Tag Archives: parenting

37. Summer reading challenge

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The library has become noticeably busier this week, now that schools in England have finally closed for the summer. The girls and I have been feeling very sorry for all these English kids who are still at school six weeks after Spanish summer holidays started. (Irish holidays aren’t much shorter than Spanish holidays. How I relished those long holidays as a child).

With so much going on in the library, I’ve had to move to a different table, this time near the front. I sit at one of two round tables; the other is reserved for signing children up for the Summer Reading Challenge.

All morning, mothers arrive with their kids, mostly in the 5 to 7 age range. There are laid back chilled out mums, frazzled harried mums, mums who’ve been bringing their kids to the library since they were born, mums who’ve only stepped into this library for the first time today.

The young member of staff assigned to the task of signing kids up is great. She focuses on the kids, asks their name and how to spell it, asks if they know their birthday. She finds a point of interest in almost every kid – catches something they say or some object they have – and lets them know she’s their ally. For one kid, it’s Pokémon – asks the kid which is their favourite and then says she likes that one too. For another kid, it’s their favourite colour (green), for another, a book they like. Did I already mention how great libraries and librarians are?

All of this takes me back more than a decade, when we still lived in England and the girls signed up for the Summer Reading Challenge, two years running, if I’m not mistaken. They had to set a goal for how many books they’d read (one six year old this morning said he was going to read six hundred billion million). I can’t remember what the goal was now – five maybe? Or maybe that’s too low. I can’t remember.

Anyway, the point is, Lily was the reader. She’d picked up reading early, read her first Harry Potter book at five. (Looking back now, even I can’t believe that’s true, but it is). So the ‘challenge’ part of the Summer Reading Challenge didn’t really exist for her. But for Katie, it really was a challenge – for her and for me. I despaired of her ever reading. She refused. She wailed. She simply would not read. By the time she was nine, I was resigned to the fact that she was never going to read. I don’t mean she was illiterate, but she was so halting and uncomfortable with reading that I had decided that maybe it just wasn’t for her.

She turned 10, then 11, then 12. Two summers ago, just before she turned 13, she discovered the joy of reading. It started with a graphic novel and then reading a novel by the same author. Once she got going, there was as no stopping her. She now puts Lily and me in the ha’penny place. This year so far, she’s read more than 20 novels. The first place she wanted to go to when we arrived in the UK was a bookshop. Here are her books just for the few weeks we’re here:

The summer reading challenge now? Figuring out how we’ll stay under our luggage limit, thanks to all of Katie’s books!

2. You did WHAT?!

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The girls are only just realizing, perhaps only now taking an interest in the fact that I had a life before they came along. Some weeks ago, I was talking about Australia with someone. Afterwards, Katie said to me, almost as an accusation, “You never told us that you’d been to Australia,” like I’ve been keeping it from them on purpose. I’m sure I’ve told them before about the three weeks I spent on the east coast of Australia when I was 23. Maybe not. Either way, they were intrigued and wanted to know more. Lily then teasingly said, “What else are you not telling us?”

A couple of weeks later, Katie had to do a school project about her mother. Maybe it was about a parent. I don’t know. Anyway, she did it about me. I remember Lily doing the same project at the same time last year. I asked Katie if she wanted to interview me, but she told me no, she’d find out all she needed on the Internet. Dear God! What would she unearth?

Home from school a couple of days later, she says, “It says you lectured in Cambridge?” She can’t believe it. I explain that I was a post-doctoral fellow at Cambridge and that I gave some lectures in the Geography department. “But at Cambridge?” she asks. She really can’t believe it and it doesn’t seem to matter that I wasn’t a don, but rather an occasional contributor to a course or two as part of my fellowship. “Cambridge,” she says again.

Then she discovers some of the stuff I’ve had published – newspaper and online stories about my research, and such like. “You can write,” she says, impressed; this new information absolutely at odds with the mummy figure who forces her to eat her greens and nags her about leaving her trainers on the middle of the living room floor. I tell her that something I wrote my was once used as evidence in hearings at the US Congress.

“So, what on earth are you doing here?” she asks, referring to this tiny corner of Spain where we now live. I explain that, for me, coming here was the end of one great adventure – the boat, the cruising – and the start of another – a new culture, new language, a new community of people, an adventure that I’m still on ten years later. For her, this place is home. She’s lived here since she was four years old. It’s boring old Sanlucar, from where she wants to get out into the world, not a place you’d leave Cambridge for!

This morning, as the girls were getting ready for school, Lily asked, “Mum, have you ever been to a disco?” I almost choked on my herbal tea. When I told them about the Huntsman in Edenderry, the Wednesday night bar-exes in the students’ union in Maynooth, the Saturday night’s at the Crazy Cock in Fukuoka, the night I met their father, my first date with their father, they looked at each other and rolled their eyes. Lily asked me to show them my dance moves. “You know my dance moves,” I laughed. I’m relieved there’s no evidence of my disco days on the Internet.

I was young once…but never cool!!!

1. Four more days of school

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It was unusually and pleasantly cool when I went for my walk just before 8 o’clock this morning. Overcast and with a slight mist on my face. A respite from most mornings when the sun is already beating down hot and glaring from the sky at that hour. It won’t last long. In a few hours, the clouds will have burned away and the temperature will be in the mid to high 30s.

Sheep on my walk this morning

This week every year feels like the lead up to Christmas for its levels of busyness. The last week of school each year somehow always coincides with me having more than normal amounts of editing and writing work. It’s not that I perceive that there’s more work because I’m so busy doing other things. My records show that, year after year, one of my busiest work weeks of the year is also the last week of school. Maybe the writers I work with are also racing to complete their writing projects before the end of their or their kids’ academic years.

When the girls were little, the last week of school involved a day-long parent-student-teacher excursion to a water park, preparation for the end of year school performance, the one-day medieval festival that we, the parents’ association, organized, and finally a parents’ association convivencia, to which we all brought and shared food, had a barbecue and got sozzled – in the baking sun.

Now that the girls are older, my duties are more of a chauffeuring nature. No longer in the village school only a one-minute walk from our house, their secondary school is 25km away. As the school year draws to a close, trips to that town have increased – for evening graduation prep (for Lily), get togethers with friends, end of year parent-teacher meetings, and so on. Then there’s Katie to her tennis lessons 40km in the opposite direction. Plus the dog’s annual rabies vaccination lands this week each year. Luckily, the roads are good and we have some good music and podcasts to listen to.

To make matters slightly more crazy this year, we’re leaving next week for 10 weeks. We’ve never left Sanlucar for such a long time before so I’m in the process of getting the house ready to close it up. At least I haven’t had to do much grocery shopping this week, as I’m running down the food cupboards and the fridge. I’m setting up an irrigation system to water the 50 potted plants on my patio (I didn’t realize I had 50 until I set about the rather fiddly business of setting up the system). I still need to lift the dinghy and kayaks out of the water and store them until we come back. And there’s the packing, of course – not only of clothes and whatnot, but everything I will need to be able to carry on working while I’m away. Somewhere, in the midst of it all, as with every other year, I find the time to sit at my desk and meet my work deadlines.

The craziness of this time of the year is suffused with optimism and looking forward. All three of us are looking forward to the end of the school year for a shake-up of a routine that has started to feel like a drudge. All three of us, for different reasons, have had a tougher than expected year, so we’re looking forward to the end of school perhaps more than other years. A miscalculation on my part, however, means that, rather than having a few days to relax at home, and swim in the pool and the river, we’re leaving Sanlucar the very first day of the school holidays. Silly me.

Four more days of school…and summer, here we come!!