BEING A PARENT

FINALLY, my brother and sister in law are bringing their new son home from hospital. He’s three weeks old now. It’s been very hard for them having to manage the daily visits and just when he was finally ready to come home they had a sickness bug sweep the house. First their daughter, then Granny, then father… each time it meant they had to wait another 48 hours until the last of the bug before being able to even go and see him in the hospital, let alone bring him home.

Hopefully once he’s home they can all settle into their new routine and the enormously traumatic first few weeks of his life will slowly fade….

So strange to think how much time has disappeared since my children were that age. It’s all going too fast. I am now officially the smallest in the family and I suspect that it will only get worse unless I keep trying to get to my stretching classes.

All the advice in the world and it doesn’t make any difference – each child and each situation is different. When we welcome new parents and new babies into the world you kind of want to warn them that they will experience fear like they’ve never known, quite possibly for the rest of their lives, but that’s possibly as bad as freaking a pregnant woman out about how much it hurts (I mean, hey, she might be the one who drops it whist cycling up a hill). Take last night for example. My daughter was off to a party, but failed to text me to let me know her plans, where she was staying, whether I could lock up, so I spent the whole night worrying about her. I have a friend who is going to the funeral of her nephew next week. He was sixteen. Mother found him dead in bed. This is why we just need to hold onto and enjoy every minute of our children and be very very thankful for all that we have and send up a small thought, prayer or message for those dealing with misery in the world. There’s too much of it about. I wish I could do more (although if you can get to Zac Goldsmith’s coffee morning and help support children with cancer I’d be very grateful – see post below).

Being a parent is a ridiculously hard job. As somebody I’ve never heard of called Dave Barry once said, “a perfect parent is a person with excellent child-rearing theories and no actual children”.

In the meantime, I have been trying to manage work, juggling kids and home life – a teacher’s strike on Thursday meant my son had the “day off” according to one source, “a home study day” according to another and “a pain in the arse for working parents” day from another source. No prizes for guessing who said what.

…and now I have two weeks of half term to manage. My daughter is now on half term this week, my son next week. She’s going to be working though so I don’t have to worry about her and her Grandmother will come and stay no doubt to keep her company and keep an eye on everything. It’s when my youngest is on holiday that it becomes more tricky.

Here are my huge children: taken when we dropped my son back from his Grandmother’s 100th birthday party and checked out his new university accommodation – he’s in a house with 9 other people! Party central….

…and the state of his new house really wasn’t too bad, you could see the floors and they weren’t too sticky, the kitchen units were still visible and the sink wasn’t quite over-flowing, one flatmate emptied one of the bins in my presence – because that’s what you do when a parent arrives, but on the whole really quite impressive. Not my son’s room – that was a mess, but no surprises there. My mother always used to comment that she hated going into any of our student accommodation because it was the only time she had to wipe her feet on the way out:-

(I am off to the hairdresser to sort out my ginger hair – not sure what happened. Appears to be very orange.