Seal View Window

Wednesdays and Thursdays have ended up being mad busy days for me this term, ferrying kids from one appointment/club to another all afternoon. I know this is nothing compared to people who 'work' for a living but being a Home Executive is supposed to be about quality time, fun and relaxation surely, not frantically racing about. So Wednesdays and Thursdays make me grumpy.

Anyway, there are of course many side benefits to my job at present. One is the impromptu puppet shows in my rear view mirror. Today was a long complicated story about two seals. Driving commitments meant that I lost track of the tale at several key points, but I'm sure I'll catch it again on the More4 reruns. (Obviously I pulled off into a handy field to take this shot, before the blip health and safety officers step in.) My son's stories are also hampered in the telling by the fact that currently all his words start with D, even the ones dat don't dif dou dee dhat di dean. Today?s trip out in the car was to his first group speech therapy class in Haddington, though I can't really say how it went as parents didn't get to go in. Sounded like fun though.

For a kid with such a limited ability to make himself understood, he does a great job at not getting too frustrated with life. (He's 3.5 so just at the right age for frustrated rages.) We just have to keep reminding ourselves that his lack of ability to articulate doesn't mean he's stupid, so we should treat him the same way we did our early-talking daughter. We were having philosophical discussions and explaining high and low pressure weather systems to her when she was two, but with our son we haven't been doing that. Lately we keep kicking ourselves about how this is making us treat them differently when we shouldn't: just because he can't parrot it back perfectly like Katherine did doesn't mean it's not going in.

So I'm not sure a performance appraisal on the parenting job I'm doing just now would come out any more positive than 'some progress made, but several areas to work on'. Let's put it this way: I'm not expecting a Christmas bonus, but then who is this year?

That makes me sound down on life. I'm not. We smile most of the day. And that's more than I ever did stuck behind a desk.