This is a question one of the kids asked me the other day in response to a request to tidy their room! Of course that was far too time consuming them so instead we ended up having quite a detailed discussion.
‘What’s the point – it only gets dirty again’ she said.
I pointed out that by that logic I needn’t bother doing the washing, ironing, cooking or any of the other cleaning jobs as due to the nature of the house it gets dirty again or they get hungry again. I also pointed out that if that were the case maybe Mr T shouldn’t go to work, after all I am sure there are things he’d rather be doing and so we could live on beans on toast, wear dirty clothes and live in a box – needless to say she did go and tidy her room, but it seemed to get us both thinking about things that are important in life.
Later that day all the kids were sat in the living room glued to i-pods with various degrees of noise coming from them, I confiscated them and said that as the sun was actually shining we were going out to get a few bits and then we were going to make hanging baskets, after lots of moaning we made it to the DIY shop, got the stuff and in the end we did make the hanging baskets. To some extent they must have enjoyed it as Pixie delightedly told her teacher all about the yellow snapdragons this morning. It made me realise how different their growing up will be to mine.
For us we were out and about on our bikes with every opportunity or playing with friends, we’d walk to school and back on our own by the time we were about Hpop’s age without needing a mobile phone to track our whereabouts and we could survive until the next day without have to use facetime or the internet as they weren’t there for us to worry about. Don’t get me wrong I am Facebook, twitter affiliated and fully i-pod, i-phone etc functional and I won’t deny that on rainy days when they can’t agree what to do they can be a boon but we would have played board games, used our imaginations to play games or built lego. My children still do that but to a lesser degree, everyone is much more safety conscious and theses days children are much more protected. We are lucky in that we leave in a quiet bit of a cul-de-sac, so in some ways the kids do get a taste of how I grew up, able to play outside with the warning to stay in sight but usually pushing our luck and staying where we could hear ourselves being called, of course we didn’t think about any possible dangers but we had fun.
This week we had a crisis when the very old X-box finally creaked to a halt, cue lots of hysteria and how imp and Hpops couldn’t possibly cope without it. I must admit I was peeved, Mr T was away and despite my efforts to find a cure it was after a variety of tests pronounced no longer working. In the end to preserve both my sanity and Matthew’s a new one was procured and again it reminded me how much things have changed, I still remember the good old spectrums! Then it occurred to me that the time I spent playing on that, and the time I was thrilled when my Dad taught me to get an old dragon computer to type my name 10 times isn’t so different from the pleasure they get from finishing a game on the X-box or i-pod! Technology may have moved on but the feelings are the same.
What I most want for my kids is for them to be happy, I haven’t got it worked out what I want them to do as I don’t think it is up to me to tell them. I hope that we can give them all the opportunities they need to find out what they are good at, what they enjoy and that somewhere between the two they can work out something that will make them happy. At the moment Hpops wants to be a teacher, a writer, a famous (that word again) and a dancer, imp wants to be a racing car driver, a fireman and a policeman and Pixie wants to be a fairy princess and a mummy! I’m sure they’ll change their minds several times but for the moment we’ll keep letting Hpops go riding and Imp will be karting for his birthday, as for Pixie, she has a dressing up box full of fairy wings and princess wings to keep her happy – the mummy bit can wait for a long time! As we drove to school and they decided to play cloud spotting I came full circle, I remember playing that game and loving making up stories about the shapes in the sky whilst trying to work out while they were there.
So in the end I guess I hope they come to realise that while tidying and cleaning may be boring they are necessary so we can enjoy the pleasures of play and family time and cloud spotting!
