By: Blonde Two
I am by no means an expert on child rearing but I remember our days of having three little ones at home fondly and through a slightly blurred, undoubtedly rose-tinted pair of (rather flattering though I say it myself) spectacles. Despite being a non-expert I am pleased to say that now all three of the B2 children have reached adulthood (and contrary to my rather naive expectations, this did not happen at 18) I am quietly smug about the way they have turned out.
Don’t get me wrong, my family, like me, are not perfect (Mr B2, of course, is) but there are lots of things about them that I love and I still experience a rather pleasant sense of surprise when I discover that my relationship with them, although still bossy enough to be motherly, is something akin to a friendship.
One thing I am particularly pleased about is my children’s sense of exploration. Two of them love to travel and the other one likes nothing better than delving into strange woodland and seeing what he can find. We did a fair amount of exploring when they were young, only once to foreign climes but there was lots of ‘going somewhere’ and ‘finding something’.
Another thing I have discovered since my children’s adulthood began is that, although we do have a tendency to be a bit on the argumentative side, my family is far better at getting on with itself if we are all outside. There is something about tents, open fires and a field big enough to run around in that brings out the calm and helpful in all of the B2s.
They are also (and I apologise to them for this) extremely good at accepting (and being) the weirdness in a situation. Most kids would not be impressed at the thought of their mother stripping off and swimming in a public lake in a sports bra and a borrowed pair of green swim shorts but Six-Foot-Blonde did a great job last weekend of taking his mother completely in his stride, in fact, the shorts were his.
There is a short list of things I have always been pleased that I taught my children:
- How to use an axe.
- How to make cheese sauce.
- How to be kind.
They have mastered these and now, I think, will go far in life. Six-Foot-Blonde has also mastered the art of selecting a good bottle of single malt to share with his parents… maybe I should write that manual after all!
The axe I can manage, but the cheese sauce? Well at least that can come in a packet, with the ultimate cookery duffer instructions.
Packet cheese sauce is okay but definitely not the same thing. There are enough people in the family who can make it though should you fancy some of the real stuff!