naps

never ever take a nap during school hours. no matter how in tune you think your internal alarm clock is with the school bell, it will fail and there will be no snooze button to save you.  if you are lucky you will get a polite call from the school asking who is picking up your child and as you swear like fury in your head another part of your brain will kick in and tell a smooth small teeny tiny lie so the authorities won't get involved and your card at the school isn't permanently marked.

never ever take a nap during school hours as the guilt will force you to make a proper cooked dinner when all you were planning to do was whip out a couple of fish fingers from the freezer and fling them into the oven with some frozen chips. instead you may end up doing an emergency defrost in the microwave.  you might have to start chopping and frying and stirring instead of sniffing to make sure nothing is burning under the grill.

we had spaghetti bolognese for dinner today. it tasted lovely. every cloud has a ... you know the rest.

the playdate

no one told me about the 'playdate'. when i was growing up mum and dad never mentioned the 'playdate' or any other such variation of the name.  i played with (or tried to injure) my brothers and when my sister came along ten years after me  (annoyingly young but nevertheless a bonus) i played with her.

i could hardly call my siblings friends could i so what was there other than these familial relationships?  answer: one girl who was my age and whom i adored but she lived in battersea (gasp), a distant drive away. there were a few teenagers who, to their credit, blessed me with their company but  clearly didn't want to play with someone so short. anyway both were the children of my parents' friends. and so when it came to my social hierarchy pyramid of friendship, to me they did not actually count.

when i was old enough to leave the home on my own and create my own version of the modern playdate, the routine largely consisted of knocking on doors to see who could come out to play.  ok so i grew up on an estate in east london and i would not necessarily advocate three year olds going out to hunt for other children (mainly because they wouldn't be able to reach the bell and i don't think spyholes allow you to look that far down) but it was fun and my parents never knew what we got up to.

ok so for the first seven or eight years of my life my parents regulated and limited my play to blood and near enough blood companionship but i survived and more to the point so did they which is more than i can say for my own experience of managing the social lives of my two boys. how did we get to 'playdate'?  what happened to that simple life? how could it be replaced with a word that fills me with such dread and sweaty anticipation?