The mother of a friend of my child’s told me that her daughter sat down to dinner one evening, held hands around the table and asked everyone if they would like to say gross. A few weeks later my child came home and wanted to discuss God. He is learning about religion at the local Montessori. I am not sure what form it takes and honestly I don’t care, as long as it covers all religions rather than the most popular indoctrination of the time. At dinner this evening he announced that he knows so much now about religion and he even knows the names of God’s two children: Jesus and Picasso.
Bible Study?
February 22nd, 2010A-nother
February 21st, 2010I realise I have spoken plenty about that desperate need to procreate but then there is that cautious desire to provide your child with a sibling. Should I, shouldn’t I? What if I do, what if I don’t? … and all the other what ifs.
It’s a tough decision that never gets any easier. The only difference between having two and deciding to stick to one is that you can wish you had had another one but, if you do have that other one, you can never say you wish you’d only had one … as that would be diminishing the value of a human life … an extremely important human life since you would have made it from scratch.
Dirt is ok … even if I have got OCD
February 19th, 2010My child has just run past me with his mouth smeared with the remains of a strawberry Solero ice cream and I didn’t even flinch.
… and he stayed like that till bath time.
There was a time when I would look at the parents of children with messy faces and recoil. I would wonder why parents chose to be so neglectful of their children and not wipe their faces clean of chocolate, tomato sauce, biscuit crumbs … and the worst of all: snot.
They seemed to just not care.
In the early days I would wipe even a shadow of a crumb from his top lip and he never had hands dirty enough to transfer onto anything cleaner in his reach. Have I become more neglectful? Lazy even? Maybe I just have to admit that dirt it not only ok, but essential for a four-year-old to function properly.
Living up to expectations
February 18th, 2010I always believed my husband was shredding my work. He would come home to a tired wife and child. Child whimpers and he backs down. Child asks for something reasonable and his first response is no, child insists and he says yes because it isn’t worth fighting over … reinforcing the idea that a little performance might help his case.
I used to think this was a male vs. female thing until I stayed with a friend who works and whose husband stays home and looks after the kids – this could be many people I know at the moment since it seems to be a common trend right now – and realised that in certain ways the roles are truly reversed.
It is the parent who spends less time with the child who tends to back down as soon as the child whimpers … the parent who goes to work who doesn’t force the child to do what they are perfectly capable of doing. They want to feel needed so they do whatever they can to make up for the space they have left by not being there.
I have pushed my child to live up to my … yes, often unreasonable … expectations, and my husband comes home and shreds my work. In his position though, I’d probably do exactly the same thing.
Some toys should be locked away
February 15th, 2010A very long time ago I was embarrassed by a child I once looked after. She was four at the time and I was nineteen and we were playing hairdressers in her room … as one does … when she told me that her daddy was in love with me but he couldn’t marry me because he was married to her mum. Guess who was standing behind me? There was a lot of awkward eye shifting and foot shuffling and mutterings before her dad walked away and the incident was never mentioned again.
My child never embarrassed me … until recently. It was my husband’s birthday party and the house was full of people – mostly the short variety. Adults and children were playing in every room of the house. It was a good day.
There are items in the house that have been forgotten about since having a child … items that I often wish weren’t forgotten but circumstances prevail and … well, these things just get forgotten. But not by the child. He had seen something that, when it came to playing cops and robbers, he knew would be a great asset to the game. He walked proudly into the room swinging the pink fur-coated handcuffs. It could have been worse … but not much, I doubt. I might have even blushed and, for once, I couldn’t blame it on champagne.
