Couldn’t help laughing to read how Allison Babb took her kids to school bright and early today – only to discover when she got there that it doesn’t open till tomorrow.  I bet that wiped the sunny smile off her face.  There are few disappointments greater than realising you cannot hold a teacher responsible for your child today.

I am of course permitted to laugh because I once tried forcing J to go to school, not realising term had ended the day before.

Parents stink sometimes.

We must wait till Thursday to drag our kids out of bed by the ankles and send them back to school.  It will in fact be a shock to all our systems to get organised so early in the morning after a couple of weeks of late nights and sleep-ins.  Even early bird Marion has been lounging on in bed for an extra hour or so and enjoying the morning peace until J rouses himself late morning, normally looking for me to make some of those wonderful Jamie Oliver fruit pancakes.

“Do you not realise”, I said yesterday, “that it was Poppy and Daisy Oliver (both under 10) who made the pancakes rather than their dad?  This was to demonstrate how blinkin simple they are.”

[If you missed the show you can watch his very cute daughters making pancakes here.]

In the end I caved in though, realising what I would save in the cooking I would lose in the clearing up.  Teenage boys can read a text message at 100 paces but are blind to pools of batter on the kitchen floor.  Or wonder why you are getting so het up over congealed egg white cemented onto the work surfaces.

Teenagers stink sometimes.