The First One...

This is my first blog, so please go easy on me. I find it’s easy to clarify my thoughts in a mind but once I start typing to get them down they become ^£*%&>$&)*%”! I’d like to share my family life with you, if you can bear it. The title gives you a clue – it’s a madhouse, indeed, but we’re no different from any other family in our day-to-day life.

I’m focusing on pre-pubescence quite a bit at the moment. It’s a gentler forerunner of Puberty – the land of grunts and crabbiness. My older daughter (Daughter 1) is rapidly approaching puberty. She turned 10 in December and virtually overnight Mother Nature handed her a wallop to the back of her head for a birthday present. She leant over head bed and said “It won’t be long, girl, so Go Forth and be Crabby”. And since then there’s been an onslaught of daggered stares at her little sister (Daughter 2, currently aged 8 minus three days) as if she was a permanent eyesore and she should apologise for her very existence, outbursts of “It’s not fair!” – I particularly like that one; it’s usually aimed at me and reminds me of my youth – and “I hate you” (although that’s the big gun so it’s only come out once SO FAR). I’m as yet waiting for “No, you do it that way” and “I’m going out”, which will no doubt make an appearance in a year or two. “You’re so embarrassing” was got out of the way several years ago, incidentally, but that’s hardly surprising.

Daughter 1’s also started developing small crushes on public figures. The other night we were watching “Splash” (yes, I know, I do apologise. It won’t happen again…) and she says to me:

“Does Tom Daley have a girlfriend?”

Me: “Err, no – he’s gay, actually.”

Daughter 2: “Who with?”

Me: “Err, I’m not sure.”

Daughter 1: “Oh.”

Daughter 1 is disappointed. I don’t know what her expectations are, but her shoulders and head go down, but only to disappear back into a game on her iPad, from which she probably won’t appear until she’s 18, when she’ll suddenly pop her headphones off her head and say, “That’s it now, I’m ready. I’m an adult now. Have I missed anything?”

That’s another feature of pre-pubescence that I’m noticing: the withdrawal from family life; a sloping off, a creeping out. 98% of the time it’s to dive into the iPad. I can’t say I blame her. The Harry Potter DVDs have all been watched a million times now so that excitement’s worn off, and school must be constant noise, 9 to 3pm. When you’re young you just put up with the constant racket at school, but when I go in there from time to time I feel like clamping my hands to my ears and shouting “Make it stop!” I don’t know how our wonderful teachers cope. Perhaps they go off to the loos for a few minutes and stick their heads in their iPads for sanity too.

All I can say is, technology can be blamed for a lot of things, but it does provide a bit of a Time Out.