Hmmm.. stick with Disney i think.
2am last night: Fran awakes… shrieking. Enter Mummy stage left.
Fran: Its the monster… its the monster.. the one in the rubbish tip…
2.30 am: Mummy leaves sleeping child having carefully explained the possibilities of filming a large puppet monster in a small room pretending to be dragging people under water to their death while being fired at by Princess Leah’s blaster. We managed to transform said scary monster into the image of a pink and purple stripy tights puppet….
7.30am: Mummy constructs fake monster with padded pair of tights and pretends, sock puppet like, to eat/strangle Amelie for Fran’s delectation until all parties quite convinced the nightmare has been dispelled.
Which i think, ably proves that my daughter is not ready for a “certain type of film”, delicate soul that she is.
This morning started badly due to further cock up with taxi. I felt really terrible because i sent two perfectly nice taxi people away until it was sorted properly, which made me feel very uncomfortable because they are asian and i felt like they must think it was a racist thing; it wasn’t, i was just annoyed by the following. Maybe its just me, but an LEA transport team that think the below is okay, don’t seem to be doing their job well enough to me.
They
a) can’t get my address right despite several attempts by me to get it changed on their records,
b) can’t phone me back to tell me the names of the people collecting my daughter,
c) can’t send me a letter confirming details of said event,
d) think its totally acceptable for a 4 year old to be delivered to nursery for a full day 30 minutes early so they can do 2 separate trips for several children on one contract
e) don’t think its important to be able to tell me for definite that the (married) couple who turn up unannounced to collect my child have been police checked (and lets just remember this is Cambridgeshire, of Soham fame we are dealing with here) and
f) don’t think its likely that said 4 year old, who has issues with change, might be a bit thrown by a black cab (not the previously familiar people carrier) turning up with two completely unfamiliar people in it, with no carseat for her and with names she can’t pronounce (and has frankly no chance of remembering either – who has been asked “Whats your name again?” by Maddy 6500 times?)
Sigh – looks like i will be doing the nursery run then :~/ I can’t decide if its more horrifying that they operate that way or more horrifying that they expect parents to be okay with that. Am i completely odd because i want to be utterly sure with the whole set up before i put my daughter into a car with two complete unknowns? I had a HORRIBLE experience last year where i didn’t check carefully enough when things changed slightly and then the taxi was 20 minutes late – 40 minutes where i really couldn’t be sure that i hadn’t just made the most fatal of parental errors; i’m not going to go through that again. I find it amazing that sorting out these arrangements really carefully is not paramount; they would be so accountable if it went wrong and i think its my job to make sure that they HAVE done their job, otherwise *I* would be accountable. Apart from anything, these are arrangements made for SEN children and vulnerable children and its really not that fair on the taxi people if its not carefully sorted out, they need to know their backs are covered too.
Rant over.
After that, things improved. Fran and i sat and read the baby book; we got as far as the pictures of mummy and daddy bits and then she asked to stop, so we did. I was very proud of myself, not a stutter ;~)
After that i read her Camille and the Sunflowers and then we spent ages on oil pastels and sunflowers. We had lots of fun doing it and she tried really hard. I’ll do photos later.
Then we read the end of the Moses stories and Androclus and the Lion, which she loved. It brought a tear to her eye. And finally she did some writing practise and when i dictated a small sentence to her “The cat has a hat” she wrote it out perfectly, which was great. And since we got Maddy, its been garden play al lthe way. Lovely.
