Back to School…

A very strange day today. I’ve had an odd feeling all day which I just can’t shake and Ady says he feels the same.

Today would have been Davies’ first day at school. I know technically he wouldn’t have had to start until January but he is 5 next week and as far as I know defered entry until the term after a child is 5 is pretty unusual.

So today we would have dressed him up in his school uniform and taken pictures of him in it which would have remained forever in the family album in the same way as the picture of my first day at school is in my parents’. He would have gone off clutching his new book bag or rucksack or lunchbox.

He would have been entrusted to the care of some other grown up who would have been the first in a succession of other grown ups than me who would see him through the next 11 years. Today would have been his induction into that process. Good or bad, happy or sad memories to follow today would have been a day which he would have always remembered. First Day At School – a rite of passage, something we all have in common, a memory we call upon throughout the rest of our lives and a day which marks a transition from being our parents’ child and part of our family to part of society and part of a class and in the system and tagged with a number and reported on and graded and compared and found lacking and measured against every other child who falls within a year of your birth.

Davies won’t remember today. For him it has not been marked out as different to any other day. He woke up this morning and had breakfast, ended up not getting dressed until about 10.30 because he was playing. Ady and I were working on a report so he played and butted in as and when he needed us. He drew a person and tore round it because he couldn’t find any scissors then wanted to laminate it. I got out the laminator and pouches and he did it himself. I then suggested that he did a life cycle series to cut out so we debated butterflies and frogs and he chose frogs. So with no help he drew frogspawn, tadpoles, tadpoles with legs, little froglets and fully grown frogs, then a picture of him, Ady, Scarlett and me looking into a pond with a lily pad with the frog sitting on it. I also got out the sharp scissors for him and he used them really well.

Him and Scarlett also watched some Discovery Kids on monkeys which sparked discussion about what mammals are and how they differ from other creatures and how we are mammals too.

I then headed off to the post office to send loads of ebay parcels, some birthday cards to our friends in NZ and various other bits which have been sitting around waiting to be sent too.

I came back to find Davies and Tarly playing one of their regular games where Scarlett is a puppy called Rocky and Davies is her owner – always seems a bit of an odd one to me but they both love playing it!

I made them lunch and then my Dad arrived to look after them while Ady and I headed off to trek round his three work sites. From the utter chaos and bedlam we came home to I can only assume they continued to play all day and had a great time – apparantly they made tents in the bedrooms, watched Willy Wonka and role played it, the THANK YOU neighbours had called in with a toy car and a doll for them (why? not at all sure but it clearly warrants a thank you card!).

So if you tick off what he has covered today and what he could have been doing today I certainly think the case so far rests with HE 🙂

In other news, off I went with Ady to look round three massive nursery sites (thats nursery in the horticultural sense, not the childcare one!) and double check his H&S findings. Nice to spend a whole afternoon just the two of us, nice to be introduced to people in a sort of professional capacity without having to worry about what the children are up to and nice to use long words and technical terms and be taken seriously!

Also very strange was at the second site which is the head office Ady introduced me to someone without actually saying I was his wife. Most of the people we came across I have met at some point at staff parties and I have enough distinguishing features that when seen stood beside Ady I am probably instantly recognisable as his wife if you’d met me as such previously. But as I was there today with a view to eventually getting some work out of it, or at the very least aiding Ady’d credibility as someone who knows about H&S and has done it before he was introducing me as ‘having worked with me doing this before so coming round to give a second opinion to my findings’. We have worked before together and whilst not exactly hiding the fact we are married certainly not refering to it as such either so we are fairly proficient at remaining professional when we have to.

So he introduces me to this – I have to say, very attractive – man who insists on shaking my hand despite him being filthy as ‘she might like her men a bit dirty’. I confess to playing along, in a flirty manner, feeling quite safe that I was stood beside my husband and finding it quite amusing. Ady seemed a bit oblivious really until half an hour or so later just as we were about to leave the bloke came back to find us and he suddenly stepped a bit closer and did a bit of a ‘you looking at my bird?’ type act when he seemed to sense that the bloke clearly had not realised the relationship and was getting close to creating a potentially very embarassing situation. Quite amusing, pretty flattering and as I say, he was very attractive! 😉

I’m feeling a little torn this evening though. When we got home the children had had some tussle which resulted in a bruise on Tarly’s cheek and Davies being shouted at and sent to his room by my dad. Tarly fell asleep OK but has been restless, Davies was still awake at gone 9pm wanting me to stay with him because he’d missed me today.

It felt really good being Nic again today and not Mummy for a while. I didn’t really fret about them at all while I was away but I am now feeling bad that on a day when I am spouting on about how HE is the way forward instead of school I was not actually around for over half of it, I am made aware once again of how hard I find it to let go of them and be away from them not knowing what is going on with them every moment and the effect on them of me not being around too.

I guess it reinforces what we are doing but I am aware that several of the bloggers are having their own work / HE balance readjustments or ponderings I am certainly made aware that for us at least, for now at least, we are not ready for me to let go of them or them to let go of me. Early days though, early days…