At the same time, I’ve just started an awesome creative writing class called The Discovery Wonkshop led by Lani Diane Rich over at StoryWonk. It’s all geared around the pre-writing discovery process of writing a novel and even after only one class has kicked my brain into creative mode.

Our first assignment is to create a soundtrack for our story, so I have been spending the last couple of evenings with Spotify, Last.fm and a bottle of wine (as Lani says, “Best Homework EVER!”). I have spent a ridiculous amount of money on iTunes and somehow seem to have ended up with 6 hours of music in my soundtrack. I might need to prune a little.

All good, and all very exciting. Except I’ve just realised that it’s my martial arts class tonight so I need to flip back out of ‘daydreamy plot mode’ back into ‘fighting mode’ and in between find my ‘competent parent mojo’. I think my lead character is going to end up with a split-personality disorder.

Send help. Send chocolate.

• gone to the supermarket and bought magazines for us all (Toxic and a Star Wars magazine for the boys, New Scientist for me) and then they spent some of their pocket money on an Indiana Jones toy that was in the sale.
• made a list of all the activities we’d like to do or try in the holidays (okay, most of it is wishful thinking, but if you can’t make grand plans on the first day of the holidays, when can you?).
• practised basic handwriting skills for five minutes (Akra Jr is keen to earn his pen license next school year, but his letter formation is terrible for an 8 year old, so we’ve bought some handwriting exercise books and Li’l Bhaji is joining in too).
• watched Akra Jr learn about home keys on Dance Mat Typing.
• spent time outside with Li’l Bhaji attempting to teach him to ride his bike without stabilisers.
• only had to listen to one major squabble which I refused to referee.

I get a medal for all that, right? RIGHT?

For some reason, sibling bickering between Akra Jr (eldest son) and Li’l Bhaji (youngest son) has escalated to epic proportions of late (presumably fuelled by end-of-term-itis). Akra Jr’s speciality is quietly spoken nastiness and vindictiveness designed to get a rise. Li’l Bhaji’s speciality is a particularly high pitched whine and then suddenly lashing out. They both excel at tale-telling.

It’s becoming rapidly obvious that me intervening in any way only escalates the problem, even if I’m concerned that someone is about to become hurt. Separating them just allows resentment to brew to explosive levels and making any sort of judgement of who is right and who is wrong is a complete mug’s game.

We only have a few days left until the end of term, and then they get the glorious experience of togetherness for six weeks – the voice in my head is already chanting “DOOOOOOOMED” at me.

Would it be really terrible parenting to set up a boxing ring in the garden, let them get it out of their system regardless of injuries and then declare the rest of the house a fight free zone?!!

He’d been complaining of a sore gum for a couple of days before, but (as I couldn’t see any sign of inflammation or problems) we’d adopted a wait and see approach with the help of a little bonjela and reminding him to be thorough while cleaning his teeth.

Friday night, he came home from school and asked me if I thought his cheek looked a little swollen. I looked and it did look a little puffy, especially compared to the other side of his face. However, he wasn’t in any pain and again, another inspection of his mouth didn’t show anything unusual. We sent him to bed with a spoonful of children’s nurofen and the resolve to buy some children’s mouthwash in the morning, just in case.

Saturday morning, the swelling was much more pronounced and by lunchtime it looked very scary – the skin was taut as if it was the surface of an oddly shaped balloon inflated to its maximum size. The swelling was along his cheekbone, up by the side of his nose and the underneath of his eye was so inflated that it was pressing on his glasses – it looked like he’d been punched.

I have to say that the out of hours GP service in our area is awesome. We got a swift response and an appointment time (so all our queuing was done in the comfort of our own home, not in a waiting room). The GP was wonderful with Akra Jr, addressing him almost all of the time rather than just speaking over his head to me. We left with a prescription for an appropriate antibiotic and the instructions to see a dentist as soon as possible.

Dentist today was also wonderful – we were seen very quickly with little waiting around. Poor Akra Jr has a teeny cavity at the back of one of his baby molars – I feel gutted, he’s always had excellent teeth up until now. We’ve got the option to try and save the tooth or have it extracted with pros and cons to both. So we just have to decide by the end of the week once the course of antibiotics has finished.

Also rather disturbingly, Akra Jr (who is only 8 years old) wanted to know when he could get his own computer and mobile phone.

Oh… I don’t know… how about Two Thousand and NEVER!

Gulp. I want a pause button on them growing up, please.

Whenever I take Akra Jr and Li’l Bhaji shopping to spend their pocket or birthday money, I really have to fight the desire to heckle. There is so much utter crap out there manufactured purely to part the naive with their cash – plastic tat that falls apart the moment you get it home, stuff that’s priced twice as much as equivalent toys because it has a film character on it, DS games that an amoeba would find hard to stay interested in after half an hour’s play.

I want to tell them to save their money for something really special, that they’ll appreciate and get a lot of play out of. My natural instinct is to point out each and every flaw in their prospective purchases. I confess that at the start of them getting their own money, I gave into that instinct a lot of the time.

However, I started to realise that my criticisms were completely poisoning the thrill of having money to spend – of being the proverbial kid in a toy shop. It’s their choice, their money, not mine. If I control every purchasing decision they make, how will they ever learn to look after their cash?

So these days, I’m doing my best to take a step back. I still have the ultimate power of veto on potentially dangerous or age inappropriate toys and games of course, but otherwise it’s their call. Which is why we ended up coming home from town yesterday with two packets of GoGos, two GoGo sticker books, two extortionately-priced Star Wars action figures and two DS games (one of which was discarded on the first day as “boring”) with only a teeny bit of heckling.

Please let them learn quickly, biting my tongue hurts.

Where was I? Oh yes. Akra Jr is 8 years old today. EIGHT YEARS OLD! I don’t feel old enough to have an eight year old son.

Anyway, he’s as had as fun a day as possible with a streaming cold and having to go to school for most of it.

Tea (at his request) was at McDonalds, with just the four of us (his party was at the weekend). He has played on his new DS games (Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones, spot a theme?) and he is actually eager to go to bed so he can try out his new reading light. A 6-speed bike is cluttering up the living room ready for a day that it does not rain.

A perfect day all round then, really.

I am sure that when I’m in my 50s, I’m going to look back at all the photographs I have of my smiling children out on spring-time walks, or on trips to the park and I’m going to have a wonderful rosy-glow memory of outings with my offspring, delighting in every moment of their company and wonder why I didn’t do it more often.

Conveniently, I will have forgotten about the constant bickering, about the argument over the ownership of a random stick from the ground, the “my legs hurt, we’ve been walking for YEARS” whine and the realisation that they’re DESPERATE for the loo just as we’re at the furthest point away from the nearest public convenience.

I will also have failed to recall the frog-march across roads with their wrist in a death-grip hold as they’d just tried to run off into direct traffic. I will have consigned to oblivion the military operation that was needed just to step out of the front door only to return three times because they haven’t got their jumper, their shoes or a favourite toy.

I will be able to completely blank out the fact that the snapshot in question was the only 30 seconds on the entire trip where they were even vaguely happy and co-operative.

After all, this is why I take photographs. Family outings are just so much more pleasant in retrospect, especially with judicious use of Photoshop’s clone brush.

Last week, they kept me awake every night with their hacking coughs, raging temperatures, headaches and bad dreams.

This week it’s my turn to be ill, only they get to sleep through.

I call that blatantly unfair.

His reading has gone up a couple of levels since he was tested at the end of year 2 (not a surprise given the amount of open books I clear off the end of his bed every night!) and he is now on some “very challenging” numeracy work. He is quiet in class, but is obviously paying attention and can answer any question thrown at him.

His spelling is excellent but handwriting is letting him down slightly. However, given that I can read what he writes, and I still can’t decipher his father’s penmanship, I think he’s doing fantastically given the obvious genetic disadvantage!

I was expecting to be told he was doing pretty well, but quite bowled over with the high praise he received tonight.

I am very careful that both kids don’t feel that they’re under pressure to succeed (my only goal is for them to come out of primary school knowing how to read, write, have basic maths skills and enjoy learning), but Akra Jr works hard and enjoys classes – I just hope that continues.

He has apparently met all his targets for Foundation Stage already and has been set Year 1 targets in writing, reading and numeracy – although the teacher was keen to stress that she only believed in stretching him when he was actively choosing the advanced activities and he was still going to get lots of time to play.

His behaviour in class is good, deteriorates a bit when he’s tired or really really REALLY wants something (!) but nothing that is unexpected for a boy in Reception.

Considering that he’s not even 5 years old yet (May birthday), so one of the younger ones in the class, he’s doing incredibly well. I am so grateful that he has such a passionate and caring teacher in his first year of school – her enthusiasm is obviously catching!

Akra Jr, in particular, has really got into Sudoku puzzles once I sat down with him and explained how they worked. The pride when he managed to complete one entirely on his own was immense. Li’l Bhaji’s favourite is the dot-to-dot puzzles, easily completing some very complex ones with numbers over 100 (timely considering his holiday homework was to recognise all the numbers in order up to 100, don’t you think? Tick. That was painless).

However, unsurprisingly, some of the puzzles were a bit beyond Li’l Bhaji, being aimed at an age group somewhat higher than 4 years old, so building on the success of his dot-to-dotting I got them both a copy of The Greatest Dot to Dot Book in the World: Book 1 and it is awesome. It has really captured their imagination plus they’ve been great at helping each other out in order to find a particularly illusive number.

The only downside to dot-to-dots that I can see (and this is not a reflection of the book, all the others we’ve tried in the previous magazine and the free downloads we’ve found on line (thank you @ginnikelley!)) is that the cry of “but what is it supposed to BE?” seems rather common.

Still, the abstractness…. oh… it’s an ELEPHANT… see there’s its trunk… no, that’s its ear…. doesn’t seem to have put them off too much, so that’s good.

I’m sure there were lots of accidents out there today and I warned the kids to take it easy and not mess around to avoid slipping over.

Did one of them slip on the ice anyway?

Oh no.

Li’l Bhaji decided to walk straight into a staggered fence instead because he was too busy talking to look where he was going. Sigh. Still, it makes a change for him to have the accident on the way to school, rather than during school – so it’s a progress of sorts.

He’s okay now, but does have a rather lurid blue bump on his forehead as a memento.

It’s been a struggle, and I didn’t expect it to be. This has been a very long term, the time stretched out further by the seemingly endless number of demands in letters brought home. I’m tired. The kids are tired and tearful. We’ve all had enough. For the first time, I’m wondering whether a system of 4 semesters might work a lot better than our current term system.

I’ve always been pro-school before and I’m still generally happy with our local school – the staff are lovely and the boys are getting on really well there, but I’m finding myself feeling increasingly resentful of how much it is taking over our lives. While the school day ends at 3.30pm, the rest of the day is a write-off and I can’t really remember the last time we did something special together as a family of 4 at the weekend – the kids are too exhausted by then to contemplate doing anything other than veg out.

Having one child at school was different somehow. Perhaps because Akra Jr was still in Key Stage 1 then, perhaps because extra demands on time, energy and money for only one child didn’t seem so bad. It still felt that we had time and interest for other things… non-school things.

This is the cue for parents of multiple school-age children to reassure me that it gets easier…

However, the highlight of the week has to be yesterday when I received the dreaded phone call from school “Akra Jr has had an accident and I think he might need taking to hospital”. I ran over there (then ran back and got the car and DROVE round there – doh!) and rushed him to A&E, did the worst example of parallel parking in my life and got him through to the reception.

Three HOURS later we finally emerged. No stitches (wrong kind of wound apparently) but some fairly impressive looking bandages and dressings covering a nasty and deep cut to his side and various scrapes on his elbow, knees and chest.

I really have to teach my son that he needs to stop picking fights with the playground – the playground always wins.