Get your dates right, boys

Day 294

Fancied a bit of a change - what do we think of the new look? There are several others I'm intending to try out but this felt good to start with.

The boys came up trumps on Father's Day this year. They are both rubbish at giving people gifts and cards on time (or at all), and I was still waiting for my birthday cards from the beginning of the month. I put the fear of God and a few other deities into them about Father's Day though, and they turned up with a card each for Steve - ON THE DAY!

AND they had a card and pressie for me. Well, swipe me sideways and call me Susan.

Joe bought me a candle (the last of the big spenders, that one) which was quite nice, actually, as I'd just been to a car boot sale and bought a big wooden candlestick.

Sam bought me a bathroom gift set, which on first glance appeared to be quite nice too. On closer inspection, however, it proved to be fantastic. It was clearly cheap and foreign and, better still, badly translated. Lush!

I am now the proud owner of bath salts for 'decompression', should I ever want to bathe at a depth of 1000 metres. My 'fancy soap' - (which, in my head, is soap given to you by your fancy man) - is supposed to 'cleanlily take good care of ones health maintain skin'. But my favourite is the shower gel which promises to 'clean skin, no-irritated, moisten,and fresher'. Fab-u-lous!

So - I get a birthday present on Father's Day. Steve should expect a Father's Day pressie on his birthday, at the end of July. Then he can have his birthday presents on Sam's birthday in August, who will have to wait until Joe's birthday in December for his. Joe can have his birthday present at Christmas, and they can both wait for their Christmas presents until Easter.

Sorted. Much less expense and we can shop in the sales. If they complain, I can always point out that "you started it", like the mature person that I am. (I am a reed, I bend, I adapt, I go with the flow, this is all perfectly zen...)

You do your best as a parent but it just never turns out the way you expect, does it. They are both much shabbier at things I have always considered important, and wiser than I ever would have expected. They are both funnier, which is always a bonus.

Sam is far kinder than he seemed likely to become as a boisterous little toddler. Joe is more stubborn than I anticipated. And handsomer. But the older they get, they seem to move further and further away from the way I brought them up and into a space of their own.

This is exactly how it should be, I know, but it is also a bit weird.

I have invested twenty-eight years into being a parent, which is well over half my life, and I find I still want to see evidence of all that input in their current lives. I am not quite ready to have my influence so speedily repelled, the lessons I tried to instill so conveniently forgotten, or to have the values I exampled discarded with such happy nonchalance.

This letting go stuff really is for grown-ups, isn't it.

Perhaps I need to have a 'decompression' bath, and get myself 'moisten and fresher', which sounds just about as rude as it possibly could. Ergo, I'm in.

Care to join me?