WorkWorld meets FamilyWorld
Saturday, September 20th, 2008“So is your house always this tidy or did you guys have to spend the whole day fixing it up for us?” The question was fired past the mother to the children, a smile on the face of the asker, one of Rob’s twenty-odd colleagues from work who had come for dinner (that would be “approximately twenty”, not “twenty unusual people” 😉 ) As it happened, we hadn’t done much to tidy up at all. That’s one of the benefits of packing everything away. One sweep of the floor and you’re done. The house might look bare and sterile, but we’ll call it minimalistic.
Now I don’t think my mother checks this blog a few hundred times each day, and we don’t have that many friends, so it would appear, according to our stat counter, that people who don’t know us face-to-face are reading this little offering. With that in mind, allow me to give a little background. Rob is in the field of education…..and what would you expect a bunch of lecturers to ask your kids when they turn up for dinner?
You’d have thought I would have thought about this beforehand and prepped the littlelings on appropriate answers.
But I hadn’t.
So when I heard *where do you do school?* *have you finished school yet?* *what do you do for school?* *well, which programme do you use then?*, I escaped, frantically searching the house for the husband. “Rob, they’re asking the kids about school. Gah!!!!” “Just tell them to read your blog post,” he answered calmly, a hint of cheek in his voice.
By the time I re-entered the room the conversation had moved on.
Phew.
Well, maybe not.
“Have you read about all the places you’re going?
“ No.”
Why didn’t the seven-year-old think to say, “We haven’t read about all of them, but we have read some novels about Cambodia and Vietnam and China and India (even though we’re not going there) and Mongolia and three set in St Petersburg in different time periods. And we’ve had the whole non-fiction section of the library at home to flick through.”?????
Nup, he just said, “No.” Coz we haven’t read about *all* of them and he doesn’t lie.
There’s this tension between not wanting the family to be a show and not wanting to look silly. Teachers Know Stuff and even if you don’t want to, you feel like you’re having a performance review when they talk to The Children Who You Are Supposed To Have Been Educating While Your Husband Went To Work! Even though they are teachers, you know those perfectly nice individuals are not giving out grades, but you can’t help feeling examined. The reality is, that at worst they were simply being polite, but actually they seemed interested in engaging the children in conversation. They can leave a comment if I’ve misinterpreted!
I’d have given the evening an A-. It was one of those nights when the children were polite, sociable, spontaneously helping with dishwashing, offering food, waiting patiently for others to eat first, pouring drinks, and picking up dropped almonds (that would be the two year old). Apart from that two-year-old losing the plot when she bit into a chilli in the curry, they were a pleasant addition to the company. M6 won hearts as he skipped around the room quietly asking questions….you’re not from NZ are you? where are you from? when did you come here? oh that’s six years before I was born, one year after J13 was born. And the teacher recognised good maths!!!!!! She even asked me how I teach them, coz it’s working so well. Yippee-dippy-doo! (I didn’t let on).
The next morning the children’s stories came out:
“One lady said I have a cute little nose” (K9, and she does)
“Yeah someone said *I* was cute. I’m a boy. I am NOT cute. Handsome, but not cute.” (K11, who IS cute – when he was two a check out assistant at PaknSave told me she would marry him if he were 40 years older!!!!)
“I like those dinners coz there’s so much good food. Can we do it again?”
Sunday night saw us dining in candlelit style.
We were transported back to Ancient Rome and dined on roast 
rayres