A for effort but must try harder

Yes, it’s true, there are many things worse that researching the nesting habits of a black caiman, in a style presentable to a class of 30 eight year olds, but it’s not how I would necessarily choose to spend an evening.

Why when my children have homework they have known about for a month, do they leave it until the very last minute to have a meltdown and make me feel that somehow I am the worst mother in the world for not making sure it was done weeks ago, despite the fact I only found out about it yesterday?

I think it fair to say that in our family parental support on the school front goes in fits and starts. Some weeks, life is so manic that I barely register that the children can read and on other occasions, I go into parenting overdrive in a very lame attempt to make up for the weeks of academic neglect.

It wasn’t until my six-year-old came home from school telling me that everyone in his class was cleverer than him, that my competitive genes kicked in; we spent three evenings working on a presentation of a recent holiday, carefully coloured, labelled and notated, (mostly by me). I resisted the temptation to use the phrase “no child of mine languishes at the bottom of the class, pull your finger out and show them what you can do”. I don’t believe in the pushy style of parenting. Encouragement is one thing, rearing spoon-fed robots is not really my thing.

I remember a particularly galling incident some years back when the class of six year olds were asked to bring in a picture they liked. I’m fairly sure we ripped something out from the Argos catalogue on the way to school, only to be met in the playground by my “enthusiastic” friend whose six-year-old had brought in a copy of Van Gough’s sunflowers AND a scale model of the sunflowers in paper mache to totally blow everyone out of the water.

I’d wager that kid had never even heard of Van Gough, full marks to the parent though – a stay-at-home mum and star baker at the school cake sales as well. Doubtless her child will be heading up some multi-national corporation by the age of 21 or hosting a Radio 4 culture programme, while mine hover around mediocre obscurity.

This weekend, in a brief period of educational input, we visited the Churchill War Rooms in London for some research for our oldest son’s project on World War II. We started the day with a quick run-through of the Rees family planned itinerary.

This was met with much disdain when middle child realised that a Chelsea Football Club stadium tour was not on the agenda.

After spending several hours in Borough market, the home of the ridiculously overpriced loaf, we had managed to garner some enthusiasm, as well as being guilt-tripped into buying a thimble-sized pot of olive oil (apparently infused with walnuts and rosemary) for the price of my student over draft.

The boys had abused the free samples and there was simply no way I could walk away knowing they had just managed to get through almost an entire pot with associated stale bread. I mean, olive oil of all things! I am from Essex, their father is from Liverpool. The only use for olive oil when I was their age was as Popeye’s girlfriend or to improve your suntan. Fuelled with smug feelings of food snobbery and a belly full of chorizo, we headed off on the sunniest day of the year, to spend two hours in a network of underground tunnels which served as the nerve-centre for the planning and execution of WWII. Having spent the 20 minutes walk there giving all three boys an idiot’s guide to the events of 1939-45, and paid an entrance fee that made the Borough Market olive oil suddenly look quite good value, I was riding high on my smug parenting cloud. This place is worth a visit and actually proved to be quite a hit with all of us. How abruptly I was brought back down to earth as we left: “Did you enjoy that?”

Youngest son: “Yes Mum, but I’m still not sure whether Hilter was English?”

Perhaps I should give up on trying to be an Uber-parent. Crocodile presentations aside, sometimes you just can’t win.