite hard to resist a small girl who wants you to play ‘let’s put the (soft) building blocks on my head’, or the pre-schooler who can make the question why last all morning and go twice round your understanding of physics.

What to do? Concentrate on the childcare, the childcare and nothing but the childcare, interspersed by a little light housework? Trouble with that is that although sometimes you find you do not have whole evenings to yourself, sometimes you find that you do. Plus, your brain would dribble out of your ears.

And so life post children, especially post two children is, you have found, the art of throwing up lots of balls and dashing around trying to catch them all before they hit the ground.

When you start to drop too many of them, or stay up till 11pm on a regular basis* to catch them, that’s when you know it’s time to scale back.

*Ooooooh, the wild, riotous living.

On the next David Attenborough.

Currently, the Comet is using her left hand a lot in her efforts to feed herself. You are entertaining yourself by putting bits of potato in different places, or pointing the loaded teaspoon this way or that to see if she will still go the southpaw route (so far, mostly), but despite the fact that your Mum says that your Brother’s left-handedness was glaring from quite early on, you are not sure if it means anything. It’s very easy to look at a mild preference for … and declare that this clearly shows her future as a …. and at ten months you feel this is a little optimistic. Most likely she’s just gotten used to your right-handed habit of making a lunge for her mouth from her left, in the days when she was still letting you feed her.

The Star, on the other hand, is rising four and a child who most definitely knows his own mind. This is wearying when it leads to regular arguments about whether it is time to stop chasing the pigeons or (in his opinion) not. There are times when you would like to have one of those children who just capitulates to adult demands without demonstrating a fundamental contempt for the concept of the Mama is always right. On the upside, your debating skills are getting a really good workout.

Anyway, it occurred to you the other day that the Star has been fascinated with animals and related concepts for long enough now that it  is shaping up nicely to be a genuinely enduring obsession, rather than just a passing phase. I mean, sure, he went though cars and trains and, well, that was about it because then he got onto bugs and sharks and frankly he’s never looked back. It’s been the natural world from then on in, albeit a new subsection of it every few months. It’s hard to keep up, because he simply adds a new species to the pantheon rather than dropping previous enthusiasms completely, but you think birds are edging it from dinosaurs* these days.

You hadn’t realised how marked his preference was until you bought a set of picture encyclopaedias from a car boot sale on the grounds that while the Star enjoys a good story and another one and one more and oh go on Mama read me this too, he has also shown a certain appetite for factual books. When you got home, you upended them in the living room and the Star dived into them excitedly. Yet very soon it was very apparent that all encyclopaedias are not created equal. Because the Star divided the books into the ones about mammals, birds, insects, dinosaurs and sea life, which he wanted to read, and the ones about science, history, geography, farming and, shock horror, transport, which he didn’t, and though the books sit on a Star accessible shelf and the favoured ones are pulled down frequently, the others remained shunned to this day. You are still slightly surprised by how adamantly he sticks to his guns on this. Although he did let you buy a book on castles the other day and has pulled that out of the reading pile quite regularly since, so perhaps it is time to insist on looking through the one on agriculture or something again. Probably not though, as what he seemed most interested in wasn’t the knights but spotting all the dogs in the pictures.

Thing is, if this is the beginning of a truly lifelong passion, you are wondering if perhaps you should start pursuing it with him more.

Tricky. Animals have always left you a bit cold to be honest. But you feel the books are a good starting point. Also, thank goodness for libraries. You have learned more in the last year about the natural world than in your previous thirty *cough* summers due to the non-fiction section of the local children’s library, and you are pretty sure the Star has internalised more.**

You are also becoming accustomed to spending days out at animal-themed attractions. Parks will do, of course. What with the squirrels, the pigeons, the bees, wasps, butterflies, snails, worms, other assorted bugs and caterpillars, the pigeons, the dogs, the parrots, the starlings, the many varieties of ducks, the geese and the swans, the moorhens, the coots, the herons, the pigeons, the rats, the mice and the pigeons there is quite a lot of wildlife action going on. Still, this is London and there is also a profusion of zoos, safari parks, open farms, bird sanctuaries, aquariums and, if all else fails, the Natural History Museum within easy striking distance, so many places in fact, that if you visit one a month by the time you get back to the top of the list, that place will still be fresh and exciting. For both of you.

And then there is the issue of pets. After the Star renewed his quest to hug every mutt in London, following a brief hiatus when he realised that dogs have teeth, you have also been encouraging him to ask Granny and Grandad when they are going to get a dog. Rather them than you, is what you say. At least with children, you eventually get to stop picking up their poo.

You, however, are more inclined to think the Star might be getting some fish for his birthday.

As well as this. Mind you, you draw the line at having to sit though episodes of Countryfile.  But you might be persuaded to take the Star to the Imax at the Science Museum next time you and B get a yen to go to the cinema.

But the educator in you is vaguely worried that you should be doing something a bit more purposeful than just letting the Star’s whimsy stuff his brain full of whatever animal facts he comes across that happen to take his fancy (“Penguins have spiky tongues, Mama!”). In fact, the educator in you is having difficulty in restraining herself from drawing up some kind of biologically focused pre-schooler scheme of work. This month we will look at life-cycles!

Question is, would this kill his interest absolutely dead and if not, what should you be doing?

Answers on a postcard please.

*You are not at all sure that the Star grasps that dinosaurs do not, as such, exist in the modern world. You suspect he thinks they just live far far away. Under these circumstances, dinosaurs definitely count.

**Unless you are talking about evolution. You are still looking for a Star-freindly explanation. Anyone? Anyone at all?

On Big Miracle.

The email mentioned whales and with that you gave up your hitherto apathetic stance to pimping your blog out for material gain and accepted the offer of taking the Star along to an advance screening of the film Big Miracle in return for a review.  The Star regards whales as honorary sharks and remains violently interested in all things marine, so despite the fact that you had vague misgivings owing to the fact that these were whales in peril, and also despite the fact that when the blurb mentioned ‘rival superpowers’ you just knew there was going to be a Russian swigging vodka in it somewhere, you decided that it was too good an opportunity to pass up and off you both trotted.

Plus, it has Drew Barrymore in it. You like Drew Barrymore.

“Will there be sharks?” said the Star on the way to the ’boutique-style’ hotel where they hold such events. “Fish? Penguins? Seahorses? Sharks? Jellyfish? Sharks? Fish? Sharks? Sharks?” and because you hadn’t actually bothered to read much beyond ‘whales’ ‘Greenpeace’ ‘Drew Barrymore’ and, yes, ‘rival superpowers’ you were confident when you said, “Oh, I should think so.”

There weren’t any sharks. Or fish or penguins or seahorses or jellyfish or even a vast amount of screen time for the actual whales either, although the one sequence of the whales swimming around under water was impressive enough to get rapturous gasps out of the Star. So if, like you, anyone is thinking of taking a budding marine biologist along to Big Miracle and then sitting back and letting the wildlife work its magic on their hyperactive toddler it is best that you burst that bubble right away.

For Big Miracle is a film not about the three whales imprisoned in the Point Barrow Alaskan ice of the frozen north sometime back in the 80s when Ronald Regan was in power that people who actually read the summary more carefully than you might think it is.

No, it is a film about the disparate group of people who come together to save them, the efforts they go to and the trials, tribulations, and incidents of getting their tongue stuck to various metal surfaces and being fleeced by a young Anouki boy they have in doing so.

It is, in fact, an ensemble rescue-adventure movie.

This is not at all a bad thing. In your opinion. Apollo 13 is one of your favourite movies for the very reason that it is the triumph of a team of engineers over adversity, and given the choice between saving Tom Hanks or three whales from certain death, you know which you’d choose. Watching all the pieces slowly and inexorably fall into place on the whales’ behalf was quite diverting.

Plus, the people involved are all quite engaging. Flawed, certainly, but generally the film was lacking in the kind of negativity that comes from being forced to watch unpleasant people being unpleasant at length. The major baddy is the weather and nearly everyone is pretty focused on trying to beat her.

You got a couple of chuckles out of it. This always pleases you.

And there may not have been much in the way of further animal action to support the three leading mammals, but there was some quite nifty  heavy machinery for the Star to drool over.

The problem is that there was quite a lot of back story to fit in, as well as attempts to tackle the themes of ethics in journalism, the tension between environmental protection and a native people’s traditional way of life, Cold War politics, coming of age, the generation gap, the evils of the oil industry, serving in the armed forces and luuuurve. Towards the middle of the film you started to feel as though huge swathes of the original script had been ruthlessly excised in order to bring the film in in anything like a reasonable length. In one instance, for example, an entire romance sweeps by in the space of one phone call. It’s rather a shame. You would have almost sat through the seventeen hour version.

Which brings us to the other problem. Being a film about humans and human motivations, it involves quite long periods of talking, talking, talking at times, so it does have to be said that in the second third of the film the Star did wander off to look for more of the sweeties kindly provided by the organisers for a while. Much business with his whale-shaped balloon and trying to chat to the people next to and behind us.

He resisted your suggestion that you leave altogether, however, and when the rescue efforts ratcheted up towards the final push, he was duly enthralled again, and remained so until the end. It helped the whales come back into focus then too.

A final word of warning. The ending of the film is not quite what might be expected from a heartwarming family-friendly movie about saving cute animals. Possibly the filmmakers were constrained by it being based on a real life event.

That said, this plot twist went right over the Star’s head and he left well content with his experience overall. He was certainly able to go home and give a fair summary of the main points of the plot to his Papa and pronounce it good quite decidedly. Really, that’s everything you can ask of a film experience with a toddler.

As for you, you like to cry in movies. You pronounce it good too.

Although the Russians? Did neck the vodka.

On smug motherhood.

‘I wanna banana!’ said your son.

‘Sorry, sweets, no bananas today.’

The Star frowned. ‘Apple! Me have an apple?’

‘No apples either. We need to go shopping. How about a satsuma?’

‘Yes!’ Cherubic smile of satisfaction. ‘A sat-suma! I yike sat-sumas.’

There are times when you get to feel really smug as a mother, and when exchanges like this happen at top volume on a busy bus, that is one of them.

You feel justified in accepting the accolades that must surely have been rolling in upon you from your fellow passengers. You put a lot of effort into the Star’s food and eating habits. You do a lot of cooking. You do a lot of cooking from scratch.  Junk food in your house is pelmeni, Russian style ravioli. You even make your own hamburgers.

As a result you have a son who will refuse fish fingers*, can’t stand ketchup, has only recently discovered fruit juice is nicer than plain water, prefers the bitter dark Russian chocolate to the exceptionally sweet Cadburys  and whose favourite foods are apples,** brocoli, tomatoes and home-made chicken noodle soup.*** He doesn’t eat biscuits.  Or puddings. Not even with custard. He prefers fruit. He likes smoked salmon, steamed salmon, salmon and broccoli pasta and has never knowingly eaten a chicken nugget.

Of course, given that you can feel anxious about absolutely anything parenting related, you worry about this. Will he, you fret, rebel when he is thirteen, eat a Happy Meal and then consume nothing but McDonald’s for the rest of his life, die at 45 an obese blob as a result of your failure to desensitize him to fatty, sugar laden foods?

But the thing is, it’s not that you ban these things from his life. Every now and again you’ll make a cake and offer him some. He’ll nibble the icing and demand some grapes. You can’t even get him to eat sausages unless you hide them in toad in the hole, which is a shame as you like them.

In fact, it weren’t for the fact that he doesn’t really want to be adventurous, is steadfast in turning his nose up at stuffed peppers and adores ice cream, you’d be tempted to jack in the cooking and buy in a years’  supply of microwavable dinners to redress the balance.

Anyway. This is relevant because, as well as the fact that it doesn’t do to miss an opportunity for a good boast when you are a mother, you are about to wean the Comet.

Which means breaking out the baby rice and having at her with purees and not giving baby led weaning a chance.

Baby led weaning, for the child rearing fashion challenged amongst us, is where you cover the floor, the walls and any siblings in plastic sheeting, plonk a bowl of (unsalted but otherwise unadulterated) spaghetti bolognaise in front of a seven month old, stand well back and let them have at it. And then give them a bath and nuke the kitchen from orbit.

You would find it amusing, and as the Comet already has a good line in lunging for the nearest banana, or trying to face plant in the Rice Krispies, or flinging herself sideways to go after a piece of flying pasta, you doubt you will be able to resist giving her a spoon and a plate of cauliflower cheese sometime very soon, just to see what she makes of it.

But by and large, you don’t want to mess with the magic formula that has produced the Star and his disgustingly well-balanced attitude towards food.

Plus, there is the issue of the mess.

*Unless he’s at his Granny’s. For some reason he likes fish fingers at Granny’s.

**He ate four today. You are not sure this is entirely healthy. And nearly an entire bag of satsumas yesterday. On the other hand, surely this is better than him eating four lots of sweets?

***OK, and crisps. He doesn’t get to eat crisps very often though, so he has stopped asking for them. You save them for situations that call for really big bribes.

On Ooooooooooooooh Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

You took the Star to his first fireworks display yesterday.

It’s not the first time he’s seen fireworks. You took him to the Ancestral New Town last year for rockets and Catherine wheels  in the back garden. He loved it, so for 2011 you decided that it was time to take him to the real thing in the Big Park Near You. Oh, and the Comet. The Comet really benefits from being a second child. There is no way the Star would have been out so far past his bedtime at her age.

You set off with a good half hour to go, thinking that you would just pop on the bus and get to the place you and B had decided would be a good one to observe from.

This happened to be on the other side of the river to where the display was actually taking place. You are cheap, you see, and didn’t feel like paying the £20 entrance fee (‘kids go free!’ Yeah. Right).

First snag. You had insufficiently considered that everybody else in your corner of London would be doing the same thing. You were eventually forced to walk an extra 15 minutes to the other bus-stop, miss another two buses due to overcrowding, muscle your way into the last seats on the top floor on a third, roar off round the corner, and then get promptly stuck in a traffic jam.

You got off the bus.

You began trotting towards the river, determinedly dragging the toddler. But at some point, you and B decided that you weren’t going to make the far bank in time and cut left through the houses in order to go and ooh and ahh from the boundaries of the park.

As it happens, when the display started, the fireworks marshals were too busy removing the fencing in anticipation of the exodus to come, and so you and quite a lot of other people ended up standing just inside the park, with a pretty good view of the bangs and wizzes.

The Star really enjoyed himself. He ended up on his Papa’s shoulders shouting WEEEEEEEEEEEEE! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! and DAAAVAAAAAI, DAAAVAAAAAI!* at the top of his voice throughout.

The Comet started stoically at the pretty lights. Very occasionally, she blinked. You had your hand over her ears, but still, you’d expected a bit more reaction.

Then it was time to go home.

You meandered back along your side of the river, watching the party boats sail by and allowing the Star plenty of time to throw leaves into the water.

Then you got to your bus stop. They’d closed the roads round the park and the traffic was pretty chocka, but your bus was coming so you weren’t too worried.

The bus was terminating there and turning round again rather than trying to force its way through the jam any further. They do that. It’s irritating. It’s especially irritating when you have an over stimulated toddler and a baby to get home. Eventually you decided to bite the bullet and just walk.

You walked and walked and walked. B carried the Star, but the Star is 20kg these days and he could only do so far before you both had to find new incentives to keep the kid on his feet a bit further. Sadly, pigeon chasing is impractical at night. There are no pigeons.

You made it to another, different bus stop after a while. The Star entertained himself, as he is wont to do in such circumstances, by commanding passers-by to STOP! As ever, a few revellers did so, which just thrilled him right down to his little socks.

Your bus came.

And went again. Too overcrowded to even stop.

You ended up getting the Inconvenient Bus and then Yet Another Bus after that, arriving home at 10.30pm.

The fireworks finished at 8.30.

Next year, you will probably be partaking of your parents’ hospitality again.

*’Let’s go! Let’s Go!’

On the Voyage of the Beagle.

B’s problem with dinosaurs is that at the moment every book he picks up when he wants to read to the Star contains pictures of snarling teeth devouring smaller, cuter animals and he is having difficulty finding euphemisms to explain it.

But the Star is completely animal, insect* and fish** mad and it is impossible to avoid the topic of what they, let alone dinosaurs, eat completely. You tend to wince and say  ’I expect that rabbit is having a sleep’ when you get to that bit. It’s hard to look a three-year old in the face and say, yes, that owl is eating that mouse, look at that blood splatter, imagine the crunch of its delicate little bones as you peruse the encyclopaedia, when not five minutes before you were reading a story about a kind-hearted hamster in a tutu and his best friend the cat in a bowler hat. The kind-hearted talking hamster no less.

That said, it’s probably you and B who are the sensitive ones. It does not seem to bother the Star in the slightest. He cheerfully lists all the animals a lion might be expected to chomp on and many that are improbable, and his eyes light up when he finds a picture of a fox bearing down on an unsuspecting gaggle of chickens. One of his favourite things is to bounce up to the fish counter in the supermarket, point to the most fishy looking fish there and say ‘I eat fish!’ He is even sanguine about the possibility of personal danger. ‘That dinosaur eat me up?’ he asks with relish every time we come across a T-rex.

In fact, the only thing he seems a bit upset about is when it’s insects getting savaged.

The Star really really likes his bug-friends.*** He has a particular downer on spiders for this reason.

This is not B’s only objection to dinosaurs, however. He feels that the Star is putting a lot of effort into learning some really useless facts. He came to this conclusion after the Star had taken him through the latest library book and accurately named all the terrible lizards, and told him about how sauropods swallowed stones.****

You feel B has a point there. The Star would be much better off learning to recognise formula one cars.*****

But your main objection to the dinosaur phase is that it leads you to have to explain evolution over breakfast.

Well there was this timeline picture in the book, showing how we went from microbes to human beings, with a detour via the dinosaurs and you were unwise enough to read the text which went with it. 42 whys later and the Star was frankly disbelieving whilst you had given up. The Star has, after all, only just grasped the concept of the past, which he refers to as ‘last night’ regardless of when it actually happened. The concept of deep time is beyond him.You are almost certainly lucky that he doesn’t think the dinosaurs are, in fact, Transformers in disguise.

At which point you also realised that the problem with creationism is that it makes a far better picture book.

The devil has the best stories.

*Also, related organisms like spiders. Do not get pedantic.

**And crabs. Yes, you know they aren’t fish. Whatever.

***It’s really time to get him a dog, isn’t it?

****Because they didn’t have proper teeth so needed a bit of extra help to grind up the leaves they ate. See, you are learning something too.

*****This weekend, your MiL taught the Star to read ‘baba’ (or rather ‘баба’) and you taught the Star to pick out a Red Bull Formula One car from the others. So so proud.

On wearing your underpants over your tights.

You have realised that you have neglected to mention that the Star has a secret superhero identity, and has had it for a good six months now.

He is Rescue Boy! A name which can only be said with a fist pump, swirl of an imaginary cape and a rhetorical flourish worthy of the best Hollywood voiceover.

His special power is retrieving felt tip pen lids.

You discovered it thus.

There you were, spending an idle twenty minutes encouraging the Star to colour inside the lines, when the blue pen’s top rolled of the table.

Immediately, the Star bounced out of his seat, and with a cry of ‘Rescue Boy!’* he burrowed under the table and came up triumphantly clutching the item in question.

When another pen lid ended up on the floor as pen lids are wont to do, he did it again. And again. And again and again and again. Then he started surreptitiously sliding whatever items he could find off the table so he could dramatically pick them up. Soon that became unsurreptitiously chucking them on the floor.

Which is when you put a stop to it.

Until the next time you both sat down to draw.

You find yourself charmed but slightly nonplussed by this behaviour as you were not aware that the Star had a particular interest in comic book characters. Bugs, yes. Peppa Pig, yes. Dinosaurs, yes. Flowers, yes. The Wot Wots, yes. Trains, yes. Football, up to a point.** Wearing his underpants over his tights? Meh, was what you had thought were his thoughts on the subject. You couldn’t even recall him coming across any of the baggy-trouser challenged brigade. Until you remembered this.

Still. While Justin Fletcher clearly has a lot to answer for, secret superhero identities must be hard-wired into little boys’ psyches.

*Said with a fist pump, swirl of an imaginary cape and a rhetorical flourish worthy of the best Hollywood voiceover. Of course.

**Sharing the ball is the point, but that’s a post for another day.

On the end of an era.

Anybody can tell you are irredeemably middle class because your children wear second-hand clothes.*

OK, so necessity plays a part, but you spend quite a bit of time at car boot sales anyway**, and while you are there the sight of so many barely-worn clothes going for twenty pence a flower-strewn babygrow brings out the rampant economy driver in you. Even though every. Damn. Item of clothing for girls is covered in pink. And flowers. Pink flowers! On a pink background! With more pink for the trim!

Your urge to save money is not helped by the fact that you also live amongst very affluent mothers who tend to offload the entire back catalogue of Mini Boden at the NCT nearly new sales in your area. Of course the downside is that they generally want more for their clothes. ‘But it’s JoJo Maman Bebe!’ they say, ‘That MUST be worth two pounds!’ You put up with this because, it must be said, there is a slightly higher chance that they will be selling items where the pink is confined to a bit of piping round the neckline.

Of course, you were nearly lured away from the path of unbearable fiscal smugness this summer by the fact that suddenly the shops seem to have decided that bright colours for boys are in.  And your mother has decided to fight back against the wave of pink that has entered your house by turning up with determinedly unpink dresses for the Comet.***

But what with one thing and the fact that having your kids in you *cough* late *cough* thirties meaning that lots of people have already had theirs, and are just itching to give away bin bags full of great jeans to a good home, you haven’t really been tempted.

Unfortunately, it seems that the Star’s days of handmedown living might be coming to an end.

3+ year old boys really live to destroy their clothes.

Parents of 3+ year old boys have stopped buying more outfits than he can possibly wear because that top is just! So! Cute!

What’s left is mainly clothes saying ‘Here comes trouble!’ or ‘I’m a menace!’ or ‘Lock up your fragile items!’ Which, you’ve discovered, might as well read ‘Give my mother a disapproving glance!’ or ‘Tut if you think I should be dragged off by my ear!’**** People are too easily swayed by advertising. If he wears his lime green leaf patterned shirt with the bright yellow shorts, they just smile.

Still, you’ve had a good run and any minute now he’ll be starting school and it’s all out of your hands, bar the weekends.

*Well, not pants. Or shoes. Or swimming costumes. Or socks. Or vests. But apart from that…

**B still has a technics habit to feed.

***Although last time she was forced to fall back on purple. Even new, it is hard to escape the rose-tinted tyranny.

****What your friend aptly calls the ‘Daddy’s Little Princess’, ‘Mummy’s Little Pyscho’ clothing phenomenon, which, for boys in particular, really seems to take off at 3+.

On education, education, education and sacrifice.

Since the Star has now turned three, he is eligible for the 15 hours of nursery provision the UK provides, and you could be enjoying blissful toddler free afternoons.

You aren’t.

The Star did, in fact, get a place at the nursery of your choice. The one where they don’t just follow the children around and attempt to get the to count the fish as a nod towards numeracy teaching if he shows a fleeting interest in the aquarium, but actually collar a few kids at a time and spend a short time with a bit of structured learning each day.

You don’t have much time for ‘dogme’ in your profession, so you don’t see why you should support something similar when it comes to your children. ‘Dogme’ rose from Scott Thornbury’s attack on handout driven lessons. You think that a teacher who doesn’t know how to use resources properly is the last person to have the skills to go it alone. You don’t doubt that this kind of student led learning can be done, but only by the most skilled, and even then it is your professional opinion that making it up as you go along is not as successful as a teaching strategy as actually giving it some thought in advance. Although you are also undoubtedly against photocopying a badly designed worksheet as a substitute for actual preparation.

Not that you are opposed to a bit of impromptu teaching, of course.

So, you were satisfied with the school.

The problem was that even though you had booked the Star in for the afternoon session at the nursery and the Star’s Russian playgroup slash language lessons are in the morning, the fact that they are at the opposite ends of South London meant that the clashed horribly and on Tuesdays and Thursdays he wouldn’t make it to the school anything like on time. Plus, if you are honest, you didn’t really fancy plunging the Star into a monolingual English environment for the full five days a week.

You went down fighting. You spoke to his (bi-lingual in Portuguese and English) teacher. You officially requested that the Star be let off Tuesdays and Thursdays to further the bilingual and bi-cultural diversity of his individually tailored diffentationalised syllabus. The (bi-cultural but regretting not being bi-lingual in Norwegian and English) Headmaster himself phoned you up to chat about it.

Both were sympathetic.

But his absences would mess up the school’s official absence stats and that in turn would have an impact on their standings in the school league tables*, and so you had to choose.

Choose to send your child to the excellent local school you hope to get him into when the time comes for compulsory education and enjoy afternoons of sitting, feet up, in front of the TV watching property programmes** and feeding the Comet without the distraction of a toddler demanding attention to contend with. But tip the precarious balance you have gained between English and Russian firmly away from Russian.

Or continue to slog through London traffic for an hour twice a week and have to provide the Star with opportunities to get messy, explore the world and learn maths in the afternoons yourself. But manage to keep a reasonable amount of Russian input in your child’s life.

No contest really.

*You don’t blame the school, you blame The System.

** This is a joke. You don’t watch property programmes in the afternoon. No, in the afternoon it’s mostly antique shows.

On nicknames.

Sarah at Bringing Up Baby Bilingual has got you thinking about your children’s nicknames and the truth is that they have too many.

The Star is, of course, the Star, although rarely to his face.

But you call him Sausage and Monster and Boo. Malinki Malchik*, Malinki Chelovek** and Pipiskin***. Smelly Pants Russian-Surname. Stroppy Pants Russian-Surname. Sweetie. And, of course, all Russian people who meet him call him by the diminuative form of his given name.

It’s no wonder the Star has a tendency so shrug when strangers ask him what he’s called.

B pointed out that you would need new names for your daughter.

Malinki Kusochik Kolbassa****, Small, Cheripackha*****, Goblin and the diminuative forms of her given name are all popular.

But the Star calls her Hobooka.

He means Helicopter******.

Because she waves her arms and legs about a lot apparently.

And you are consumed by delight at his cleverness.

*Little Boy.

**Little Person – this always makes your MiL laugh. It’s not a Russian collocation.

***Penis Boy [affectionate].

****Little Piece of Salami.

*****Turtle – there’s a resemblance.

******It’s not Russian, it’s just the way he pronounces ‘helicopter’.