Month: March 2016

Daughters 3 and 4 bouncing in onesie heaven

I have an aversion to onesies, not that I’m judging. Some of my lovely readers may well pop one on after they’ve done the school run. Hell, they may do the school run in it (see blog: Mamas in Pyjamas), but personally, they aren’t my bag. 

Back in the Middle Ages, my sister had one. I hated it even way back then, with its prudish zip that went up to her neck. She was a teenager goddamn it, and I felt she should have been letting it all hang out – I was! She loved that cosy onesie and no amount of sibling ribbing could unzip her. 

Fast forward 30 years and the bloody things are back to haunt me. I don’t think big sister has one of the current trend but her kids do, my kids do, I’ll bet your kids do. I see them all coming out of swimming lessons in them on a Friday night: a stream of onesies – is there a collective noun for that yet? There’s surely enough people wearing them to warrant their own word. They look like a crowd of little furry animals: hoods up with ears, but school shoes spoil the look and what do you do if your onesie has built in feet? Well, I know what you do because my kids have them. Put the bin outside please. I can’t, I’m in my onesie. Put the big crocs on then. Built in feet are no barrier to chores in our house. No excuse has gone unturned. Do your washing up. I’m already upstairs. Walk. Put your clothes away. I’ll miss the train. So? Clean the skid marks. I’m meeting facetime friend in 2 minutes. And? 

Daughter 4 and dog 2 both with ears

Back to onesies and CROCS. Now I mention those hideous beasts I feel they need their own sound bite. Never was a more ugly shoe ever invented. Ask my two best buds about crocs and they will explode like Mount Vesuvius. Number 1 New Zealand friend refuses to let her hubby wear them. Partner wears his into the office in our garage over his slippers, but usually forgets to take off his crocs. It’s a look that will never get into Vogue. It’s a dreadful look. Number 1 friend works in said office – she’s never impressed. Dog 2 chewed up partner’s first pair of crocs and I’m still pretty sure that Number 1 friend fed them to him.

  Partner de la mode (not)

Now, I did begin this by saying that I wouldn’t judge…but I am going to end it with a judgement: if there is one thing worse than onesies, onesies with in built feet, onesies with crocs and crocs with slippers: IT’S MEN IN ONESIES. All I’m going to say on that matter is that it’s wrong, just so very wrong. Judgement Day has come.

Here is the link to the video daughters 3 and 4 made to support this blog:

I turned on radio 4 this morning and this is what greeted me: “a piece of Jesus’ foreskin is in this museum.” Omg, I thought to myself – Jesus had a penis! I’d never thought about it before. He seemed too ethereal to actually have a nob. In fact, just writing this, I’m feeling as if I need to go to confession: I’m sorry father. I have sinned. I have imagined Jesus with a penis. A beard and a penis. When I got home I googled what I’d heard, as it struck me as rather a bold thing to say on radio 4 at 9am and there it was in Wikipedia: The Holy Prepuce, or Holy Foreskin – it even gives the Latin and the entire history of this intimate part of Jesus, along with details of the arguments between churches over the years, as to who has the real relic – I’m not sure he’d be happy with it being called that. 

Jesus is a man who formed an important part of my childhood – that is from when mum ‘found’ religion, one holiday in the Lake District and from then on, it was Sunday School every week. Before that it was: get yourself to the Salvation Army, I want a couple of hours off on a Sunday. I got quite into the whole Sally Ann vibe and asked if I could go to the next level in the organisation and get a tambourine. Mum and Dad then accused me of only wanting to play the tambourine so that I could wear the uniform and it all petered out after that. 

So, back to Jesus and hearing that snippet on the radio this morning. The programme was, in fact nothing to do with Jesus, it was a programme about Ireland’s troubled political history and the nob comment was entirely incidental. It did, however, get me thinking about how, when we grow up with an important person in our lives, we have a certain image of them and they can take on this mythical aura. This happens with celebrities and the royal family, when of course as we know, even the Queen farts. This also happens with our parents, who, for example, ‘never have sex’, (in the case of parents of young children, of course this is true), but no child wants to see their parents in this light and nor should they. Which is why I am going to pretend that I turned on the radio this morning and heard: “Jesus, the chap with the beard, is still the same old Son of God that he always was,” and let’s leave it at that.

Postscript:
Daughter 4 read my blog out loud. I’ve seen Jesus’ willy, she said. Where? I asked, surprised. In church, she replied, he was on the cross. Can I have cheese on my pasta? Well there you go, I thought to myself. Children just take everything in their stride.

When my kids were really little, they all loved reading. Daughter 1 would often be found with her little torch under her duvet reading Horrid Henry and it was a similar picture for all the others. Reading was fun, spontaneous, on their terms: their choice of books, their time. Then came school and the dreaded reading record and slowly, but surely, their enthusiasm for reading dwindled. The reading record: a bigger passion killer than granny pants. I literally watched my kids’ love of the written word slide on a slippery, downward slope. Watching the crap that my otherwise creative and intelligent children were writing in these odious paperback booklets, made me want tear them up. The final straw came when I saw that daughter 1, the most avid reader of all of them, had written her latest entry, one letter per box, thus filling up almost an entire book with one analysis. 

Just imagine, settling into bed with your favourite book in the evening. You are tired because it’s near the end of the day, but it’s a real page turner and you are desperate to find out what happens next. You are then taken to another cliff hanger, which you decide to leave for the following night. You close your book, feeling contented and excited at the same time…and then you have to write about it. You are supposed to be analysing character and plot, use of language and why the author chose to write it in a particular way…but you simply can’t be bothered. So you just scribble down what happened, because it fills the box that you have to fill and your teacher will be happy – not ecstatically so, but appeased. You have to do this night after night for years. You are given targets to reach and deadlines to follow and now all those wonderful page turning books have become burden after burden. 

The reading record mimics the lot of the teachers who have to mark them. Teaching is fun, exhilarating and challenging, but once it has to be shoved into boxes and analysed to death – literally – it becomes a chore and a burden. Education needs to find liberation: from the reading record to the mountains of pointless paperwork teachers are required to complete. Only then will children be able to grow into free thinkers, taught by teachers who are free to teach.