Bringing up Boys - The Art of Being Ill

Bog Boy
Being very ill indeed

The art of being ill is hard one.

• You must not be SO ill that you cannot take advantage of it nor must you be to not ill enough that you have to go into school anyway.
• You will need to be just sick enough to get at least two days off as one day off is no good as your Mum will think you are just trying get out of a spelling test or a maths exam or basically something you don't want to do particularly; like English.
• Throwing up is a good one as you have to be off school for at least 24 hours for that but you must get the timings right, if you throw up at night you'll only get the one day off but if you throw up in the way to school you might be able to squeeze two days off as technically you will have to clear the morning of the day after tomorrow as well before you can go back.
• A good dose of chicken pox can be great - only as long as you get it mildly - but make sure your Mum has had it first as she's no good at pandering to your every whim if she's laid up as well. 
• Remember Calpol is your friend - reduces feverishness and that really spaced out feeling fast and allows you to play Minecraft uninterrupted all day but still won't really knock a nail on the head of a persistent virus so that when Mum takes your temperature the next morning it's raised too high for you to go back to school just yet...
• Don't forget to get picky with your food (preferably don't eat at all to begin with) refuse all our favourites with a sigh and say things like: "I'm just not  hungry Mum' "I can't Mum it hurts when I swallow." And allow her a small moment of triumph when she tempts you to eat with a Belgian Chocolate Choux bun*
• Get practising with your cough a good flemmy coughing noise will keep her just off balance enough to give you the benefit of the doubt - possibly allowing you an extra convalescence day at home.
• A really good  idea is to wake early and trip your way to Mum's room saying you really don't feel very well. She'll be too sleepy to argue the point and  more than likely allow you in for a cuddle. If you are too old for a cuddle in bed with Mum you can always sit on her bed and shiver. She will be so concerned that she'll jump out of bed, insist that you get in and keep warm while she gets up to fetch you a lovely cup of tea.
• Waking up in the middle of the night to say you've thrown up, feel really ill or have a headache is  another good way to make the point however, don't do this too much or you will rapidly lose her sympathy as she gets more and more tired and you'll not be able to get that extra day of convalescence.
• Keep buttering her up with the want smile or the demands for a cuddle and always say thank you for everything she does and technically you could get a whole week off - and that might mean you manage to miss a spelling test, maths exam and the dreaded English
• WARNING: Don't milk it too much or else Mum won't be as amenable to letting you stay home the next time. 

I have been ill enough to be off school for three days and have missed my spelling test, piano lesson and double English

Have a happy illness

Bog Boy 

(Aged nearly nine)

*Top Tip: Show a great deal of reluctance to eat this or indeed any treat as you are sure to get  another to tempt your appetite back

Getting back in the Groove

Refusing to stick my head in the ground!

It's been a long time.
A very long time and no it's not about the blog, even thoughit has been so long since I posted that my rankings are now totally off the scale and I am in danger of being forgotten.
It's about work.
And I am in danger of being forgotten there too.
Not only forgotten - which may imply that I once was remembered - but there is also the realisation that for some I have actually never existed.
And now I am trying to get back.
Get into the groove.
I feel as if I have been in some kind of stasis - frozen in time like Austin Powers and totally without any mojo.
I haven't been doing nothing for the past 12 years. I have managed to keep my foot wedged in the door so to speak- while renovating our home and birthing and bringing up two boys - but the foot has been so long wedged that I think it has mortified.
I do have some work but lately it has been squeezed and I fear that because I am not in the office on a daily basis I am fading fast in everyone's collective memory.
Hence the need to rejuvenate myself; be reborn - faster, stronger, better than before.
And I feel an utter fraud.
I fear I may never work properly again.
Why on earth would anyone want to give me gainful employment?
I have forgotten how to do it.
Not that I have forgotten how to write, I can do that OK. I write 1,000 words a week and get paid for it. But I am beginning to fear that all my eggs are in one basket and if that magazine were to decide to close down my column - then what?
No one knows who I am!
I wasn't widely known when I was working full time but at least all the PRs knew where to send the press releases and would ring me up with useful bon mots and stuff. I'd get invited to functions and press days and the like.
Now I find I am having to scrabble about on line searching for stuff more and more and increasingly I am having to telephone PR Execs, begging them to put me on their mailing lists. They invariably mispronounce my name, get confused and then ask me again just who I am and why I am calling.
It's so scary.
Scary that I am going to have to risk rejection, ridicule and condescension from editors and publishers young enough to be my kids as I start all over again at the bottom.
I am going to have to prove, not just to them, but to myself that I can do it
I am terrified.
Can I make it?
Can I do this?

Bringing Up Boys - it's not a 100m dash it's a marathon!

They're brilliant - aren't they?

It's dreadful isn't it when you have a higher sense of the worthiness of your child than the teachers and you don't even believe that you're really that biased. 

Of course you are aware he's a bubbly personality who's always on the move  but compared to your eldest he's a positive genius. Surely he HAS to be doing well?

But doing well is a relative issue.

As I said my youngest is a genius compared to his brother but compared to the other hot house flowers...he, as I found out, and by extension I, am sadly wanting.

It was all supposed to be so good. 

"Right Mrs B, Bog Boy!" she says it so brightly that I am totalling unprepared for the first cut. "Not the brightest chap, is he"

What? Well of course he is...he's a genius. He's always telling me so.

She pats my knee sympathetically and smiles. "He's not going to be top of the class..."

Oh, really, OK then...

"Reading - he is a bit behind and as for his writing..."

His writing is great it's already better than his brother's writing and Bog Boy is left handed

"His writing development is slow but it is better than The Boy's - I know I used to take him for extra English." she smiles again.

Oh Brilliant! Get two with one blow why don't you! I really don't like her smile...

"He hasn't really grasped punctuation and although he can be helped with capital letters, his spelling really lets him down."

Oh good grief! My hackles are up and I try to rally but that is my fatal mistake...

"I don't  really concentrate on his spellings as such, " I say  in what I think sounds like worldly authority. "I rather have my hands full with my eldest and trying to help him. I don't feel Bog Boy needs to be rushed at it so, as yet." 

But I am up against a master - I forget she's already retired twice...

"What a refreshing attitude," she chirrups, smiling again; "and you're quite right a child should be a child for as long as possible, it goes so quickly...."

My hackles are smoothed and I soften up.

"Perhaps you could bring mathematics into his play life with measuring, and weights and money" she says it as she would to a small defiant child and I swear she's about to pat me on the head as well.

Oh god I walked onto that one didn't I?

I begin to panic and hyperventilate and I feel suddenly very uncomfortable on the small blue plastic chair. She, of course, is sitting on a normal chair bolstering her position of ultimate superiority. I fluster.

"But he'll be OK to go into Year 3 won't he?"

"Yes, yes," I am told, "he'll be fine just not up there with the top of the class!" she says with another sympathetic pat on my knee.

And before I know it I am dismissed.

I leave in a daze and it's not until I am halfway home that I start to get enough life in me to get angry. "Right!" I think, "that's it. I'll show her, my kids are brilliant!"

I should have metaphorically ripped her to shreds.

"HOW DARE SHE!!! How dare she say that crap to me, how dare she pronounce via her crystal ball that my kids are not going to make it. I am determined to push my kids to the utmost throughout the holidays so that they are perfect in all their lessons when the new year academic year begins."

My dander is up. I know my kids can do it...
"Right no TV, no sweeties, no no no anything nice until work is done. Every Day! Two hours a day..

well maybe 45 minutes, children cannot concentrate for more than 45 minutes I remembered from somwehre. Music lessons. Extra sports coaching. Tutor?"

It's all beginning to sound very expensive and very time consuming.

I try not to think about the essay I saw that one of Bog Boy's chums had written and which I espied when I was waiting in the Year 2 Classroom. A whole page about a boy going on holiday with proper punctuation - even speech marks! And all joined up and it made sense.

"Oh heck! Even my eldest cannot do that!!!"

By the time I reach home all of 20 minutes later I am a gibbering wreck as I look with clear eye at the enormity of what I am trying to achieve.

And then I remember what they said about Winston Churchill being backward and at the bottom of the class - and he got the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 as well as being Prime Minister! (oh they don't make them like they used to, do they!)

One has to hold firm and not panic the bringing up of boys is not a 100m dash, it is rather a marathon - just one I wish I didn't have to run too!

Bringing up boys: When age starts to count...(the quest to have his own puppy continues)

The Puppy In Question...

God I am so undecided!

Has he really done enough to earn one? Is he really mature enough to cope?

Half of me says: “Let him rise to the challenge even if you are unsure!” The other half says: “No Way! This is going to be a total disaster!

While I may be unsure, I do know that he has tried his very best. He has been helpful. He has cleared up when I asked without a murmur and under very trying circumstances, for while he is busy being good and doing all and sundry, his younger brother is allowed to get away with doing very little and that irks.

It irks, badly.

“It’s Not Fair!” is the refrain.

And I have to keep reminding him what he is doing it all for. Sometimes I think he wishes he wasn’t trying to earn a puppy. Sometimes

I think he just wants to forget it all and be allowed to go back to being able to just hang out.

It has been particularly hard now that they are back at school. For my eldest has homework that takes over and hour to do each evening while the younger boy just has to do a bit of reading and a few spelling – all of 10 minutes. I hate to inform my eldest but that is not going to change for quite some time.

I think he forgets that he IS three years’ older than his brother and now the difference in age seems enormous as my eldest really starts to grow-up.

It’s a combination of finally coming off his epilepsy drugs and just being 10 years’ old. Suddenly he can think clearly, concentrate, see and hear without anything getting in his way, he is more co-ordinated, able to take on instructions without us having to hover over him to make sure he gets it right. He’s more trustworthy – most of the time.

I’d like to say my youngest is taking everything in his stride too – but life isn’t that tidy.

Bog Boy is at his brother night and day making life difficult and I do know why. Suddenly he’s not the one who gets everything right, suddenly he’s not the one making great leaps and bounds in learning and sport and most anything you can imagine. He’s not the top dog he thought he was and he’s just a tad envious too of all the attention his brother is garnering.

It makes for an exciting household, car journeys, meal times, bedtimes, bath times….and it is so very difficult to be mature and ignore your pesky younger brother – and doesn’t your younger brother know it!

And that is where the rub is – can I say my eldest is mature enough to have a puppy when he gets so wound up by his younger brother that he thumps him? Screeches at him? Wails that life is unfair? Albeit with extreme provocation?

The coin is being tossed….

Bringing up Boys - Puppies, Boys and The Ultimate Challenge

Whippet puppy: Five days old

I don’t think that it was the cleverest idea I had and certainly not one that I should have voiced.

However, it’s over and one now and I have to stick with it come hell or high water. I promised.

Somewhere along the line I voiced my wish that it would be great to keep a puppy from the Wickedest Whippet’s latest litter. Never mind that we already have four dogs. I actually said I wanted one.

And I said it in my boys’ hearing.

Stupid woman!

“Really Mum?” says my eldest; the one who came to watch the puppies being born, the one who found the whole thing amazing, sickening and fascinating and yucky all at the same time. “Can we really keep one?”

It was too late to backtrack and he said it with such yearning and before I knew it I was tumbling back the years to when I longed for a dog too.

I could feel it gnawing at my soul, and it hurt just like it did then when I begged and cajoled my parents. When bliss for me was being left alone to play with other people’s dogs on long Sunday afternoons when we went round for interminably long lunches that drifted well into Drinks’ time.

Being the eldest child amongst my parents’ friends by some years meant that when I was little the only companions who could actually play with me invariably would be the dogs. Not that I complained.

And then there I was with my son looking at me with such longing. And I don’t know how but I agreed, and even got my husband to agree, that if my eldest could demonstrate to us that he was mature enough to look after a puppy then he could keep it.

This is now a MAJOR quest.

My eldest, aged 10, has to go from Zero to Hero in less than two months. It is a massive ask. From lazy slug-abed living in a bombsite with Lego IEDs littered everywhere, serious attitude problems especially when told to do anything, incapable of getting from Point A to Point B without getting  distracted or forgetting things to uber-organised angel boy at home and school.

It’s impossible!

This is probably the greatest challenge in his life so far and I am terrified he won't be able to do it. But he wants it so badly. He is trying SO hard - getting it SO wrong but for all the right reasons.

He certainly gets up without a mumur in the morning to do a list of jobs from letting the dogs out to laying the table and even bringing me tea in bed - problem is he's doing it at 5.30am in the morning. A tad too early for me but I can't tell him off can I?

He is focussed at last, he is working so hard and I am praying that he'll succeed.

Oh please wish him luck!

Bringing up Boys: His first Valentine

Be My Valentine

The Boy has delivered his first Valentine. His first proper Valentine. And I have mixed emotions.

Half of me is delighted. His Valentine is a wonderful girl, pretty and popular in the school and one with whom he has been friends from the very first day he arrived.

But.

But there is a bit of me that is absolutely terrified that he is going to get hurt and I don’t think I will ever be able to forgive his Valentine if she is the one who puts the boot in on his fragile dreams.

My imagination goes into overdrive and I picture him  tentatively handing over the card to his Valentine in front of the whole class all her fiends and all of his and opening up a whole can of worms on the teasing front. Can you imagine it?

Even if his valentine was pleased with the all the attention, all it would take is one other child to say something silly and the moment would be destroyed and instead of being happy The Boy’s Valentine would be humiliated and in turn furious with The Boy for putting her in such a situation. There would be ructions and I don't think my boy would recvover easily.

So knowing he was nervous of rejection and the whole Valentine thing in general I was hoping that he’d cop out and not go ahead with it; but he’s made of sterner stuff. Luckily I was able to persuade him not to give the valentine at school.

So it has been delivered into the hands of the girl's mother with strict instructions not to let her daughter have it until they are on their way skiing tonight for half term.

At least this way if he is rejected it can be done quietly and more importantly no one will know, at least not until after half term!

A Lenten choice

What are you giving up for Lent?

"Vegetables!"

"Home work!"

These are the things my boys wish to give up for Lent.

While I think both are worthy candidates for giving up, as their removal would make my life an awful lot easier; I had to ask the boys to reassess just what Lent was all about.

There was a universal groan round the kitchen table.

"So what do you like that you could give up?" I asked.

Bog Boy looked firmly down at his plate to avoid my gaze and muttered: "Vegetables!" mutinously under his breath.

The Boy looked thoughtfully over my shoulder. Then came back at me sharply.

"Question is Mum, what are you going to give up?"

"Biscuits and cake," I said virtuously, while thinking that the chances of me sustaining more than three days without either would be extremely thin. Thank God I didn’t say alcohol!

"Look boys the time from Shrove Tuesday to Easter Sunday is 47 days but we only need to do 40 days of fasting. Did you know we get Sunday off? So every Sunday you can eat or do whatever  it is that you give up. Do you think you could do that?"

Bog Boy perked up at this: “So in Sunday I could eat sweeties ALL day"

"Well not all day but you could have sweets on Sunday."

"Lots of sweets?"

He’s a hard negotiator my youngest

"A lot of sweets," I agreed wishing to stop the bargaining process before I was committed to buying family packs of sweeties for his consumption every Sunday.

My eldest considered this for a while.

"Chocolate!" he said. "I will give up chocolate but only if I can eat it on Sunday like you promised."

"You know that will mean no chocolate biscuits too don’t you?" I replied.

"What no bourbons?!!!"

"No Jaffa cakes!!!" piped the youngest.

"No sweeties, no chocolate, and chocolate is sweeties do you understand." I am a hard mother.

There was a considered silence round the table.

The tap at the sink dripped.

Finally The Boy nodded as if he had come to a great decision.

"Can we think on it at school today Mum. It's a big decision."

I nodded and smiled to myself. I, of course am only giving up biscuits and cakes - the joy is I can still eat sweeties! I wonder if they will catch on before the end of the day....