Skool rules

Well. Do you know, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Mac was up at six, ready by seven and got extremely irritated with me because he couldn’t go to school that early. The children of the Reception class were practically gagging to get into the building while parents and grandparents stood forlornly in the playground watching as their bright, bouncing chicklets bounded and bonded. Mac was very excited to see Jonathan and the two boys were comparing satchels before you could say “pencil case”. Dawn, Jonathan’s mum, was pleased to see me and informed me that Overly Hearty Mummy had just bowled up with half of the family all crowding around Her Precious Jemima all “weeping and wailing”. I felt quite calm and assured compared to some of the others. One mother was getting short shrift from her daughter – we caught up with her as we left the playground (abandoning our children to the education system) when she was telling all who would listen that her daughter “wanted a Hannah Montana lunchbox and isn’t speaking to me because I could only find a High School Musical one”.

I spent the day wondering what Mac was doing but rallied enough to stuff the chicken for dinner and make a chocolate cake for tea. Rosie rang, the sound of wine pouring into a glass in the background, and revealed that Ben had to be prised away from her that morning by a “snotty nosed teacher” who informed Rosie that he would be “far happier when he knows you’ve gone away and left him”. Surely that can’t be right?

David had promised to be home by 3pm at the latest so he could do the evening school run but he came home early to find me mooning over a pair of teeny tiny baby socks. “Please tell me they’re for either Lydia or Janey” he said, a look of trepidation on his face. “Do you remember when Mac was small enough to fit into a pair of these?” I wailed. “Hm, something’s burning” was his reply. That man can be so heartless sometimes.

My pride and joy has been home for over half an hour now and full of what he’s done today at school. He loved it. He loves his teacher Mr S, he’s sharing a desk with Jonathan and “there aren’t too many girls”. Today they learnt all about what school means and talked about all the things they can learn. His “homework” for this evening is to think about who lives in his house with him (he has declared this “easy peasy”) so that they can talk about it tomorrow. He says he can’t wait for tomorrow and wishes he could go to school every day but he doesn’t want sandwiches in his lunch box he wants “those triangle things that Smita's mum got her". Dairylea triangles? Samosas? Who knows?

However, I was somewhat thrown when he told me that he is in the Dildo Group and has got a “dildo on his coat peg and dildo stickers for my book”. Once I’d picked myself up off the floor and calmed David’s muffled protestations of “that can’t be right, Good God!” I saw the picture of an armadillo stuck to his Form Book, resumed my breathing and have vowed to spend this evening getting his pronunciation right.