We don’t need no education.

And definitely no dark sarcasm in the classroom. Wifey was unable to attend parenting class this week due to a bout of emergency babysitting so it fell on me to spend a couple of hours in the company of about 10 women.

The travails of life eh?

One of them was an spooky lookilikey of my bosses wife but wasn’t as her name was different and she had too much lipstick on. Most of the rest of them were quite plummy, with husbands that worked in the city and so on. Quite why they felt the need to tell me this more than once I don’t know, perhaps I looked a bit slow. I’m not an evening person at the best of times.

Anyway, I digress as is my habit. The subject of that evenings workshop was encouragement but it soon turned into a strange mixture of neurosis and competitiveness which from a chaps point of view seemed decidedly odd. When one of the ladies proudly announced her sprog now tidied all her toys away and she wasn’t even two yet, there was an almost palpable sense of murder underlying the platitudes and cooing noises made. This made me nervous.

So when head plummy mummy decided to voice her major concern that her nipper still doesn’t use cutlery at nearly 3, I had to think long and hard about whether to offer some advice*. I did decide to in the end and hope I phrased it tactfully. I asked if she had her dinner with the wee fella, and said that wifey had her dinner with M’laddo, he had his own cutlery, ate off a similar plate to wifey and had the same food. I have mine when I get home. This is a major faff for wifey but we think it’s important that M’laddo picks up good dining habits early on. This turned out to be a bit of a revelation- plummy mummy did sit with nipper whilst he had his dinner but he ate his own batch prepared food and she had her dinner with hubby when he got back from his city job at around 8.30pm.

Now as far as I’m aware, little children don’t pick up the ability to use their knife and fork through some form of advanced telepathy, and if you never have a sit down meal with them and allow them to mimic what you’re doing, I don’t see how (outside the realm of Stephen King), the poor mite is going to learn what to do if you don’t show him what to do.

Mind you, I managed to hold back telling them all what to do, which was a relief because I don’t really have any concept of what it’s like to be with M’laddo or his sister 24/7 so I can’t really comment. I get it easy, I really do.

*I would like to point out I wasn’t offering advice because I am a man and therefore know what to do– M’laddo uses cutlery quite well thank you very much.

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