Yesterday, Little Seymour Number One went to work. She gleefully accepted the last-minute opportunity to go down to a local pub, and wash up for four hours. She came home with a fist full of notes, and collapsed in a heap on the table.
Boy Seymour is lying to anyone who will listen that he owns an iPhone 5S. Rather than face the shame of being nine WITH NO PHONE, he is announcing that he does indeed own one, but it is at the menders, and will be for the forseeable future. So don’t text him.
Mini Seymour will always be my baby one, but even she is not tiny any more. She’s having friends for tea, and making her own social arrangements, which involve her dragging me, with no notice, to another poor unsuspecting mummy on the playground and announcing that she and such-and-such have been talking, and they have decided that tonight would be a good night for a play date.
I don’t know about the other mummies out there, but I find this kind of thing really very awkward. I am more than happy to have little friends round, BUT I NEED A BIT OF NOTICE! What if the house is a tip? What if the toilet is not clean, or I have been mucking out in Baghdad? There may be all kinds of odd artefacts littering the floor. The other day, I went into that as yet untouched derelict part of our house and found a set of teeth, an urn and a werewolf mask.
Why do I have such things? Why?
So I am left to try, tactfully, to say no to the expectant child that Mini has already invited, and try to find the right balance between politeness and practicality, so the other poor mummy who has been equally thrown by my child’s spontaneity is not offended, but also won’t then have to turf out at six-ish to collect a child around the standard weekday agenda of Cubs, ballet, Brownies, dinner or wine o’clock.
I guess, when you’re seven, it’s all about The Now.
As for Little Seymour Number Two, she is forcibly growing up. Secondary school, which had been going far too well for the first few weeks, suddenly became a reality. There are kids that are horrid to her, teachers that give last-minute homework and buses that don’t come. There’s the dilemma of the school skirt length, which has kicked in with her already, and the godforsaken twunting, bast@rding Home Economics practicals, which resulted in me having to go to the CO OP this morning to find ingredients for fu@king COUSCOUS of all things (I mean, couscous is not even cooking, it’s already couscous, all she has to do is vajazzle it a bit with chopped vegetables – why can’t she make something useful like a chocolate swiss roll??) and then drive it, a la DHL Expresss, to her school ready for Lesson 4.
Yes, Number Two is well and truly at Big School now, whether she likes it or not, and however much she pleads with me to let her stay at primary school forever.
As for me, I think that, as my children grow up, I am degenerating. Twice in the last week, I have gone for a run, only to go flying, losing my keys both times as they have been jettisoned from my hands and into the undergrowth, or onto the A281. There must come a time when one should hang up one’s running shoes, but I had hoped that it wasn’t just yet.
Maybe tonight’s vajazzled couscous will be just the tonic I need. I might have it with wine, if Mini Seymour hasn’t got plans, that is.
Fingers crossed.
UPDATE!
Little Seymour Number Two returned home from school today, with all the frickin’ ingredients UNF@CKING USED.
She didn’t need them today.
It’s next week.
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