Who knew when embarking on our school journey that there would be so many ‘days’ and no, I don’t mean of the week, I mean the themed days…World Book Day, Non-uniform Day, Children In Need, Comic Relief, International Day etc…all fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but all so easy to lose track of….
My life is dictated by my calendar. I don’t use the one usefully provided on my phone, despite my husbands varied attempts to persuade me so he can ‘sync’ with me therefore shifting all the responsibility on to me to remind him too, where he needs to be and when, as clearly navigating the life of myself and our 3 children isn’t enough!! No, I use a good old fashioned wall calendar where I carefully and precisely transcribe all school events, work schedules, birthdays, playdates etc and check it religiously. Max and the girls all know that if it isn’t on the calendar, it isn’t happening. So imagine my surprise one Wednesday evening, just before bedtime, when Esme announced that the following day was in fact International day and school had a full day of related activities planned and that she would need to go in the appropriately themed fancy dress that would encompass the spirit of the day! Great!
Having spent the evening scouring the house top to bottom for anything I could find that would be remotely representative of the traditional dress of another country and finding absolutely nothing, I had conceded to dress an extremely reluctant (understandably) Esme, in one of Max’s Spain football shirts (Yes, I know! Awful but I was desperate!) Poor Esme was disgusted as the shirt was clearly far too big for her 7yr old body and despite my desperate attempts to improve the fit with a carefully placed belt and various badges holding bits of flapping material together, it still looked frankly ridiculous. But hey ho, I conceded, at least we’d shown willing despite the short notice and I was sure there might be a couple of other Mummies that had been caught short and had to come up with other similarly ridiculous variances of the theme…Driving up to school, I couldn’t help but notice that some of the other children from Esme’s school were wearing their normal uniform, feeling a mixture of smugness that I had at least managed to pull something out of the bag and sympathy for the mothers who clearly hadn’t had the letter either, I parked the car and took Esme in to school. On entering her classroom it was immediately apparent that in fact Esme was the ONLY child not in uniform, at which she promptly burst in to tears and I started to feel the slow flush of embarrassment spread over my own face. Mrs Smith came over and greeted us with a mixture of curiosity and disapproval that even had it actually been sodding International Day, I would deem it appropriate to send my daughter to school wearing her fathers t-shirt and little else. After consoling my mortified daughter and redressing her in a spare uniform, I fled out of the back door of the classroom and past all the other organised Mummies who had in fact read the letter sent home with their children the previous day, instead of just taking their word for it, and therefore were smug in their knowledge that it was in fact International Day the following Thursday.
Interestingly soon after this incident school started emailing, texting and sending letters out to parents and I now always double triple check these events with my more organised Mummy friend who uses her phone calendar…..
It's a mums life. 