Well so much for that weekend. The spud wouldn't go to bed until 11pm every night and he was up at 7am, completely over the moon at having a whole weekend with Einstein, one of his very best friends.
He was pretty feral all weekend, running in packs of children as Einstein accepted a variety of visitors to his Grandad's house. We parents sat and nattered and watched them ebb and flow from garden to house, from ride-on toys to footballs, from swings to train tracks.
We went for hours at a time barely talking to our child unless there was an altercation over, say, a pedal car or perhaps a toy vehicle of some description. Once in a while he would pile up to have a portion of his anatomy kissed better (all very cute until he bit his tongue) and once in a while there would be a halt as each child was hauled in for a butt-sniff; but for the most part there was a lot of lazing about in the sun going on at the parents' end.
Two of the kids who came to visit were children of friends of ours and it was during a visit to their flat that I learned an important lesson: I Am Not Competitive Enough As A Mum.
Einstein's mad Mummy is one of my closer friends and I recently ripped several strips of wee out of her for having given her two year old son a rubber egg and a spoon and had him wobbling around her flat practicing for an eventual egg-and-spoon race at some yet-to-be known school.
All her claims that the egg and spoon just happened to by lying around fell, I am sorry to say, on cloth ears; I don't nick-name her son 'Einstein' for no reason. This boy could speak the alphabet before the age of two and was correctly pointing at colours before he could speak, which I might add he did at least six months before everyone else's children. I have always suspected her of flash cards and subliminal learning tapes piped under his cot mattress.
When we visited our other friends, however, we found their two year old and their four year old parading around the house with potatoes balanced on... you guessed it, spoons.
Clearly I am not pushy enough as a parent... Einstein's Mummy, I salute you. Lessons please, I'll bring my own spoon.
3 comments:
People rehearse for the egg and spoon race? Either that's very funny or I've been doing something wrong all these years!
I taught my sprogs to be competitive from an early age - never 'let' them win at anything... if they beat me they beat me because they were good enough to beat me... now they are grown up they don't have a competitive bone in their bodies... go figure!
I am resoundingly in agreement with you on this one, Sparx! I am not competitive and try not to push my kids.
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