#1 Don’t be like your mother
Last Friday it was Grandparents’ Day at school. Grandparents are honoured with a special assembly and get to visit the classrooms where each grandchild has fashioned a little gift depending on the whims, fancies and creative prowess of the classroom teacher.
We grade four teachers had decided on cardboard teapots which the students would laboriously, but lovingly, colour in and cut out. It was up to me to merely purchase the teabags to plop into the completed articles.
Five minutes after the kids had left for the day on Thursday, I poked my head into my buddy teacher’s classroom. There were beautifully decorated teapots littering the desks and it suddenly hit me like a metre ruler to the face that I had failed to remember to get my kids to do their teapots.
“Please tell me Grandparent’s Day isn’t tomorrow!” I screeched desperately to my buddy.
She just looked confused for a moment, doubting herself, so strong was my panicked conviction that she’d been the one to get the date wrong, not me.
So I lugged home the stencilled sheets and a handful of colouring pencils and that evening I fastidiously cut out the fiddly things while Scotto sat, tongue sticking out the side of his mouth, happily colouring in like an eight year old.
“These pencils aren’t very good, Pinky! They keep breaking and I need more pretty colours!” he complained, going off in search of my eye liner sharpener.
He was very slow. I think he was having trouble staying in the lines. I fought back an urge to rap him over the knuckles.
In the end I told him to stop colouring because it was taking too long and I found a Better Homes and Gardens magazine and pasted flowers and cakes all over the teapots instead.
I managed to get them all finished and the students presented them to their grandparents with an air of unwarranted pride.
My beautiful daughter turns 21 today. She is in her third year of an education degree and in about 12 months, she will be a primary teacher.
Imagine how proud that makes me feel.
Hopefully, she will more aware of her surroundings than I am.
I have no other advice for her because… well… she’s perfect.
Happy birthday gorgeous Tweetie-Bird xxx
