I’m delighted to report that we have reached the point of lockdown at which the children are turning into small versions of us.
This was always my fear and somehow now it’s happened there’s a sense of relief that we have a decent enough chunk of time remaining to try and talk them out of these terribly bad habits before they are released back into society.
Henry has been overheard saying “Oh for goodness sake, why are you crying now?” to Bella on more than one occasion.
When he was trying to get on my good side yesterday he said he wanted to play a board game because he was “sick of looking at a screen all day”.
After many requests to finish her vegetables at dinner last night Bella eventually relented then announced “Finally I can have a bloody biscuit”. Except she pronounced it ‘blooding’ so at least she may get out of being sent to the head’s office next term on a technicality.
When she couldn’t find her snack earlier (having put it down briefly near Andy) she turned to him and said, exasperated but deadly serious: “Daddy please can you just check behind my ear?” Turns out she’s pretty astute as that is, indeed, where it was lurking. (Much to Henry’s disgust - he gets furious whenever Andy magics stuff from behind their ears.)
When you have kids you always hope - or in some cases desperately pray - they will get the best bits of you. And avoid as many of the bad bits as possible.
I fervently hope they fare better than me in the classroom, specifically my complete and utter inability to do anything useful with numbers. I sat the lower tier GCSE Maths paper (oh ok, and Science) because I was so astonishingly retarded in both areas.
While it’s clear that the boys at least are already blessed with the Wragg ears (to the point that Xander has been nicknamed ‘Jugs’ by his adoring uncle), I do hope that through some quirk of genetics none of them inherit their feet from either of us. And I do hope Bella avoids my very inelegant cocktail sausage fingers.
And in an ideal world I’d like them to avoid Andy’s habit of starting every offer to carry out an unappealing task with “Do you want me to…”, the most common time being at 3am when a child is crying.
This is how it goes: Him, mumbling: “Do you want me to go?” Me, to myself: “YES I want you to go. Of COURSE I want you to go. It’s 3 o’clock in the morning and I was unconscious 6 seconds ago, why the hell would I want to get out of bed to untwist a duvet/convince Bella that Henry has not taken her imaginary biscuit/stand barefoot on a Happy Land character?”
Me, out loud, with as much passive aggression as I can muster: “No, don’t worry, I’ll go,” as I hoik the duvet back sufficiently that he gets the full effect of the draft.
But he’s already resumed his snoring.
Meanwhile it’d be nice if they picked up Andy's athleticism - he can run a half marathon with no training and hit a golf ball 300 yards with the same amount of effort I put into swatting a fly with my flip flop - and my fatalism, which I think is linked closely to my disinterest in anything competitive and has served me well over the years. If you don’t set yourself up, you can never fall, right?
But there are also things they have come out with recently that have got a bit muddled.
I’ve been spinning out the food in the larder and freezer as far as I possibly can to try and limit my trips to the supermarket to once a fortnight. (The fridge was emptied days ago. We’ve been getting almost all our nutrition from frozen peas.) So when I served soup for lunch that I had found lurking in the depths of the freezer - emerging triumphant as if I had got my hands on a winning lottery ticket - Henry asked despondently why we had to have soup AGAIN. I said it was all we had in the house and, after a brief pause, he asked in a small voice, “Are we poor?”
Wrong end of the stick, yes, though not one he’s hugely concerned about when he’s stabbing at my MacBook with sticky fingers and constantly pulling against the (permanently attached) charging cable so the thing is nearly swept onto the floor dozens of times a day.
So it is with mixed emotions that I anticipate the next Government announcement on how long the lockdown is going to continue. While I would love nothing more than to bundle them off to school for the last few weeks of the summer term, they will do so with very fresh memories of Mummy’s penchant for grown up language, sarcastic retorts and bare faced shouting.
Let's just hope their teachers are too busy enjoying the effing and jeffing of 29 other children to notice.
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