Monster & Teeny

I’ve just deleted a comment on the post below suggesting that breakfast round the table as a family instead of sugar coated wheat and dry bread eaten off the floor would be better. I do agree with freedom of speech but in the same way as if someone came into my home and pissed me off I’d chuck ‘em out (and indeed have done so in the past - don’t mess with me, I can be dead hard ) if you want to exercise your freedom of speech then *my* blog is probably not the place to do it. Make me laugh, challenge me properly or indeed leave me sycophantic and adoring comments by all means but don’t come here with your nonsense!

Anyway, best we get it out of the way here and now. I’m Nic and I don’t have a table. There I’ve said it.

I know this fails me on so many levels. How can I possibly be a proper home educator without a table. Where do I sit the children to do their maths workbooks? Where do I hang my world map if not over the table? Where do we sit our hama bead boards, our laminator, our large pieces of card in order to create autumnal colleges with collected dead leaves, where do we do our home made playdough-ing, where do we weigh out ingredients for (wholesome) cookies and where the hell do I sit and write my report for the LEA if not at the table?

Also I can’t possibly be a proper parent without a table. Well I could maybe be a parent but Id’d be a slovenly one, for where will our sense of ‘Family’ come from if not by eating three square meals round a table together while discussing topics of the day? Where will my husband sit and eat his marmalade on toast while reading the paper of a morning, where will I gossip with my friends when they come over for coffee mornings, where I ask you will I sit with my head in my hands when my life collapses around me?

Well it won’t be at the table cos we don’t have one.

That’s a lie actually, we do have a table, infact we have several. The children each have their own table and chair (because that’s the sort of insular, fight for yourself, standalone, you’re on your own matey, just you and yer table type mentality we have in this ‘not family’) which they sit and eat at if they so wish. Often (and you might just want to sit down before you read this next bit, at your table if you like) they pull their tables up to the telly and sit and watch it while they eat. AND IT’S NOT BABY EINSTEIN THEY’RE WATCHING EITHER AS THEY TROUGH THEIR CHICKEN NUGGETS! We also have three other tables - one used to be a kitchen table and two used to be pushed together to form a banquet style long table down the centre of our dining room. Back when we had a kitchen bigger than a postage stamp and we had a dining room at all. Now they nestle together, in the style of an IKEA warehouse in our garage, slightly cold, slightly cobwebby, dreaming of the day when once again we will become a real proper family and sit round them eating.

I know that the chances are the person who made the comment will never come here again, I know that they probably are far too busy, with their tableist ways somewhere worshipping the table, trawling the internet and righting wrongs, spreading the word and fighting the good fight, maybe you even sell tables in your spare time, hell maybe you are a long distant descendant of Chippendale or perhaps you just work for IKEA (or maybe it’s more subtle than that, maybe you are in the business of fine linen napkins or placemats or something, a sort of ancillary table accessory type trade) but if you ever do come back maybe you should scroll a little further down the page and look at the pictures a bit more closely. Maybe you should read some of the words, maybe you should get more of a feel of who we are and what we’re doing. There are things I could / would / should do maybe but actually when my children are fully grown I imagine that not having had a table will be something that hasn’t scarred them too badly. And as for their breakfast itself? Well it mightn’t be perfect but the dry bread was something my daughter got for herself and was very proud of her independance, and the sugar coated cereal isn’t the very healthiest of choices in the world but is what my son eats and enjoys. And the setting them up for the day with breakfast together would probably be rather more of a priority if we didn’t spend pretty much every moment together anyway. I firmly believe in family, togetherness, healthy eating and given the space I might even go for a table (someone sent me a great link just yesterday for a Tardis tablecloth which would be fab) but I don’t parent in soundbites, our family doesn’t tick off breakfast round the table and then head off our seperate ways and if I genuinely believed life would be improved by a flat surface with four legs then we’d find a way of having one, but thank you for stopping by, I take your comments on board and I bid you a very good day.