growing up Archives : Me, Annie Bee.

Starting preschool.

Anna — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 10:40:36 +0000

Back in March we attended the open day at Seth’s preschool to be. At the time it made me sad thinking about my little boy growing up. Now here we are, six months on. Seth started preschool today. When Aoife was at preschool I was pregnant with Seth, walking up and down that sodding mountain to drop her off and pick her up whilst lugging my great, big bump along with me. Now, three and a bit years on I’ll be walking that very human I was growing, up and down that hill. Seth still doesn’t feel old enough to be starting preschool. He can’t quite do his shoes yet. His words are still a little jumbled when he’s excited. He can’t be bothered/gets to engrossed to take himself to the toilet. Listening hasn’t made it quite onto his ‘skills’ list yet. And sometimes shoving seems more persuasive than asking… Before taking Seth, we had to drop Aoife at school. When the bell went I called her over to give her a kiss before she stood in line…! I got her forehead! My goodbye kiss was denied. I can’t handle this level of rejection today. We then pootled of to preschool. We swapped shoes for pumps. Put the money in the piggy and the water on the shelf. Seth took his name card to his teacher and wandered into the classroom. I called him back to kiss him goodbye. He offered his forehead! Why do you cast me aside today? OF ALL THE DAYS WHY TODAY? Today is the beginning of the end. The start of my smallest not needing me quite so much. The start of him turning to other grown ups in a moment of need or upset. Today is the start of me feeling not quite so important anymore. Not just as a mum but as a person. See for six years I’ve been a stay at home mum, it’s been tough but I’ve loved it. I’ve felt I’ve had to justify myself a LOT over that time but it was OK because I could. I was looking after my children. Now, for two and a half days a week I’m not a stay at home mum. I’m just, well, nothing. I am redundant. I’m just a woman with outdated skills waiting for 3pm so I can start being a mum again. I do intend to use this time to work on my blog (yet another area I feel I have to justify a lot) so I can free up evenings. I hope to be able to better my skills so I can earn some money. But right now, sitting here in the silence with no one demanding brioche. I just feel useless. Entirely useless, with no purpose and contributing nothing to, well, anything. I’ve been dreading this day for a while now, selfishly hoping it wouldn’t come. I’m sad my babies are gone, I have children now. They’ve entered the education system where other adults, who’s every word they will hang on, will see them more than me. I’m no longer the most important person in their life, the font of all knowledge (whether fact or otherwise). I’m also sad because at this very moment I feel I have no purpose. It’s the start of a new chapter. Not just for them but for me and it scares the shit out of me. I’ll be totally over it once they’re both home.

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My little big boy.

Anna — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 06:00:56 +0000

Saturday was a bit of a bittersweet day. It was the open day at Aoife’s old preschool, the preschool we’re hoping to send Seth to in September. On the one hand it was lovely. Aoife saw her old teachers, they remarked how grown up she was now and reminisced about her time at there with fondness, Aoife basked in the limelight. On the other hand Seth, my last baby, is going to be going to preschool. It’s almost the beginning of a new chapter. When Aoife started preschool Seth hadn’t even been born, it seemed barely five minutes ago and then suddenly we were stood there with a little boy who’s almost three, playing in the sand and showing us he is indeed ready to start this new journey. Well not QUITE ready, although he would be eligible to start in April the school like them to be near as damnit toilet trained and he still refuses to entertain the idea. He’s more impressed with the tricks he can do whilst sat on the toilet. You really don’t want to know. I’ve been asked many times why I don’t send Seth to nursery, even if only to get a bit of time to myself. It’s a perfectly legitimate question giving all the moaning I do. The answer is twofold and as we’re all a nice bunch here I know you’ll appreciate that my opinion may differ to yours and that’s OK. Firstly, I don’t like the idea of private nursery. I KNOW some people don’t have the choice and have to use them but, simply put, I DO have the choice and I choose not to use them. I think my disdain comes from the one closest to our house. The one Seth would go to. It costs just under £40 a day to send a child there. They pop the babies into a triple buggy and wheel them down to the cafe where the staff drink lattes and the children….watch. Yes, the children sit in the buggy watching. If the children are older, they’re walked to the shops to buy whatever the nursery needs. We have a big old park round the corner but they go to the shops. If that’s the thrilling activity that goes on in public I can only imagine what goes on inside! As I have the choice, I choose to not spend £40 a day and let Seth watch me drink coffee and walk to the shop with me for free. Secondly, and most importantly, because I am a SAHM, my children going to preschool is the beginning of the end. OK, that sounds a little dramatic but bear with me. From birth until preschool I’ve had my babies with me pretty much constantly. Initially it was me and Aoife, all day every day, then she went to preschool so we weren’t together all day, every day anymore just most of the day every day. And then real school started and she was suddenly spending more of her waking time there than with me. I hated it. It’s OK though, I had back up. Seth was with me all day every day but come September he will spend two and a half days at preschool. Then a year later, he too will spend most of his waking time at school until he is 18. Then both will be adults and won’t want to spend quite so much time with me anyway as they’ll have their own lives and not want to be with their nerdy (cool) mum. THEIR LIVES ARE FLASHING BEFORE MY EYES. So you see, once they enter the school system it’s the path to me seeing less and less of them. It’s a time when they grow faster and I feel like I’m missing it. As parents we’re always talking about how their childhood is fleeting, how it seems to go by so fast and it does. So, that’s why I’m not sending Seth to preschool before I need to and that’s why I don’t need that time to myself just yet, because these are precious moments I’ll never get back and I want to enjoy them for as long as I can. Before he enters the system where he too is spending more of his waking time with people who aren’t me. Yes, I will often complain I need a bit of space, I mean an inch or an hour. Yes, I’ll moan I’m tired, it’s human nature. Yes I feel like I can’t cope sometimes but I do cope. In 18 months time I’ll be complaining my house is too quiet and I’m feeling pretty redundant. I don’t need to rush that. I’m off to drink wine and cry that my children are all grown up and don’t need me any more.

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“How he dresses, I care zero, so long as he don’t steal my drink”

Anna — Tue, 28 Jun 2016 10:02:00 +0000

This time last year, Aoife was starting her taster sessions for Reception Class, it was a big bloody deal. She barely seemed old enough, I wasn’t ready for her to leave nursery and I CERTAINLY wasn’t ready for her to start big school! I wasn’t ready to start big school! Now here we are, a year on and with only four weeks left of Reception class. Oh how things have changed. A year ago I had all the Reception Mummy worries about fitting in and making friends, keeping up with the school work, liking the teachers, coping with a change in routines and school behaviour. I’m proud to say I got through it all! Aoife has done really well too! This morning, as I cleaned the house ready to entertain a small group of five year olds after school (I don’t know how judgey are, I’m not risking it), I got to thinking about the changes in Aoife over the last year. It’s not just all getting taller and losing teeth. This time last year she liked superheroes and I was already thinking about how on earth I was going to make an Iron Man birthday cake, but now superheroes are a ‘boy thing’. She says things like ‘pink is a girls colour and blue is a boys colour’. She likes Taylor Swift and Little Mix (I have NO idea where this comes from as I wasn’t even entirely sure who they were). She likes to choose what she wants to wear herself, usually dresses as they make her ‘feel like a real girl’. She doesn’t want to hold my hand so much now or give me a cuddle when I pick her up from school. She used to love running but now she says school cross country is boring. She used to love playing tig and now when I ask what she played it was Mummies and babies. I have no problem with any of these changes, but they just don’t seem organic. Like it doesn’t feel like a natural progression. Aoife has always liked pink and princesses but she never considered them girl things, she equally loved Spiderman, they were just colours and things. Now they’re suddenly more complex than that. In the car she loves to listen to Lily Allen (a lot more sweary than you’d think), Fall Out Boy and We Are Scientists. She’s a proper Indie Cindy. If she’s at home she likes to still sit really close to me and give me cuddles. At home she LOVES to run, she runs laps of the room, whenever we’re walking places she runs, she likes going for a run with Rory and she’s even doing a sponsored run with him (If anyone is interested it’s here) it’s her absolute favourite, just not at school. At home she likes to play tig with Seth and watch Thomas or Blaze and the Monster Machines with him. The other day I told her that her outfit looked cool, she got really cross with me as girls are meant to look beautiful and boys look cool. It’s like I’ve got two different little girls now. School Aoife who conforms and Home Aoife who is more like the little girl I’ve always had. I appreciate that this happens, I appreciate that we all have the natural desire to fit in but I didn’t realise that the changes happened so early in life and it kind of makes me sad. I want her to be happy but I want her to be happy as herself. I try to explain, in the simplest of ways, that she should be happy to be whomever and whatever she wants to be. If she wants to wear a Princess dress that’s OK, equally if she wants a Hulk outfit, that’s OK too. In the same way if Seth wants to play with her Frozen doll, she isn’t to say it’s a ‘girlie’ thing. I know that generations before us seem to think that boys willies will drop off if they play with ‘girl toys’ and girls will become all ‘butch’ if they play with ‘boys toys’, thankfully we, the enlightened, know that not to be the truth now! I think I’m probably just seeing the issues of myself in my five year old (isn’t this why we have kids? to mess them up like us? keep the cycle going!)* But still I fret, Do I just go ahead and let her carry on conforming? Is it a natural progression that I’ve just got to let her go through? Will she always conform and be the kind of person who feels they have to be something she’s not? Is this just how we determine who we are, what moulds us? Do I encourage her to be different? Am I over thinking this whole thing? Is it because I’m worried that her friends are coming to play this afternoon and they might not like me? Probably. Do you think I can get a Princess dress in my size by 3pm to impress them all? *obviously not, we have kids because we love them and want to make wonderful humans and future leaders that won’t be nearly as neurotic and wine dependant as ourselves.

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“All children, except one, grow up”

Anna — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 17:55:00 +0000

Today Aoife is five years, six months and three days old. Today, while she quickly wrote a story before school because we’d forgotten to do her homework (when does that start becoming her fault not ours?), we found her first wobbly tooth. “Oh Aoife! You’ve got your first wobbly tooth!” “REALLY? WHICH ONE?” *frantically starts pulling at all her teeth* The absolute joy on her face was a picture. She looked proud as punch. This was her proper ‘big girl’ thing. Yes she’d done walking, talking, potty training etc, but they were all landmarks for us rather than for her. This was the first thing to make her feel like a big girl and she was over the moon. I, on the other hand, felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. The combination of this next step and her absolute joy that it was happening made me REALLY realise how fast she’s growing up but worse than that, how much she WANTS to grow up. I read stories in the press about gangs, children being groomed online, being bullied online, being attacked for someone to film and put on Facebook* and I fret (a LOT) about how I can protect my children from this. I KNOW it’s a few years away but then again it isn’t. The time is going so fast and no matter how hard I try to soak up and remember every tiny thing they do and say I feel like it’s all passing me by pretty quickly and these things are looming. Kids are getting savvy quicker. This evening, Aoife’s tooth fell out (it could be argued she forced it a little) and her big grin just got bigger and gappier. “I’m a getting to be a big girl now aren’t I Mummy?” “Yes, yes you are. Stop showing me that gap” “Why Mummy?” *big gappy grin* Gappy McGappison “Because it makes me sad. My baby is growing up” “Oh Mummy, I’ll always be your baby I promise. Even when I’m a grown up” *Big hug and kiss* *Heart melt and small tear* Tonight we put her tooth on a special plate outside her fairy door so Jess the fairy could take it. The door to the Fairy Kingdom for our adopted fairy, Jess. She was so excited that she didn’t want a story or anything. She just went right to sleep. If I’d have known losing a tooth would have a positive effect on bedtime I might have fed her more sugar!** Tonight I will drink wine to celebrate/commiserate. *I know only the really horrid stories make the papers and lots of good and wonderful stories about kind and caring children are out there somewhere. **This is a joke, obviously, I couldn’t deal with the sugar rush.

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