Mother in law: Making the most of the next chapter

About a week ago I wrote a blog about Deceptively Angelic Child 2, my littlest one, starting school and, on Monday, she will start Key Stage 2. She has been subject to the Covid time slip - the blink-and-you-missed-it years of schooling and life. 

It is good to have that blog to look back on - to laugh, to cry hysterically. To think of all the things I thought I was going to do with my spare time while she was at school. The blanket I was going to continue crocheting is exactly the same size as it was then. I haven’t become green fingered. I haven’t even made a cake every week. Dinners are still quite often last-minute and beige, and the washing is never all put away. Of course, this isn’t really my fault as the blasted children kept COMING HOME and expecting me to teach them both.

When I wrote the blog I was worried about being a 'mum of school age children' in zumba wear, but now I’m just a mum of junior children (still not in zumba wear though, so that is something). This year she can join the choir and the football team. There will be no nativity for me to cry at, just some boring carol service. When the classes partner up for guided reading, she will be the older child teaching the younger one.

Despite still being the littlest in her class, she is gangly with long arms, legs and fingers. She is now more spiky than squidgy. For this and other reasons, I still wonder if she is mine.

She is, obviously, still awesome and weird. She still thinks differently to us. She thinks in colours and shapes and inventions and I’m all for it. Recently she keeps bringing up Lady Gaga’s meat dress and I’m sure she’s trying to think how to outdo it. I’m certainly not going to stifle that level of creativity.

To be honest, it was Tom Nook who taught her to read during lockdown. She went back on the highest reading level in the class and spent last year proudly going to the library to change her books because they don’t have that level of book in the class. Well done Tom.

She still goes to sleep to the Imperial March every night. Bellatrix Lestrange is her style - and everything else - icon. She would be off to Hogwarts without a backwards glance to us if her letter came, but would plot for the return of the Dark Lord the whole time she was there. She also, somehow, does not have a bad bone in her body.

She says things like 'can you only wear that dress on the days you go to work really early so I don’t have to see you in it' but recently cupped my face in her hands, studied it intently, and very delicately removed an eyelash from my cheek.

It is really sad that they are getting older, that realistically the only babies living in this house in the future will have four legs, that we are done with a lot of cuteness. But, on the other hand, we can go out for a whole day without worrying about naps and bedtimes (I worried A LOT about naps and bedtimes). What we’ve lost in slapstick we’ve gained in really quite good sarcasm. They are completely continent. They - wait for it - go downstairs on their own and watch TV for a bit in the mornings. I know. As sad as I am, I’m going to make the most of the next bit before that is gone too.

*Some facts and identities have been altered in the above article