Mumble’s Blog

Hello, er…anyone out there.

Yikes. Broadcasting is scary! I was aiming for the beginning of term for this but being a bit of techno-woose I had to go for a lie down after seeing the instructions and it’s taken a couple of weeks to get a calm clear space to try to work out how it works. I think this is that space, though the baby might wake up at any moment and snooker it.

This is odd because of not saying who I am, but I’ve got 4 children, 3 at school in Haddington and a tiddler. I called myself Mumble because I had a look at guineapigmums blog and it was really articulate, and I thought, blimey, if I do one it’ll be a bit of a mumble. Then I thought, oh thats OK for a name cos it’s got a hint of the parent thing in it. It was only after I’d set it up I remembered the dancing penguin and the full horror of what i’d done started to sink in…

Anyway, here goes.

We’re back to school again after a good old long lazy break. This year we’ve been reasonably successful in the annual ‘guess the size of your child’ puzzle and all three seem to have uniforms that actually fit. More or less.

Actually it’s back for two of them, and a whole new start for my wee girl, who’s just gone into P1. She was hugely looking forward to it after the taster session at the end of last term. Come the first day though, she didn’t start until 11 o’clock and then went in with 1/3 of her class for an hour, which was a bit of a tough one to explain. I’d got to take her brother up for 8:50 so it’s not like we can just have a very leisurely breakfast and then roll up for 11. As she’s been anticipating this mightily over the summer I thought it might be tough for her to get taken to school, taken away again then finally get taken again just when she’s starting to think about lunch. Luckily one of my friends’ boys was in the same boat, so we spent the morning at theirs trying not to get their uniforms grubby, which helped. I guess the teachers have to sort them out with trays and things and that’s maybe why they don’t want them all in at once.

So far it seems to be going all right. She is massively impressed with the Whiteboard - what does it do? It must be good because it has been the first thing she’s told me every day, whether or not she got a shot of it. I’ve seen jobs advertised recently for Whiteboard Support Officers - the mystery deepens. Do they need holding up? Counselling?

It was hard watching her go in on the first full day, when they have to line up with their whole class. She’s so pleased about it, so full of beans. (Which is remarkable in itself as her little big brother has been doom-mongering all summer…oh yes, he says, nursery is all right but then there’s school and it’s horrible it’s really awful). I hope it will be as good as she thinks. I just wonder…I saw a documentary a few years back about education for her age group in Norway, where they said, well, we’re out with them all of the time when the weather is allright. And they showed the children walking through this huge forest with the rays of sun shining through their hair and … well it just seemed to keep the wonder of it all a bit more. Whatever her education is going to be like, and I hope it is good, and I hope she’s not disappointed, it won’t be like that.

She’s got her first whole day tomorrow, 8:50 - 3:20, with an hour and a quarter for lunch. She’s a friendly thing, and she does know a lot of the other children, but I’m still not sure how it’ll go. The PTA put in some improvements to the playground over the summer, which has given it a bit more badly-needed interest, but still almost an hour of unstructured time at age 4 1/2 is one long time. What must it be like for the shy kids who know nobody? And is anyone going to be awake come 3:20?

Meanwhile my heart sinks when her brother comes home with spellings and sentences to write for homework. I hoped they might give them something else to do in P3. By the time I get back from work and get them fed them it’s usally about half six, which means we’ve got an hour or so before starting to put them to bed. If he sticks his toes in, which he generally does, it can easily take that whole miserable hour to get it done. I feel like all over Scotland there are good parents who manage to jolly their children into doing this. There must be, or we would have rebelled by now surely. I just can’t work out how.

I’m starting to think I probably should have called myself Grumble.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.