Accidental parenting genius

Yesterday, with a week left to go until the start of the new school year, I took LittleBear shopping for his new school shoes. This was, I admit, a rookie error. The last week before school, in a shoe shop, is somewhere between the First Circle of Hell (Limbo) and the Seventh (Violence). When we entered the shop, it was not actually possible to approach the shelves to even see the children's shoes through the seething mass of humanity and the precariously balanced towers of rejected shoes. Verily, I had chosen poorly.

Shoe shops are, blessedly, wise to the school-shoe-buying season, and not only have a numbered queuing system, but they also write down a description of the child* in question so that if, over the screaming hubbub inside the shop, a whimpering parent misses the call for number twelve thousand, seven hundred and ninety-two to approach the counter, they can still be found.

We were only ninth in the queue when we entered the shop, with an estimated twenty-five minutes to wait.

Twenty-five minutes with a bored and tired six year old who has already been dragged round a bed shop for his mother to try out mattresses. The omens were not good.

But then, oh joy! Oh rapture! Oh blessed gods and goddesses who have smiled upon me! I had a pack of playing cards in my handbag. And there was a spare corner of a bench for us to perch upon. So perch we did, and spent a surprisingly happy time playing cards while other mothers gazed on bearing expressions that were an extraordinary mixture of surprise, envy, hatred and desperation. I promised one of them who was already a further 8 places behind us in the queue that we'd choose our shoes as fast as possible. It was the least I could do. If the cards hadn't been LittleBear's very favourite, crested, Burnley Football Club cards, I might have donated them to the queue for The Greater Good. But even my compassion has its limits when it comes to my boy and his football team.

To compound my joy, the shop had shoes that fitted my son's (inherited) wide, spatula feet, and he liked the first pair he tried on.

From the jaws of catastrophe we snatched triumph. By accident.



* Mine was described as "Blue-spotted ribbontail ray", because unsurprisingly, he was the only child in the shop clutching a cuddly cartilaginous fish. Which probably makes the derangement that went into buying it worthwhile.

Different day; different boy

After last week's catastrophic holiday club, I stayed home with my poppet on Friday, and to my immense surprise did in fact manage to get a couple of hours work done while he made a den (using every pillow, duvet and cushion in the house); built some lego and watched television. It felt like a major step forward, heralding the possibility that next summer we will be able to make more use of Working From Home and less use of Forking Out Huge Sums For Holiday Club. Not that there are that many aspects of building mass spectrometers that can be undertaken at home, but there's frequently a tedious manual that needs to be written, or something equally scintillating.

This week, we once again pieced things together with BigBear taking a day off, me taking a couple of days off and LittleBear being booked in for two days of holiday club.

I was not as worried about this as regular readers might suppose, given my ability to worry about anything and everything. Because, this is not any old holiday club, this is a football camp, run by the local professional football club. And if there is one thing that LittleBear loves more than he loves anything else, possibly even including his parents, is football. What is more, LittleBear's adored friend J was also going to said football camp. (My one bit of good holiday planning.)

I even made a plan with J's mother to attempt to arrive at the same time as each other, to avoid excessive distress and panic (I'm not sure whether J's mother suggested this to avoid distress and panic on my part, or on LittleBear's part, but it was kind of her either way.)

It turns out that synchronised arrival was unnecessary. LittleBear walked into the hall, saw J, and was off - running up and down, squealing with excitement, chasing the football, chasing J, utterly oblivious to me. I did get a goodbye, of sorts, and a cursory hug, but I was largely irrelevant within less than a second of arrival.

It's hard to believe he was the same boy as the one who was sobbing and clinging to me, begging me not to leave, less than a week ago...

I just want to be with you

It's been a few weeks since I've written anything. And that's because we've been on holiday to the 1950s. Almost. We've actually been to the family cottage that doesn't have a television, radio, internet connection or (on this occasion, courtesy of those lovely people at BT) a telephone for a period of time. So we had to make our own entertainment, which turns out to be much easier than in used to be. Approximately seventeen times a day, BigBear and I exchanged words or looks that more or less boiled down to, "do you remember what horrifically hard work it was being on holiday here with a six-month old? Isn't this better?"

But, to put your minds at rest, I'm not going to bore you all with how lovely my holiday was, and how much fun it's now possible to have with a six-and-a-half year old. I may come back to that.

Instead, I'm going to draw you inexorably into the downside of coming home, and of finding ways to get one small boy and two working parents through the remaining three and a half weeks of school holidays.

In a frenzy of organisation last term I managed to make plans for LittleBear to attend a few days here and there of various holiday clubs, interspersed with BigBear and I both taking days off work. I also have the luxury of working 22.5 hours a week and being allowed to fit that in however I want (within reason). During term time that equates to 4.5 hours a day, and being able to collect LittleBear from school every day. During the holidays it equates to three normal-length working days, during which BigBear stays at home for one day, and LittleBear goes to some club or other for two days. Simple really, isn't it?

This week started reasonably well - LittleBear went to holiday club on Monday, and came home chirpy and hungry; he stayed home with BigBear on Tuesday and me on Wednesday. So, without a care in the world, off we went to holiday club today. Admittedly, LittleBear was a little tired, having woken in the night (unusually for him), but I didn't think there was anything particularly amiss.

And then we arrived at holiday club, and after helping him hang his bag and coat up and put his lunch where he could find it, I found a small paw had snuck its way into my hand and I looked down to find a tear-streaked face gazing up at me.

"I just want to be with you Mummy," he whispered.

I crouched down to see what was wrong, and a pair of soft arms wrapped themselves round my neck and a damp face pressed itself against mine to whisper again and again, "I just want to be with you."

There seemed to be nothing I could do to reassure or calm my little boy. He was adamant that he would be sad, and that there was nothing that he wanted to do or play with, he just wanted to come home with me. It didn't matter that I wasn't going home, there was no rational thought in my baby's desperate insistence that he be with me, he was just distraught. His face grew red and blotchy as the tears kept falling, and he clung to me, even when I sat on the floor beside him to try and help him start on an activity. It was like being back at nursery again, where every single day for four years, he would cling to me and beg me to stay. At least at nursery we escaped tears most of the time, and at least at nursery I was confident that within five minutes he'd be charging around having fun and would have forgotten all about me.

This time, where I didn't know any of the staff, and LittleBear only had one classmate (not one of his particular friends, just A Girl He Knows) I was not at all confident that he would perk up. But after over half an hour of comforting, cajoling and jollying without making any progress, I finally had to bite the bullet and leave. I left a little face, gazing over the shoulder of one of the leaders, waving forlornly at me as I left.

I drove to work in floods of tears, wondering, as I so often do, whether I'd made the wrong decision. Whether I should have just said "sod it" to work, and scooped my baby up and taken him home. Would that have reassured him (and me) that I would look after him, no matter what? Or would it merely have damaged any hope of him ever finding a way to cope with new situations? I can't protect him from everything; I can't remove him from every situation that he doesn't like; I can't allow him to avoid everything he's not in the mood for. But how much distress is too much? How far can I allow his stress and anxiety to go before I step in and say, "enough"?

The answer is, I'll never know. I made today's decision today, and there's no undoing it now. I spent the day at work distracted, distressed, stressed and unhappy. I'm not sure I was either a very nice person to work with, or a very productive employee. I left early to collect my baby and found him happily playing football with his favourite leader (who wasn't there this morning). He had apparently continued crying in the morning, but cheered up and been absolutely fine in the afternoon. He didn't even seem in a particular hurry to come home. And he was absolutely caked in mud, which can only be a good thing.

High tide marks for the socks

I've cancelled tomorrow morning's session at holiday club. I'm going to work from home instead. I've explained to LittleBear that he must play with lego, or do colouring or junk modelling or whatever he wants without me helping in the morning. He says that's fine because, "I'll be able to come over and sneak a cuddle now and then won't I?"

Of course you will my darling boy, of course you will.