THE GOOD ENOUGH Parent PARKOUR

with EMILY THOMPSON

For the record, what I actually said was, “next time you get up can you please pop that jumper back into your wardrobe?”

What Miss Eight apparently took that to mean was, “If you spend Saturday doing chair parkour, you never have to do chores again.”

Taking up this challenge enthusiastically, we’ve now discovered that you can play Skylanders, eat three packets of pizza shapes and play fetch with the dog outside, without ever needing to get out of Dad’s “roller skate chair” (his new computer chair that now has grass stains on the base).

Unfortunately, we also discovered that you can’t successfully retrieve plates from a dishwasher while whizzing around the kitchen on a chair.

Later, having shaken o the unnerving feeling that other families have probably never had to eat toasted sandwiches out of soup bowls for dinner, and reassuring myself that she’ll probably be a wild adventurer/explorer/prime minister one day, we finish our weekend with the homework that wasn’t done the week before.

Miss Eight is now in Year 3, and has brought home the best home reading assignment I’ve ever seen — a grid of “reading quests”. Never one to shy away from a call to adventure, (unless of course, that adventure involves laundry), she immediately started brainstorming the “read in an unusual place” quest.

After a quick google saw her finally believe me that there are no flights to the moon this week, she starts coming up with other ideas closer to home.

“I think I’ll go read next door, Mum. I’ll be home in a bit,” she says, grabbing the book club catalogue as her “reading material”.

I point out that it’s a weekend, and you can’t just invite yourself over next door to read, but it might be fine if she asks first. Now that it has become a two-step process, she immediately rules this out and then informs me that most of the boys in her class intend to read on the toilet… We decide to focus on a di erent quest, and one she does every day anyway as part of her “training” for our border collie: read to a pet. Disappointingly, despite being read Cli ord books daily, our Lucy is not big, red, or super obedient. However, being Miss Eight, she pulls out her beekeeping hood, grabs another book and makes a concerning but vague statement about her “bee army”. I leave her to it and turn my attention to Miss 14.

“Any homework for you?” I ask. “Nope, nothing yet,” she replies.

“Absolutely nothing? Nothing you need to catch up on, no assignments?” I delve, just to be sure.

“Well, I mean yeah. All of that, obviously, Mum.”

So despite her insistence that she’s got “like, weeks until it’s all due” I ask her to just draw up a little list of what she’s learning in each subject, when the assignments are due and how much weight they all carry. She soon marvels at the organised masterpiece in front of her.

“This is amazing! Th… The colours I used are cool,” she manages to say, stopping herself just in time before she accidentally thanks me.

Lessons I learned from my “homework” this week: dinner plates are expensive to replace; I’m never going to be able to a ord a flight to the moon; bees can’t be trained to attack on command (thankfully, but that’s not going to stop Miss Eight from trying); and that there’s a part of Miss 14 who is still the happy little girl who thrives with “rainbow order” documents.