Arts and crafts

As a child, I regularly asked my mother if we could do arts and crafts together. She was never that keen on transforming old loo rolls into fairies with cotton wool heads, covered in gluey glitter and now I know why. My five-year-old daughter adores sitting at the kitchen table, losing herself in crepe paper, coloured sequins, glue and a mass of felt tips. She also regularly asks me to join in. I am quite partial to a bit of sticking but I admit I am also a perfectionist. Put it simply, I am not much of a team player when it comes to art. Last week, we were sticking together a wooden car which we then began to paint. At first, my daughter was thrilled at my enthusiasm but it ended with us squabbling over which colour to paint the bonnet. I almost marched out of the kitchen in a toddler-type strop. Perhaps I am better taking the role of the parent who supervises from a distance and tries to remain calm when the small pot of glitter spills across the kitchen floor.

Thankfully, school provides the perfect forum for arts and crafts. On a daily basis, the children arrive home laden down with artwork. Some of these masterpieces are put in a drawer and treasured forever. However, I must confess that many do not make it. These include the painted cereal boxes and paper covered in glitter and glue that has not yet dried. I am sorry to say, that these are mysteriously taken by the fairies. On one occasion, the fairies were caught out. My son was putting his apple core into the kitchen bin and suddenly shrieked, “Mummy, my space ship is in the bin. The fairies must have put it there by accident.” Head bent down, I mumbled, “How dreadful.” The space ship, in the form of a Cornflake box painted black, was then promoted to the kitchen dresser on display for the rest of the week.

Girls' shopping trip

My five-year-old daughter and I decide to leave the boys to their raucous game of soldiers in the sitting room and head off for a spot of retail therapy.

We arrive in a nearby town and walk hand in hand, with no buggy, and a handbag that is distinctly light and free of any ‘no spill’ cups, nappies or soggy wet wipes. Thankfully, she is as keen as I am to wander around the shops and browse through the new autumn collections. I watch as she floats around the store carefully sizing up each garment, pointing anything out to me that is glittery, velvet or covered in sequins. As I sift through hangers trying to find my size – or remember what size I actually am now, I suddenly spot her reflection in the mirror clipping along in a pair of silver stilletos. I dive towards her, ‘de-shoe’ her and take off the designer beaded necklace and shimmery scarf she has draped around her neck.

We head off into the changing rooms together and as she perches on the stool, I begin the task that reminds me why I rarely visit a clothes shop anymore – the trying on. I put on the first item, which I had spotted on one of the giant posters around the shop. The difference being that the model wearing it was probably a size zero and in her late teens. I twist and turn, looking in the mirror acutely aware of my daughter’s intense gaze. “What do you think?” I ask her, in the absence of my husband or mother’s opinion. “I think it would be better on a younger grown-up,” she says. I can’t resist the urge to laugh out loud at her bluntness in speaking her mind, completely unaware of how it comes across. Annoyingly she is absolutely right and I am kidding myself to think that this designer top could hang on a thirty-something-year-old mother of three!

As we leave the shop empty handed, I mutter something about losing weight under my breath. Hearing this, she looks up at me and says, “Don’t worry Mummy. I think you’re as thin as a sausage.”

The car journey

The car is bursting at the seams. We look as if we are off on an overland trek lasting several months, not a week’s holiday in Wales. The boot is full of suitcases crammed with clothes for three small children, allowing for numerous daily changes due to regular yoghurt spillages. There is an assortment of buckets and spades and a basket full of emergency rations such as coffee, olive oil and loo paper. Draped across the top is bedding for everyone including my own essential feather pillow. I also spot my husband’s laptop carefully hidden behind the pile of coats.

The children sit shoulder to shoulder, car seats crammed together in the back. Just as we start the engine, the usual demands for music begin. In the absence of any childrens’ CDs, due to my complete ban on Humpty Dumpty, Little Bo Peep and the like, they shout out, “Christmas carols.” I tell them that Father Christmas hates having carols played before December. Unable to agree, we begin our journey out of the village in silence. Suddenly a small voice from behind me says, “Are we nearly there?”

We drive on with next to no wrong turns but then enter unknown territory and grope for the sticky old map that lives on the floor under the childrens’ feet. Part of the crucial page we need has been torn. I try to make sense of it, whilst also passing back bottles of water and digestives to the now apparently starving starlings in the back. One wrong turn and we end up in Bristol, hitting its ring road on the day that they have closed one of the two lanes to strim the middle stretch of grass on the dual carriageway. Inevitably, this causes a huge tail back of cars like us, bulging with luggage and families on their way to enjoy the Bank Holiday weekend. My husband is losing his temper as we sit watching the merry strimmers. The quantities of water have taken their toll and our four-year-old declares he needs to stop. The queues of traffic stretch out beyond and behind us so we have no option but to pull over onto the hard shoulder. “Oh well, at least it takes people’s minds off the traffic,” mutters my husband. We creep along another half a mile and our daughter pipes up that she also needs to stop. I draw a line at the hard shoulder and our eyes are peeled for the next service station. The noise level in the back picks up as our son thinks it is hilariously funny to lean on The Baby, revelling in the inevitable high pitch screeches. It is time for bribery. “If you all be quiet, I’ll put the carols on,” I say. Finally, we pull into the service station and screech to a halt with the children belting out ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’.

The tent

Why is it that so many men have this huge desire to go camping? They seem to love the idea of taking their families into the wild, protecting them under a damp sheet of canvas and providing for them with a tin of ravioli warmed up on a gas stove. Personally, I have resisted the whole camping experience for the last year or so on the grounds that camping and nappy changing do not go hand in hand. However, next year when The Baby is firmly ‘potted’, I might have to give in and join the merry camping fraternity and submit to nights spent in cold and damp sleeping bags.

With this in mind, I decided to buy my husband a tent for his recent birthday. I thought he could practice camping in the garden this summer in preparation for next year. Given the current wet weather conditions, this would be the perfect rehearsal. He was delighted with his two man tent, the sleeping bag and the blow-up mattress – together with the pump given to him by the dog. With no time like the present, he was eager to time himself erecting his tent in the garden ready for his first night camping with our four-year-old son. Half an hour in, he waved the instructions at me. “These are wrong! They make no sense at all,” he said. I followed him outside to find tent parts sprawled across the garden. The first step said to identify each piece of the tent equipment, in conjunction with a diagram. My husband assured me he had already done this. We moved on and started hammering in pegs. The result of our efforts was a large piece of canvas lying pinned to the ground like a flattened spider. “It’s utterly ridiculous. Take it back to the shop and tell them that they’ve given us the wrong instructions,” he barked. I just could not accept that two relatively bright adults were defeated by four steps of instructions. We kept on trying different angles but just before we gave up, I reverted back to step one. “Are you absolutely sure that this bit of canvas is the ‘inner tent?” I asked. We both glanced at the other piece which my husband had identified as “the ground sheet.” As we unravelled it, it was obvious that this was the tent and we had been trying to erect the ground sheet. We dissolved into a fit of giggles and five minutes later, the tent was standing in all its glory in the middle of the lawn.

I left my husband to pump up the mattress and a while later he was still pumping furiously. He mouthed through the window, “It’s broken.” I just wonder how he will cope with the whole family standing in the pouring rain on a campsite next year.