(Sung to the tune of one of my all-time favourites: Oh What a Night! – loudly and tunelessly to the accompaniment of a huge glass bottle of end-of-week wine.)
Yesterday, for the first time since 21st December I was child-free – admittedly only for two hours, but all the same, two hours are two hours, and I wasn’t sniffing at them.
QueenBee walked into kinder in the morning, surveyed her new realm and, finding it acceptable, tried to dismiss me. She was most put out to discover that it was simply an orientation session and that she was there for just a brief visit. Only the promise of returning on Monday made it possible to drag her out while the teacher stood at the door, trying not to tap an impatient foot.
This morning my beautiful boy took himself off on his scooter and went off alone to embark on his final year of Primary School. We stood back-to-back at the beginning of January and I was still the taller. Now he has a centimeter on me. I think he will surpass his father’s 6’2” one day. He is not only growing up and up, he is (if possible) growing lovelier and lovelier. I can’t believe that with this short, squat female body of mine I have made a near-man. And what a gentle, wonderful near-man he is proving to be.
My Gothic Pre-teen started High School this morning. (Gee Primary School went by quickly!) She walked to school with two friends, QueenBee and me trailing redundantly after her. I gazed at the rear of her long, stick-insect form, quietly congratulating myself on the mastery of my amateur seamstry, having converted her size 12 dress to a size 10 with a hem somewhere between her ideal: mid-thigh; my ideal: above the knee; and the school’s: to the floor. (It’s above the knee.) She skipped into first assembly, delivering a peck on my cheek and then didn’t glance backwards.
A fellow mum who was near me said, ‘Should we go in and watch?’
‘Oh, okay,’ I agreed nonchalantly, ignoring the wild horses that were dragging me after my disappearing daughter.
The Vice-Head stopped us at the door, kindly, but firmly.
‘This is just for them,’ she said. ‘They need to do it alone.’
Really? Just like that?
I arrived to pick her up 35 minutes early, but she left without me. Spotting my bike at the school gate, she waited by it.
When I gave up lurking at the front door and arrived, hot and fed up, at the gate, she said, ‘What are you doing here? I can get home by myself.’
Umbilical cord snapped!
Very uncharacteristically I collapsed in front of the TV when we got back to watch Mamma Mia for the fourth time, in desperate need of soul comfort. Of course it worked.
The week of:
- panel-beating the children in readiness for school/kinder (2x orthodontist appointments, a dentist’s appointment, new shoe-shopping [aka hell], and frantic head louse elimination before haircuts all round)
- uniform shopping
- sewing and mending
- post-holiday laundry
- cleaning the bombsite house in preparation for a visit from the cleaners
- nursing the Platinum Siamese through an eye infection and a bad reaction to his FIV vaccination
- a gazillion playdates, parties and sleep-overs (none of them mine)
- Gothic Pre-teen’s wry neck incident after a night on a friend’s floor with a dicky pillow under a ceiling fan (she has a pain threshold of 10/10 and a firm conviction that if she’s feeling yukky, everyone around her should feel worse)
receded. Then I sat down at my computer and got this review for After I Do:
“I have a bone to pick with that Vicky Gemmell – I was busy reading After I Do on the bus today and was so engrossed I missed my stop – not only did I miss it but I missed it big time and finished up in some place that I’ve never been to in my life before as I was on the circle bus and should have got off at CG to change to another bus to come to EP. Luckily I finished it when I did, otherwise God knows where I would have finished up […]! I flew off the bus in such a hurry I left my umbrella behind, had to cross the road the get the circle bus coming the other way to get back to CG as I didn’t trust myself to catch the right bus to get to work. As a result, I turned up at 10 am instead of the 8.30 am start that I had planned! All because of her book!”
As you can imagine, I’m embarking on the weekend, flying/walking on air/floating on champagne bubbles (pick your cliché).
What a week! What a wonderful week.