School's out for Summer

And so we have reached the last week of school.  I say it every year but that was an unbelievably fast year. My Junior Infant has almost completed his first year in school and taken to it like the proverbial duck.  My eldest son is about to go into sixth class and my daughter has finally finished her Junior Cert. It all seems to have gone by in the blink of an eye, except for mid-year project on the Great Famine – that took an interminably long time.

The graduation for the sixth class children is due to take place this week and my friend’s son is one of the boys who will be leaving and getting ready to start a new chapter in his education. She is feeling particularly emotional about it and she doesn’t even suffer from hyper-sentimentality like me! It’s a huge milestone for any child or parent. I expect there will be lots of tears on Tuesday, mostly from the parents I imagine, and some pretty embarrassed pre-teen boys. It will be my son next year. I’m not in any hurry for it to come around.

So now with bleary eyed sentimental reflective rose tinted glasses I am looking forward to the summer holidays.  No homework induced battles for nine weeks. No smelly, temporarily undiscovered, lunch leftovers to be scraped off the bottom of schoolbags. No sudden disclosures of urgently required paraphernalia mentioned two minutes before we leave for school. It all sounds like bliss

Roll on Thursday when they finally finish up and our time, for a while, is our own.  Watch this space for complaints, from Friday, about how on earth I’m supposed to fill that time and ramblings and rantings about long until they go back!

Father's Day

A father is a hero,
in his child’s adoring eyes,
He keeps the family safe from harm,
from villains and bad guys.

A father can do anything,
he’s the best at every game,
And stronger than every other dad,
he’d put them all to shame.

A father can fix anything,
from sadness to a broken toy
With a hug, a kiss or sticky tape,
for his little girl or boy.

And even when we’re grown up too,
some things will never change.
A father remains a hero,
for his kids of the adult range.

Happy Father’s Day to dads everywhere! Thinking also of those especially missing their dads today. Jen, x

One final battle

Mid-June already and we’re trundling towards the end of the school year but not before the one last torture that is Summer Tests.  This house is still under the dark cloud of the Junior Cert and now the end of year exams for my older primary schoolers have been thrown into the mix. Stress levels are rising. The already manic afternoons now have an extra demand on them and frantic scouring of revision sheets is commonplace once homework is completed. The weekends haven’t escaped either as mountain, rivers and counties of the Emerald Isle are listed off and alternate discussions about the Bronze Age and the Great Famine take place in the kitchen depending on which child happens to have wandered in at the time.

But let me clarify. It is not my troops who are initiating these discussions, nor they who are feeling the stress.  It is not they who are scouring the revision sheets to check what needs to be known for their impending tests and it certainly isn’t they who feel the need to know the where the Galtee mountains are or which river flows through Cork. Horizontal, is not a strong enough word to describe my “Summer tests takers” and “laid back” doesn’t do them justice either. They’re much more focused on playing outside with their waterguns, flickers and lightsabers.  They see the reduction in written homework as an opportunity to escape to their own planets all the quicker.  I am reassured by them on a daily basis that it will “all be grand”, after all, it’s things that they have done through the year. I use the word “reassured” loosely. They talk the talk but they certainly don’t recollect the details!

Getting the motivational balance right is proving more difficult every year. I don’t want them to be overly worried about their tests but I would like them to have some interest and try their best. Any attempt to keep them at the dining room table just ten or fifteen minutes longer to revise for the next day is met with huge resistance. Every day I am told the tests were “fine”. I think this might be my lads’ favourite word – non-committal, covers a multitude and pacifies mam, the kids think anyway.

Roll on the summer holidays. Free from homework, free from making lunches, free from school runs and most importantly, temporarily free from the reminder that I still can’t pinpoint the counties, mountain and rivers of Ireland!

Time flies when you're having fun!

Fifteen years ago tomorrow, I became a mother for the first time when my beautiful baby girl came into the world, informing it of her arrival with lungs that Shirley Bassey would have been proud of. She turned my life as I knew it, on its head and if I’m honest, in the weeks that followed, made me wonder what on earth I’d done.  In spite of the shock to the system that was first time motherhood, I fell completely and utterly head over heels in love with this gorgeous bundle of pink and my parenting journey began. Twelve years later to the day, my sixth child, her little brother and Godson was born.

At the time, his arrival made my daughter seem very grown up by comparison, as she approached the end of her primary school time. He seemed so dependent in every regard while she was about to start an exciting new chapter in her education, one she couldn’t wait for. She strived for independence and he couldn’t live without me. The different needs were stark and challenging

The first child gets to be the guinea pig in so many regards. I was she myself, so I can appreciate the frustrations but now I’m viewing it from a different perspective. This week as my daughter takes on her Junior Cert I’m like most mums I imagine, and I worry that she’ll get enough rest, not stress too much and hope the paper goes well. I’m trying in the little ways that I can, to make home life a little bit easier for her so she can do what she needs to do. What I really want to do however, is actually go in and take the exams for her.

As I type, my nine month old son is bouncing to the tune of “In the Night Garden” and my “one day away from 15” year old daughter is taking Irish Paper 2. How she gets on will be totally down to her. I can’t influence or affect the outcome of the exams, save maybe for helping her to be in the best frame of mind possible and discouraging the pointless post mortems after each paper. In contrast, I can pick up my bouncing nine month old and feed, change and do everything he needs done for him.

As I walked back from the school today many parents stopped to admire my littlest dude. They said they couldn’t believe how he big he is now and everyone agreed time goes so fast. It certainly does. As if birthdays aren’t enough of a reminder, state exams certainly hammer that home!