My eldest has made me inordinately
proud this week. She had her first field trip away from
home. Of course there have been the endless sleepovers, but it’s not
really the same sending her to a friend’s house who texts you humorous updates,
as being away with 90 other kids and not allowed to phone home. Charlotte,
being Charlotte, was not even mildly fazed at this prospect – I mean why would
you be?? It’s freedom after all!
The official list-of-packing included
some great retro items like a disposable camera, which required some
explaining, and aghast, “What – so you can’t see the picture straight
away!?” And as we were shoehorning the necessary items into the suitcase
to cover all weather bases - some of them not even labelled as requested – I
must admit I was doubtful they would all come back from a room of 10
girls' paraphernalia. But amazing they did, and even more
astoundingly the dorm came second in the ‘tidiest room’ competition. (Excuse
me while I wipe away a maternal tear of pride). At home Charlotte
has never even made her bed, so this seemed to be stretching the boundaries of
plausibility slightly, but hey.
Three down to two is very
strange. That’s not to say it wasn’t a treat getting extra cuddly
time with H&K, and at every stage we had time to spare and things were
relaxed and easy, but it also felt a bit eerily quiet. A bit like
when your boss is away at work, everyone enjoys being able to do their own
thing, but you can’t help feeling that the focus isn’t really there. By
Friday afternoon, as luck would have it we had to be up near Charlotte’s school
for a fair that Harry’s class were putting on, so we didn’t have the normal
picking up/bus stop conflict and could go straight over to wait for the
fieldtrippers’ return. I can only compare it to wives waiting for
their soldier husbands to return from a posting, the parents lining the road
with a concerned haggardness about their eyes, and no doubt breaking about 10
of the school’s various parking rules - which I imagine will make the subject
of a passively aggressively worded email this week. And indeed with
military precision they were all herded off the coaches, and different pieces
of kit lined up for reclamation in different places, all tanned and tired
looking. And looking about five years older than when we put them on
the bus!
Charlotte looked a bit shell-shocked at
first, and seemed to be communicating only physically in the form of hugs while
in the school grounds, but as soon as we were outside started talking and
didn’t stop for about quarter of an hour (putting Harry’s nose
firmly out of joint, having become attuned to more listening space this
week). Charlie took her out soon after we got home, for a bit of
father-daughter bonding time, which they utilised by putting down a deposit on
an almost totally non-functional van. They are both a bit obsessed with vans,
and easily led astray. A sleepless night and exceedingly furrowed brow followed and they have now decided against said wheels, so the van saga rumbles on. (Possibly it should have its own sub-blog or Twitter account). Anyway,
this gave Harry time to simmer back down to his usual laid-back self.
I feel like I’ve been on the fieldtrip
myself now, having heard in copious detail the getting-on-for-half the class
who spent the night wailing, the various bodily fluid mishaps, fall-outs, and
agonising that must have gone on amongst the teachers about when to throw in
the towel and send kids home. (I would have gone for sooner, mainly for mental health reasons). They sounded like they had seriously
earned a stiff drink by Friday night. But despite all this, she had
clearly had the time of her life, and it had done wonders for her
confidence. She spent the weekend doing that thing of when you’ve
spent a lot of time with someone, and you’ve picked up their phrases and
occasionally even their mannerisms. I imagine when Harry
goes in two years’ time, I’ll ask him how it went and he’ll say, “Fine,” before returning to the more pressing matter of a Star Wars battle. I
shall probably need to deploy some more covert methods for information
extraction.
But anyway, back to the
proudness. I do worry more with Charlotte not having a left
hand that she’ll run into a situation that is trickier for her than others and
because she seems so capable and breezy it won’t get noticed. And that this will just be horrible and frustrating. But
she seems to have coped admirably. I usually do her hair in the
morning, which is really long and obviously gets knotty, so we’d come up with
plans about buns and friends doing each other’s hair (she is fine doing others’
hair, and even doing a plait, but it’s still a bit awkward to manage
herself). But she was absolutely fine, managed all on her own. She
has a prosthetic fitted with a fork that she can use for eating, but she choose
not to use it in the end (she doesn’t at home either), she doesn’t like the
attention that these things draw. And best of all, they had a school
disco, which provided the chance to acquire a set of dance routines that it’s fair to say are
associated with a very particular stage in your school-life.
It’s taken a couple of days, but Harry
& Charlotte have now attuned themselves back to their normal pattern of
bickering interspersed with extreme sweetness. Exactly the way it
should be. We went to an extremely un-PC village princess
competition on Sunday, small girls are so often incompatible with feminist
parenting, but she loved it and came out having told the judges that she loved
pogo-ing and was going to be a writer (hey, it’s another chance to talk, isn’t
it??). Harry also started a cricket club on Sunday, so they seem to be rebelling nicely against my attempts to subvert the gender conditioning of the
whole of modern childhood. I wonder what Katie will add into the mix when
she’s a bit older …
As an aside, we decided to ditch
Charlotte’s lace-up trainers for the fieldtrip, as there seemed too much pressure
to learn this skill quickly, and I could imagine the chaos of 90 kids trying to
do laces on a muddy doorstep at once. Besides, I’m not at all sure
that I could do laces very competently at 7. But it’s obviously been
bugging Charlotte, and after her bath last night she set to developing her own
technique. Which she’d mastered in the space of about 2
minutes! I’ve posted it up on YouTube here, as I know I search this
for limb difference stuff and tips. She is indeed a star.
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