Skip to main content

Dear A team parent


Dear A team parent

I am writing to you today to tell you that I am ok, my husband is ok and my B team kid is doing fine too.  We are happy, the kids are enjoying whatever activity we they are participating in today.  All in all, all is well with the world.

We get up, we have breakfast, we drop the kids at school, we go to work, we get home when the sun has already set.  We chat, we have dinner, we talk about our days, the highs and the lows, we go to bed and tomorrow we do it all again.

I don’t know where some of you get the energy to spend your daylight hours at school.  It must be exhausting trying to hold down a meaningful job, raise happy well balanced kids, geared for the challenges that they will face and to still spend an inordinate amount of time at school?  You must never sleep, I admire you, hats off.  You are truly super human beings.  I get tired just looking at the sheer volume of WhatsApp’s you manage to fire off in a day, for multiple kids in multiple grades.  You are the organisers, you know the teachers by name, you ensure that the rest of us are always aware of what is plotting. If not for some of your late night messages, my kids would have missed some important things! 

Still, we, we are ok, we tell our kids school is but a small part of life, and whilst it is important to always give your best, failure is ok too.  We tell our kids that the most important thing about any extramural activity is to have fun, for one day soon you will be a grown up, and you will have to spend your daylight hours earning your keep.  You might have to wear dresses and suits and spend days in meetings instead of on the hockey field or tennis court or taking an art lesson.  So even if you are exceptionally bad at your chosen activity, carry on with it, have fun.

Our kids might end up in the A team, in the B teams, or not make the team at all.  This too is perfectly all right, because after all, we are sending them to the best school we can afford to enable them to go off to study, we are saving as much as we can, so that we can give them opportunities far exceeding those we were given, and we were given many opportunities along the way.  We want them to be happy, well balanced, we don’t want to put any more pressure on them than the world will in time to come. 

We want our kids’ biggest problems as primary school kids to be whether they wear sweaters to tennis practice and not whether they made it into the elite tennis squad.  If they do end up making it we will all be ecstatic, but we will also remind them that if you no longer enjoy playing whatever sport you chose, we have somehow failed them, and we need to get back to basics and we need to get them to a place where they are smiling again.

So dear A team parent, you do not need to look away when you see me and my kid at school, don’t feel bad for us, for not making the cut, we are ok, we really are.  We are having fun, we are making memories.  We are trying to raise happy kids, not perfect kids, for when we look back on our lives, we too have been blessed with parents that raised well balanced individuals, and for that, we thank them. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I had a stunning Louis Vuiton Bag

I love handbags, I am crazy about them, I would forgo food for a good handbag.  Everybody has a 'thing' and mine simply happens to be handbags.  Big ones, small ones, madly expensive ones and el cheapos that you get at the flea market, grey ones hand crafted by old ladies at the old age home, shiny metally ones.  I love handbags. Well guess what?  No, not that Guess, not as in the handbag...I now have a diaper bag.  A red one, and it needs to double as my handbag.  There is just no way in hell that I can manage a two (almost three!) year old, a two week old, a diaper bag and a handbag, something had to give and in this case, it was my poor almost new chunky Louis Vuiton bag.  I miss it already... The thing is, when you have a baby, some things are just not meant to be. At least this time around, I have managed to paint my nails (all of them, fingers and toes) twice, and I have worn make up on at least four separate occasions.  With Liam a...

Hello from Sydney...still feels weird to call his home now

We arrived in Sydney without too much drama, kids were generally good on the plane and we even managed to get some much needed sleep.  A twelve hour plane ride followed by a one hour shuttle to our lovely temporary home in Elanora Heights and an extended four hour wait for Gerhard followed, no phone this side as he had to take mine. That meant that I got rather frantic at one stage waiting for him. Safe to say that in typical paranoid Niki state, I actually marched the two kids off to the next door neighbor's house and borrowed a phone... The sun here sets after 8, so we went to Woolworths (where else) last night. Ate dinner at 10, all in bed at midnight. Liam, Luka and I slept like babies, by the grace of some paracetamol for the two smalls and a sleeping tablet for mommy...imagine my surprise when we woke after 8 this morning. So today the fun bit starts, big shopping! Gerhard needs a laptop and printer, we need cellphones, a car, a house, furniture, I was born for this.  ...

Liam and growing up

It struck me about five minutes ago how fast Liam has grown up since I fell pregnant with Luka.  Let me use an example, Gerhard had to leave the house really early this morning to go and play golf.  Liam is still a bit phlegmy, so he is still nebulised morning and evening - Gerhard's job.  Refer to previous posts about pregnancy paranoia and you will clearly understand that there is just no way in hell that I can nebulise Liam. So this morning the two of us eat our breakfast and then its time to nebulize, and I tell Liam he will just have to do this on his own, poor thing.  So there is my two year old boy sitting on the couch nebulising himself, my heart actually broke into pieces. He also got his very first set of golf clubs yesterday, not the plastic variety but mini golf clubs in a proper bag.  He is just so chuffed with himself!  He actually called his Oupa Hansie yesterday to show him his golf clubs (over the phone yes).  He could not con...