My contrary child

Sometimes I think that Isabel likes to do the opposite of whatever I've asked her to do, just for the sake of being contrary. And then I realise that of course this is exactly what she's doing, since she is her father's daughter after all. She's actually not been too bad today - during the "terrible twos" she had phases of just being a bundle of No, it was as if she'd forgotten every other word in the English language.
I've learnt, obviously, to play this to my advantage wherever possible. For example, in the shoe shop yesterday I made a fuss over the shoes next to the ones I actually wanted her to have, so of course she ignored them, and went for the ones I'd wanted all along. Cunning.
These little tricks don't always work though. This evening, since Husbandio is out playing badminton and then having dinner with a friend he doesn't see too often, I decided we'd have a decadent tea of blueberry pancakes. Not standard dinner fare, but not too bad - only eggs, milk, flour and blueberries really. We shared them between us and she ate exactly as much as me - how I don't know, since I was stuffed once I'd finished. But no, she then gave me a sideways glance, and whispered "let's find some dessert in the fridge...!" I'd kind of thought that blueberry pancakes were both main course and dessert but no, she wanted something else, so I joked "well, you'd better have a pork pie then" - and that's exactly what she did. The whole thing. Good job it was only a mini one. She's clearly regained the upper hand now - how can I play things to my advantage if she's sometimes going to unexpectedly agree with me? Curse that clever child!

Military precision

Husbandio and I attended our first ever school parents' consultation evening tonight which, not that I was concerned, went very well. The affair itself was choreographed to the second - each set of parents had an allocated ten minute slot, and the head teacher announced the changeover from one set of parents to another by ringing a bell. One of the other mums told me she was so aware that they had to finish when the bell rang that she stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence, got up, thanked the teacher and left!

Ten minutes doesn't feel like very long when you're talking about a subject of such central importance as your child's progress, but I suppose with 30 kids to a class it's difficult to squeeze in any more. As it was, the appointments were held over two days. One of things I'd wanted to ask was about Isabel's reading: I have no benchmark against which to judge her progress, so while it seems to me that she's doing brilliantly, I wanted to hear that from someone more qualified! I also wanted to ask if we could start taking home some reading books with actual words in them, and found out more about why the discussion books are useful (shows the kids that, when they're writing stories, there's no right or wrong way of telling it - the story can do what you want it to, and there might be more than one way of interpreting it). We've been promised reading books with words after half term provided she can read her keyword set by then - all of those keywords will be featured in the first books which gives the kids a real confidence boost, since they'll actually be able to read these books properly. How exciting! Will definitely be working on her keywords over half term. I really don't feel I'm forcing this on her though - the first thing she wanted to do when she got home at lunchtime today was to get out her new keywords and go through them. Her idea, not mine!

My only worry now is that the books she'll be getting will be distinctly uninspiring. The school uses the Oxford Reading Tree series, and I found an article today which complained about how turgid the content of these can be. If the ones with words are anything like the ones without, I'm not expecting too much. But then, how exciting can these books be when they contain such a limited set of words? I'm just looking forward to seeing how pleased with herself she will be when she reads through her first book by herself.

First Post of Many?

On the first of the year, it seems timely to start something new.  Since I've been mulling the possibility of starting a blog for a while and, perhaps more importantly, blogging doesn't appear to be related to doing any exercise, I thought this might be a good thing to kick off.  We'll see how it goes.  For now, I think only a select few will be informed of this blog's existence - ideally non-judgmental types who won't laugh too long or too hard if it all falls through.

So, what will this blog provide?

1. Some frequent (note I didn't say daily!) musings, and just thoughts about what's happened in the day which tickled or intrigued me.

2. Comedy tales about funny things said and done by my daughter (well, I think she's funny anyway, so if you're anti-kid you may want to stop reading this now).

3. The occasional whinge/rant.  OK, these might be more than occasional - I'm thinking that this blog may be quite therapeutic!

And here, for your delectation, are today's offerings in the above categories:

1. It's hard naming a kid.  This is on my mind since I'm 5 months pregnant, and got the baby naming book down from the shelf the other day.  This proved 2 things: that I have no real preference as to a favourite name as yet, and that there are some very odd names out there.  I mean, we all know about the standard odd ones (Chardonnay springs to mind), but DeForrest?  Concepcion?  And the trouble is that the good names tend to be the popular ones which is also bad - when Isabel starts school there will be two Ambers in her class, and I bet their parents didn't expect that when having their naming discussions!

2. Isabel went to stay with my mum on NY Eve, but had a bit of a panic the night before that we were banishing her and would never come to get her back.  The moral of this story is that children will read much more into a movie or story  than you ever expect - she got this particular fear from The Tale of Despereaux, which we had taken her to see in the afternoon.  Took a lot of persuading until she believed that going away for the night would be a fun treat rather than the start of a lifelong punishment.

3. I've just finished the ironing, and it narked me for a multitude of reasons.  First, only about 20% of it was mine.  Second, the iron has turned into a communist with Alzheimer's: it went on strike several times with no provocation or warning, and kept dribbling all over everything.  Which made the fact that not all of it was mine better somehow.  Anyway, it's done, so that's something to tick off the list of jobs which must be done before going back to work next week.  

Future topics to be considered in another post (getting late now and am going to bed before my writing gets any more inane) include "what the hell do I cook for a kosher jewish couple whose son is dairy intolerant?", and "how did the movie Michael Clayton win any Oscars when it was SOOOO boring?".   And if that's not enough to hook you then I don't know what is.