November is always the worst month of the year for me. In the last three weeks I've worked 50 - 60 hours a week, I've done a Sixth Form Open Evening, an UVI Parents' Evening, marked 100 tests and then written the corresponding reports (only 50 more to do this week) and then yesterday, I worked another Open Morning!
On top of that there's been extra parental duties with daughter attending a party last Saturday (I took my laptop and sat in a corner writing reports, very antisocial, but very necessary) and husband abandoning us to yet more football matches leaving me to do all the choir, piano, swimming, riding and Brownie runs. I even had to return to school after dropping daughter at choir to attend
her Parents' Evening!
Talking of which, I was chatting to another mum before I went in to see daughter's teacher and I said I was going to raise the issue of the amount of homework that is set (about 3 hours a week; yes, she is in year
3) and the other mum said, quite earnestly, "Do you think they don't get enough?".
Huh?!
It seems I am lacking in the pushy mum gene because I don't make my daughter do an hour of homework a night! Apparently I am dooming my child to failure because I just rely on the 8 hours hard work my daughter and her teachers put in every day to educate her. Funny how she came top of her year in the creative writing test, then. Do you think that has anything to do with her playing imaginatively in her room and in the garden, reading lots of books on her own and writing her own stories in her myriad of notebooks? And do you think my playing those games of Uno, Set and Acuity with her might have something to do with her having a maths age 4 years above her actual age? And all those books she reads and tells me about with great enthusiasm, do they contribute to her having a reading age 4 years above her actual age? There are many more ways a child can develop than being chained to the kitchen table doing homework.
Okay, rant over.
Anyway, back to November. It's the Christmas Fair time of year as well and so far I've donated bottles and chocolate the the school fair, decorated a Christmas cake for a colleague to raffle, donated chocolate to the Brownie's stall at the church Christmas fair, made 10 sweet and toy filled jam jars for daughter's class stall at the school Christmas Fair and sold 20 raffle tickets for the PTA (okay, I wrote a cheque for £20 and wrote various people's names on the stubbs) and I've yet to bake the cakes to take in the day before for the Cake stall. Help?
On top of all that, I'm rehearsing for Christmas concerts in Manchester and at the Bridgewater Hall
and also rehearsing a piece written to celebrate the Olympics which we are performing around the country next year.
And I think there is something happening next month that I should be getting ready for............
What is it now?...........
Oh, that's it!
Christmas!!
