Fonic Fun ( better a witty fool than a foolish wit )

Tricky thing the English language, practically every word one picks is an exception to the rules of phonics, not to mention the rules of grammar, spelling and a load of other rules that take up rather too much childhood time.

On the way back from seeing a friend in Holland Park we play spelling the names of her friends.

‘Me and my best friend, it’s OK.’ She says, delightedly.

Ok, to get the (what I choose to call a ) joke you need to know that her best friend’s name begins with K and hers O. Ok, even after that it’s not exactly a belter but it’s her first wordplay joke, as far as I'm aware, though maybe she puns and riddling with the teachers and minders all day every weekday.

We begin to sound out the name of another friend.

“A, m, e, l, i, a….”I enunciate in my best consonants and vowels (might as well do a bit of elocution at the same time).

“Eh?” she says.

“Yes: A, m.....- e! Clever girl!”

“U?”

‘No, e!’

“E?” I catch her eye in the mirror, she’s looking very pleased with herself.

Oh, eh! I geddit…another little wordplay. At this rate I’ll have to get her a Shakespeare red nose

t-shirt for Comic Relief.

SHELLFISH

I woke up this morning with X pulling my pillow (which she calls a cushion) away from me. "Hey, you can't do that, that's selfish," I tell her. Over making toast we chat about selfish and what it means. This is the luxury of saturday time, chatting over the meaning of being selfish.

Then we go to dancing and do shopping and car washing and present buying and library going, and book buying where we use our token from World Book Day. This event seems to have been an amazing success. The bookshop is crammed with parents such as I, adding to the token in the hope we're adding to our little ones desire to read rather than bang on a dvd.

Later, banging on the telly, I discover that the list of 12 of the best for World Book Day includes a book by David Abbott, ad luminary, mentor to my generation, now about 80. What hope this gives. Maybe, though I've blown it writing ads as beautifully as he did, there's still that slight, small (very small) hope and possibility that I still might one day write a book as well- crafted as his copy. I write a mental note to myself to look at his book: but I don't read books any more, that's the problem. I'd love to but I've no time. I'm too busy dealing with my digital multi-platform life: checking my email. twitter, facebook, you tube, so I don't lose out in the marketplace of now. Of course David Abbot is rich and has has a very profitable company. He's uniquely able to leave the workplace ( heard that word on Woman's Hour this afternoon and it irritated me as usual) and so now he can enjoy his life in the homeplace.

Later my old friend Will calls from the Isle of Man and we chatted for a bit too long.

"That was very shellfish of you," says X.

It's world book day on thursday.

I know this because the school has sent me two texts this week helpfully informing me that on thursday my child must take her favourite book to school and also come dressed as a character from it.

I've come to dread texts from the school. They're full of cakes that need to be baked, special clothing that needs to be found, or inform me of yet another day off (sorry, inset day) for the teachers, which means yet more foraging around for someone who is not her mummy to look after her.

Favourite book? Hmmmm. For years I longed for time spent with two heads in one book. I’ve loved books all my life and I always thought that passing on the joy of reading would be a pure, simple pleasure. But, come the pressure of an evening when we haven't got into the house until seven, and then her into bed until eight and I've more work to do.... well, the stories I like the best then are the short ones. At the moment this is Cinderella.

We read it and then she begs for telly. Yes, wrong. I know. Yes, it shouldn't even be in the bedroom (strange that it is, given that for years I didn't even have a telly in the house) and she shouldn't be in there either, but there it is. She thinks that telly comes after books now, not dreamtime. In fact I’m surprised she didn’t ask to go to school dressed as her favourite character from Masterchef. This is not the childhood I wanted for her, it's certainly not the childhood I had. On the plus side last night she learned how to make a catwalk ballet dress with a big flower out of a highstreet number. I was thrilled (though maybe this is also misguided, given our clothing budget) that she preferred the designer one to the highstreet number. Anyway, at least she doesn't really need a fairy godmother, she's got Gok.

I did mess about with the idea of her going to the book day dressed as the monkey from that Julia Donaldson story we like but monkeys are a bit complicated whereas, we’ve got a whole dressing up box full of Cinderella balldresses. It’s all a bit of a cliché but X got quite into it, working out roles for all her little friends- who could be her ugly sisters and the prince etcetera.

Today, when she came home from school she was still full of the book event. Apparently about half the girls are planning on being Cinderellas and the others are coming as ballerinas –guess they’ll all be Angelina’s, then.. ..

X told me that the teacher was wondering if anyone wanted to be a witch. Good for the teacher, but I can’t think of a good witch story that X and I read and anyway, X is set on the Cinders route and is packing her princess shoes into her school bag right now. She’s nagged a friend who has a wand into being her fairy godmother, but not surprisingly she hasn’t got any ugly sisters and her prince wants to be a cowboy. Get used to it, that's real life, princess, I said.

PORKY PIES

I know this make me sound older and even more hidebound than a character in PG Wodehouse but it was with great chagrin that I discovered today that my old school, or should I say, almer mater, has dropped the school motto: vincit veritas. I've found this motto a great deal of help to me over the years and in bad times ( when someone says my bottom looks big, or that they don't love me or want to fire me....) -well,' truth conquers' I say to myself shortly before the 'butch up and get on with it' internal speech. It's always worked well for me. Which is possibly why it was on my mind tonight when X tore the loo paper off the roll into a massive heap on the loo floor and then was adamant that Mr Nobody was responsible. It took three quarters of an hour of alternate naughty step, screaming and discussion to align on the fact that Mr Nobody was in fact little Miss X.

I was surprised I had the energy, to be honest (- well, I have to be honest now, don't I?) after the exhausting last week or so and there was a moment half way through when I thought that it was a bit silly getting so upset about the fact that Mr Nobody doesn't exist (and wasn't it me who suggested he existed in the first place?) But then she flung her arms around me and tried to muddy the water by saying she loved me and I had this vision of her in late teens doing exactly that to me to distract me from some much more serious issue and I just wanted to establish that truth is an important concept. Thank goodness she said 'me' to the twenty milllionth time I asked who did it.

She looked a bit surprised that one little 'me' was the magic answer that made mummy ok again. We went upstairs to have a bath together, peace restored.

" Mummy, you legs look really fat don't they," she said, as I climbed in the water.

Porky pies? No, sadly- it really is truly, honestly- porky thighs.

Vincit veritas..........

ALIEN SMELLS

When I pick her up from one of the minders she smells of perfume. That's because her minder smokes a bit and tries to cover it up with heavy perfume. When I pick her up from the other minder she smells of fried food. Both smells remind me that I'm not giving her the best start. I put her in the bath as quickly as I can and it's only when she smells of Sainsbury's basics soap that I finally can pretend to myself that I'm a bona fide ordinary mummy.

BONDING OVER THE LOO

X and I were up all night chucking up in turns. It started with her doing the technicolour yawn at school, then she puked in the car, on the stairs, on the bed, in the bath, on the sheets, on her nightie, on the sheets, and so until she had regurgitated, spat, vomited and spewed everything lodged in every twist of her angry little tummy. The bile fizzed in the bowl. Poor thing. I watched her watching appalled as the steaming stuff streamed out of her mouth in an angry acid explosion that, over the night, gradually got clearer and clearer until I thought there could be no moisture left in her and her body would crumble to dust. It must be frightening when your body takes over so totally when you are little. But then X came out of the womb with her body fighting stuff. She's a little fighter.

I was quite proud of myself, given my hopeless fear of bodily things. I managed to actually remember that it was me supposed to be comforting her and to make my voice low and quietly reassuring rather than squeaking in panic and disgust. I told her it would be over soon - or ,in other words- lied. I handed tissues, got drinks, plumped pillows and restrained myself from rushing to phone NHS Direct. This is a big step towards bona fide motherhood for me, especially as she had been ill with a chest infection as well so there was that little fear that there was something bigger wrong.

Then I started to join in the puking party. Every time I had to run to the loo she ran too and watched me hanging over the loo, I couldn't stop her. Then she passed me the tissues and the water, I couldn't stop her, she seemed keen to join in the fun. 'That was a lot,' wasn't it,' she said peering into the bowl after one of my heave-ho's.

Strangely, it was weirdly quite a good experience; well, in retrospect, now the lingering nausea is abating. I've been feeling very disconnected to X recently. Maybe it's a common parental feeling but I sometimes wonder if it might be to do with her being adopted, I sometimes wonder if she feels that the bond isn't visceral- especially given the fact that she screamed at me in the street the other day," I hate you, I wish I had my tummy mummy."

When I was at university there was an arcane bonding game played by drunken biochemists after they had ingested huge quantities of their own homemade alcohol distilled in the lab. It was called the dwyll flonk, don't ask me why. It involved a bucket of sick and a mop and everyone standing in a circle and- I don't want to think about it, really. Lets just say it didn't seem much fun at all to me but they all seemed to really make a party out of it. I thought it must be a boy thing.

Last night, after a day in bed, in an exhausted fug of bile breathe and dehydrated - headache sleep we both finally emerged blinking, with griping tummies and chapped lips, and looked at each other over the chaos of towels and sick bowls and smiled and hugged.

'That was a nice day, wasn't it, mummy,' she said, snuggling up to me and making my aching tummy retch. 'Nice?' Well, I wouldn't go quite that far but as dwyll flonk puking parties go, it really couldn't have been better. In fact I'd go so far as to say she is a great person to have a puke with, very relaxed and with an almost amused fascination for it.

And another interesting thing - we may not have a visceral genetic connection but her sick looked just like mine. It looked just like tinned fruit salad. So I thought that must have been what she had for lunch. But mine did too - and I definitely haven't had tinned fruit salad since I was about her age. Maybe everyone's sick looks like tinned fruit salad and the whole carrot and tomato thing is a bit of a red herring? Uhghh- just made myself feel sick again thinking about herrings...

.

You have to be dinosaur friends to take children out together in London.

One of my bestest friends came to stay this weekend with two of her children. We used to work together as a creative team so we know each other really well. This helps when doing really, really challenging and demanding parenting things like a whole day out at a museum in London.

We went to see the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum. There was a child meltdown on the tube on the way there, a child multi-wail in the picnic area about the horrific prospect of eating sandwiches, a child keening session about the fact we didn’t want to go upstairs, and a child group whimper at the fact my friend and I didn’t want to spend the entire time in the shop. Admittedly the shop boycott was a bit of a mummy double standard, given that my friend and I once spend several hundred dollars apiece in a single hours shop in Soho, NY.

In between these freak-outs my friend’s nine year old mercilessly interrogated a museum man about spiders in the precise and confident manner of Kirsty Wark doing a Newsnight piece on arachnids. I tried not to flinch as the husk of the hairy body of a massive spider was put in my hand and I learned the exact way that the living creature heaved it’s way out. I never knew that spiders (well, this one, anyway) breathed by holes in its skin. Apparently this is good as this is the reason that spiders cannot get as big as they could if they had lungs, but a few hundred years the atmosphere was richer in oxygen and the spiders were therefore much, much bigger. I decided that the digital world may possibly be a small price to pay for the lack of ginormous hairy spiders. It’s a close call…

Meanwhile the four year olds spent the afternoon rigorously investigating the grating on the floor and the museum lighting system.

“Well, at least they’re showing interest in their environment,” said my friend, as we dragged them away. But then she was the one that said that even said it was good when we were being made redundant so I never listen to her when she's being so glass totally ridiculously brimming over when it is clearly not even half full. Then we dragged them all off for a melt-down on the way home on the tube.