Routines

I’m all for routines and it’s a well-known fact that children thrive on them. If I had my way I’d have the kids feed, bathed and in bed by 4.30pm.

I almost did the other day. It got to the bedtime bit and then I looked at the clock. This had the potential to backfire with them waking at 4am so I decided to let them ‘stay up’ and do a quiet activity.

Because it was darkening outside, I haven’t yet taught two of them to tell the time and it didn’t occur to the oldest to check the clock, this went down like I’d just announced they could have a bag of lollies for supper.

They were little angels and quietly went about their respective drawing, writing and car activities allowing me to watch the likes of the Ellen show and the news (while multi-tasking of course) undisturbed. By the time Shortland Street came on, they happily trotted off to bed, believing they’d had a pretty radical treat.

The next night, I again fed them early and Master Four, a stickler for routine, moseyed off to run the bath at 4.15pm announcing “I’m gonna have the first bath and then I can stay up and do an activity.”

What a treat!

This made for a no-fuss bed-time, considering, before this, the only way I could coax them to bed was promising a “great big boof”. This is when they get thrown into bed with a “boof”. It went from swinging them with a “one and a two and a three – boof” to the boof never being big enough so each night they had to be swung and dropped onto their pillows from a greater height. Not ideal on one’s back with growing kids.

But I’ll happily summon up the strength to give them a great big boof if I get a whole lot of down-time at the end of the day. In fact, there’s a good line-up on tv tonight so I might go peel the spuds now.

Sloths

Master Seven’s door is adorned with home-made signs stating: “Stop”, “No coming in”, “My police station” and “Can come in:”

The latter is followed by a list of names of all his favourite people, including the cats. Although I mostly fall into this category, my name is under the “sometimes” sub-title, depending on whether he has just been sent to the naughty step.

His brother and sister don’t, of course, feature on this list and I don’t like their chances of survival should they attempt to enter.

This is because my son is a neat-freak. Everything, and I mean everything, is in its place. When he had the Smurf collection, all 30 or so were lined up on the window sill and, god forbid, should I place one back in the wrong order after I’d dusted, he would be onto it as soon as he returned from school.

Now the Smurf collection lines his brother and sister’s window sill and I’ve long given up dusting around it. You see, Master Seven goes through phases where he absolutely loves and becomes obsessed with something (Thomas the Tank Engine, Smurfs and currently Madagascar). His family will pay a small fortune to fulfill his desire to have everything that this particular product brings out, and then overnight he’s over it and the whole collection gets shunted down the hall to his siblings’ room, much to their delight.

Because there isn’t much to the Madagascar collection, his neat-as-a-pin room now looks bare while the twin’s room looks like a junior rainbow-hued version of a charity shop.

The problem with this is that, while I have one neat-freak, the twins are sloths. They don’t give a damn the state of their room and, because there’s now so much stuff, I’ve given up trying to tidy or vacuum it. Making one’s way across their floor at night to tuck them in is a hazard and I don’t know how they’ve managed to survive themselves racing out of their room in the dark each morning to come and greet me.

Still, it could be worse: at least they are both on the same page. I remember, at the age of four, sharing a room with my baby brother and getting so fed up with his continuous game of throwing toys out of the cot that I somehow managed to convince my mother I needed my own room and my older brother ended up taking my place. To this day, (although he would vehemently deny it) my little bro is still rather slothful while I like everything in its place.

Which brings me to wonder, however can a daughter of mine be so slovenly and will they both stay this way?

I asked family therapist/author/parenting coach and tv presenter Diane Levy her views:

“I think that – as with most ways of thinking about parenting – there is “Nature” and “Nurture”.

A person’s initial “Nature” is genetically determined (depending on your belief) and we, as parents, have no control over that. We get what we are given. This explains the marked difference in your children.

Melancholic perfectionists have a great desire of order and sequence and so tidiness comes naturally to them. Phlegmatic, peace-loving adults also often have a great need for tidiness and good systems. This is not so much a quest for perfection as it is a quest to avoid confrontation and lower tension and so tidiness and good systems help achieve this.

From birth, our environment also shapes us and so we can teach (read “whine, nag and insist”) our children to become tidy, but it is an uphill struggle when we have children who couldn’t care less and for whom mess is not a worry.

Another factor is the pace of life we live and the many activities we encourage our children to enjoy. Often, there is no time for the mundane task of “tidy your room” and a lack of our energy to see it through.

Amazingly, our previously messy children, who use their bedroom floors as a muddled, chaotic system of horizontal filing, may grow up to be very tidy in their own homes. I would like to think that this is the triumph of Nurture over Nature and that what they learned at home (but rarely practised) did brush off onto them…but I am more drawn to the idea that it is both a mystery and a miracle!”

Dinner Time Banter

The conversation had taken a turn for the worse. What had started off talking about the Queen’s birthday had somehow plummeted into parachuting and flying poos.

I tuned out to the toilet-humoured banter around the dinner table and tried to rewind the conversation to find out how it had got to this point. And then realised it was my fault.

“Did you know it’s a holiday this weekend,” I had asked the children. “Because it’s actually the Queen’s birthday so everyone gets a holiday to celebrate.

“I bet Grandma is happy about that,” quipped Master Seven. Their great-grandma has long been a big fan of Elizabeth and is constantly being told she resembles the queen, much to her delight.

“I bet the Queen gets a lot of presents,” remarked Master Four.

“Maybe we should take her one on an aeroplane?” suggested Miss Four.

“But then we might have to go to the toilet,” Master Four.

“Aeroplanes have toilets,” I told him. Then out of curiosity to hear how far their imaginations could stretch, and probably where I went wrong, I asked: “What do you think happens when you flush it?”

Three frowns then: “All the poos and wees fall from the sky.”

“No, aeroplanes have tanks which are emptied when it lands,” I explained and should have left it there. Instead, I couldn’t resist recounting a story I’d read in the paper years earlier.

“But did you know that one time there was a leak and, remember the other day when I explained to you how hail was formed as it fell through the air? Well that happened and someone found a frozen poo in their backyard.”

This, of course, had the expected response so I continued.

“The people who found it couldn’t figure out where it came from and thought it must have been from an alien until they solved the mystery.”

By now their imaginations were working overtime and they took turns at narrating their own experiences of aeroplanes and frozen faeces until Master Seven topped the lot by relating the time he’d parachuted out of an aeroplane when the frozen poo went flying past and landed on his brother’s head, of course.

And that brought me back to the present. I’m not sure what Elizabeth, or grandma for that matter, would have to say about all that nonsense.