We're all class in this house

It's Sunday night. After the fiftieth airing of that particularly endearing question: "What shall we do now?", it occurred to me that I could get my eldest precious darling to do some homework. This is a novelty activity in our house. I suppose it means he won't get ahead or hold down a good job or maybe he'll become a drug dealer. Don't assume his voice has broken yet or even that he has a set of adult teeth. Homework starts early in these ambitious and insecure times. I suppose it started back in the Industrial Revolution, or the Reformation, or whenever it was that people decided that a satisfying life involved something other than growing food and eating it. Among his peers, I don't think they talk about homework. Among my parenting peers down at the school pick-up, our family is way behind. Or in the parlance of my some-time drug dealer, "lazy-as".

So homework involved finding words ending in -s. We got ten words, including Guinness but not including poos as the five year old vetoed his own idea. Mrs Doocey has class - you don't sully anything she has to read. And of course if you grow up in our household, then you have no idea that most five year olds don't routinely chat about Guinness.

We went to a sixth birthday party in the afternoon. Children's birthday parties are mostly ghastly. Mothers and fathers spend a lot of time and money encouraging children to be badly behaved. Without any help from Guinness. But at birthday parties, if you are really unfortunate, you can learn what other children are doing at school. Winning principals' awards which were stolen from under the child's nose. The child who wrote a story with 21 sentences in it. Twenty One! I jolted forward on the third repeat, suddenly clicking as to what was expected of me. "Wow! That is clever." I'm a bit thick like that, not realising when to make appropriate admiring noises. It comes from having admired 85 pieces of sand already that day. Often I don't bother to look. That brings it's own problems when I eventually notice that it wasn't a sandpit concoction at all but the now destroyed contents of my seedling tray of brassicas.

On the subject of admiring things, I am wondering if I should get a citizens' referendum going against stickers on fruit. What was wrong with having one Dole Sticker on an entire bunch of bananas? When did people get so thick about food things that every single apple had to be labelled with it's variety? You might come up with some compelling reasons for this ridiculous practice, but before you do, I want to know how many of them you have extracted from a toddler's nose this week. If the answer is less than seven, then I won't consider your ideas to carry any weight.