(no subject)

It's looking like it could be an interesting couple of months; one of the parents at Rowan's school is undergoing treatment on his leg - I think there's some degenerative thing going on with his bones - and this has been making it near on impossible for him to keep up his share of the school runs. He's scheduled for more surgery in the near future, so he called me on Friday to ask if I'd be willing to collect Megan for them a couple of times a week. Megan's nan lives in my district, so it's not too much hassle for her to pick her up, she just can't be at the school on time. This is perfectly fine with me, though Rowan's a little uneasy; he's in the midst of a phase where girls have cooties ;-) One minute he's really good friends with a certain girl, the next they're big meanies and he doesn't want anything to do with them *chuckles*

Megan's mum approached me in the playground this morning to ask if I wouldn't mind collecting Megan tomorrow, and Rowan's playing at theirs on Wednesday so we can sit down and hash out how we're gonna work this between us.

We had the first birthday party of the academic year on Friday night - ohboy was that a nightmare to get to! I had to collect him from school, catch the bus to town and then the Penarth/Barry bus out of town in order to get off at the bottom of Penarth Road, which is practically the very edge of Cardiff itself. Any further and you're in Cogan.

The party was at a jungle gym back behind all the car showrooms and warehouses on that road, and oh did it stink! It was a nice size place and the equipment looked to be laid out wonderfully but the smell of urine hit you the minute you walked in! *bleugh* I'm glad I was able to block the smell out after a bit. The food they laid on was pretty poor too - Rowan was still hungry on the way home so we ended up getting a burger. I was dreading having to get the bus back to town, as the out-of-town buses get fairly infrequent the later the evening draws on, and one sailed by as we were leaving the complex. Thankfully Mo, Lucy's mum, offered us a lift back into town, which shaved off half our journey time. I gotta remember to thank her again if I see her this afternoon.

I think I saw one of my old primary school friends while we were there, but I don't know for certain. She seemed deep in conversation with someone I assume was her mum, and it looked like quite an upsetting topic too.

I'm really not sure what to make of events yesterday; Barrie had Rowan without his own parents supervision for the first time in about three years, as Keith was working, and he promised last week that he'd take Rowan to see Ratatouille. Rowan was all excited about this, talking about getting pic-n-mix, and I'd made him promise me that if he was having sweets he wasn't to have any cola (sweets + cola = wired Rowan, add that to an inexperienced parent and you have a recipe for disaster). So I packed him off to football, with instructions to be good for his Dad and to have a great time.

I talked to Baz a little on the phone after football, as he'd been a little uncertain he'd make it on time due to traffic, and he told me they were popping back to his new place in Canton to get Rowan changed before they headed out. I went about my afternoon, scanning in photos, before heading to my parents place to collect Rowan. I find him clinging to his Dad, begging to stay with him, and this is where things get fuzzy.

Turns out, once they got him out of his football kit, they stayed around the flat/house/whatever watching tv and playing computer games with Baz's friends/housemates/whatever, and Rowan was still anticipating the promised trip to the cinema. I'm not entirely certain whose idea it was to stay home, and for how long, 'cause Rowan's not the best person to ask about these things yet, and if I asked Barrie I'd probably be lied to.

So basically, Rowan didn't get his promised day out, and he was rather distressed about it. *sigh*

The other thing that worries me is that Baz asked if Rowan would be able to stay over some Saturday nights, now he has his own place. I don't like the idea, 'cause I haven't forgotten the last time he took Rowan out with his mates and brought him home with alcohol in his baby bottles, and this weekend only reinforces my fears. I know I can be over paranoid though, so I don't know what to think.

*rambles*

I'm watching a very interesting documentary on Channel 4 right now, all about kids leaving primary school unable to read.

The stats claim that one in five kids in this country enter high school at age eleven with a reading age lower than nine. So as a result, they simply can't function at school and this, amongst other things, is a strong factor in teenage delinquency. Lets face it, if you can't understand what you're being taught and therefore feel stupid, wouldn't you act up?

They showed examples of some kids, and you got to see a little of their family lives - the majority are working class white boys whose parents either don't have the time to pay attention to them due to work pressures, or were themselves failed by the system and don't have the strength to encourage their kids to stay in school and learn.

Personally, I don't understand parents that let their kids stay home instead of going to school when they start struggling like this. They're only perpetuating the vicious cycle. Heck, I glare disapprovingly at Mam any time she suggests taking Rowan out of school a day or two early, just to suit holiday arrangements. If he's supposed to be in school, and he's not genuinely sick, then he's going to damn well be in school. But, as Dad frequently points out, I had the advantage of two parents who had the strength of their convictions and encouraged me to try my best regardless.

I'm doing my best not to get on a soap-box here, or a high horse, 'cause that'd be stupid. Rowan appears to be doing just fine with his reading, though I have no idea what level he's meant to be at. All I know is that his teachers have not approached me about his reading, and he seems to be coping okay with his daily reading homework. It's even to the point that I'm having to be careful what I look at on the computer in his presence, 'cause he tries to read the screen over my shoulder! *grins* But I can't get complacent about this - I can't just rely on the school to teach him, it's my job to back them up, as it were.

I learned to read at an early age, from what I've gathered, though it'd be useless to ask my parents how they taught me. They seem to have blanked out a great deal of the past, 'cause they rarely have any useful advice for me where teaching Rowan's concerned. But reading has always been a really big thing in our family - to the point where my nephews refer to Mam as 'Nana Books'! Dad's sole way of connecting to his grandchildren has always been through storytime, and he frequently picks up Thomas magazines to read the stories to Rowan. Between the three of us, we've encouraged Rowan to enjoy stories, and hopefully this'll help.

One thing that did interest me was the interview with the Poet Laureate, who seems to be somewhat disregarding the reports. He's working with inner-city teens to try and get them interested in reading, and they showed him doing a reading circle where they're reciting Shakespeare - which has always seemed to me to be a very tough source material. He admitted that the kids he works with do have problems with 'sight reading', and this struck a chord with me.

My mam tries to get out of reading to Rowan these days because, though she's an avid reader and enjoys a good novel, she is very, very bad at reading aloud. Dad is a lay preacher, who once had aspirations to be a minister or a teacher, and so is very used to reading aloud - though his presentation style is somewhat Tony Blair-like *chuckles* He read his father-of-the-bride speech like he was giving a church sermon, with lots of those little pauses Tony is so infamous for. Me, I love a good book, and I read somewhere between the levels of my parents; Mam likes romance novels and other general fiction, whereas Dad likes to be intellectually challenged by what he reads - Mam frequently gets annoyed at us when we throw high-scoring scrabble words around the conversation. I know for a fact I'm perfectly literate, but I'm also not very good at reading aloud. The good thing about having Rowan is that, for the last six years, I've been having to read aloud almost every night. As a result, this has improved somewhat.

Where I was 'failed by the system' was in my maths. I basically had the same experience these kids are having with reading, and it was never dealt with properly. In fact, had I not changed high schools towards the end of my first year, I would have been moved out of the top-tier class in my year, simply due to my lack of math skills. The one good thing about the school I later went to - which was an absolutely crap high school, and not even the teachers wanted to go there - was that I was able to work through their maths curriculum at my own pace. This basically kept me in the maths class, even when I was getting frustrated (though, lets be honest, I was too afraid of being caught to truant in the first place) and I left with a D-grade in my GCSE. I later upped that to a C in tertiary college. My Dad tried to help me with my maths - I remember Mam took night classes herself while I was in school, to improve her own math skills - but his approach of counting apples and oranges was so at odds with the way I was being taught at school that I just couldn't get my head around anything, and would get fed up.

Now, Rowan? He's already reciting his times tables at me, and he's frequently challenging me "What's this plus this, mummah?" to which I always say "You tell me!" and he mostly gives me the right answer. So here again I'm keeping my fingers crossed - his dad's better at maths than english, with me better at english than maths, but hopefully Rowan'll do okay at both.

Parenthood's scary, guys...