So only 2 more sleeps until the little ankle-biters are back to school. It can be bitter-sweet. As much as you can’t wait to have a bit of time on your hands again and not having to spend hours planning structured/educational but fun day trips (We did the British Wildlife Centre in Surrey…Really worth a look). The downside is you no longer get to stay in your pajama’s until 10:30am when it’s no major deal if you go all day without brushing your hair and if you suddenly find there’s no food in the house, it’s no biggie you can just amble down to Tesco’s.

Suddenly your back to school nights, where even you have to go to bed early, if like me you struggle to get up before 7:00am,  uniforms have to be laid out in order of putting on (Goggle Boy has been known to put shorts on first and pants on after if they are put in the wrong order) and packed lunches made to conform to the school’s ever-changing dietary requirements.

The worst thing, far worse than the early mornings that have to be timed with military precision is having to mill around the playground for 20 minutes before school making idle chit-chat with other human beings that really if you didn’t have the daily contact of school, you wouldn’t tiddle on if they were on fire.

Now I have to be careful here, by not remaining anonymous it means that I can shameless beg for views on Facebook to my friends and relatives. The downside is I have to be careful who I slag off to save being “duffed” up in the playground…Although saying that I’m pretty hard and can definitely say the only social housing tenant in the school’s history I think (it’s a posh school in a nice area) so the chances of being beaten to death by a Prada handbag or kicked in the face by a Jimmy Choo is highly unlikely. So, I shall soldier on.

So I stand there, every day, on my own, in the playground, desperately avoiding eye contact with anyone. Hoping that they wont notice me. But inevitably they always ferret you out, like a diligent hound, sniffing out a mangy old fox (maybe it’ll soften the blow if I slag myself of too?!). So on goes the plastic smile, cue eyes lighting up like I am genuinely interested that “Tarquin” has mastered Mandarin in 34 seconds exactly.

Now don’t get me wrong, as a parent, I know you always want the best for your children and am proud when they have mastered a new skill, or moved on in some area of their lives. I just don’t feel the need to publicly announce it to someone who I am forced to share breathing space with for the next 7 years because I somehow managed to wing it into the decent school. I also know that my children aren’t mini Einsteins (I refer to the earlier post about Goggle Boy) and if there is one thing I can’t stand is deluded parents.

“Tarquin” for example only learnt to string a sentence together in the past year, despite being 5 and has a penchant for biting and kicking other children. But according to his mother, this is because poor “Tarquin” is too bored to do anything else as he is so intelligent, the school simply can’t push him enough! As far as she is concerned he is already eligible to join MENSA and is just one punch away from a Nobel Peace Prize. I suppose your going to tell me next, that the constant snot trail he has dribbling from his grotty little nose is excess brain seeping out of his head as he simply can’t fit it all in anymore??


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