Burying the children up to their necks in the sand entertained them immensely; and provided a few moments of relief from the relentlessness of it all.
When they were babies, the control was real. They couldn't walk or talk and even Alex's 'cowboy with an arrow in the leg crawl' was months away.
As they grew, they started to assert their independence in countless different ways. First it was sleeping and then eating and one by one the barriers were broken down and the obstacles overcome until now they are fully functioning 4 year old adults. They have all the power of preference but none of the responsibility of choice and I fear that this is likely to continue until they earn their first pay check.
Until then, the erosion of control is gradually replaced by the need to manage their increasingly wilful disobedience.
At the moment I am deep in the territory of threats, bribery but mainly counting to five.
Most conversations go something like this:
Me: "Sophie - can you put your shoes on lovely?"
Me: "Sophie - can you put your shoes on now? We are leaving in two minutes."
Me: "Sophie - I've asked you to put your shoes on twenty-nine times? If you don't have them on by the time I count to five, you are not taking teddy."
After rushing from one to three with no discernible indication of compliance, four gets dissected into ever small fractions, until at 4 and 16/20ths, the leading foot makes its first slow move. Eventually, she leaves the house with a sandal on one foot and a welly on the other. A shaky compromise has been achieved, but at the cost of any semblance of my authority.
Clare on the other hand is super effective in the face of the merest whiff of non compliance. Alex is staked out in the desert by two and rowing a slave galley by four. Five never comes and I don't even think she knows what would happen if it did.
But Alex's time on the rowlocks has served him well and by the time we finally dug them out, Tom and Jenny had chartered a Hobie Catamaran and were amazingly willing to let the children on board.
Perhaps sailing a dinghy on some chilly lake in Wiltshire is not a fair comparison to careering across the temperate Atlantic foam in a superfast twin hull with a maniacal career capsizer at the helm. Tom spent most of his childhood trying to sink the unsinkable and Alex probably didn't fully appreciate this as we lashed him into an outsized life jacket and plonked him unceremoniously on the canvas deck with one simple instruction; hold on tight.
My job was not to save him if we went over; it was to film it for the board of enquiry.
My boy is a plucky chap. If he was anything less than fully satisfied with the pre-launch safety briefing, we never heard a peep. If he found that compliance with the International Avoidance of Collisions at Sea Regulations left something to be desired, well, he took it all in his little stride.
Breaking out the shoreline surf, I'll confess that he looked a little unsure whether he had made the right decision. As he skimmed over the 50m contour line and the water 12 inches beneath his bottom on the nylon deck webbing turned to inky blackness, a small smile had returned even as the spray plastered hair to his forehead. By the time we prepared to round the first inflatable yellow buoy with the nose threatening to dig in and catapult us all into the drink, his grin was broad and he may even have emitted the odd yelp of excitement.
What is certain is that back on dry land, he had pinched a phone and chartered a 37 foot Bavaria in the Adriatic for the summer half term long before Sophie had returned from her drenching.
She was less impressed with the whole affair.
Perhaps I should have been more firm with her from the start.
The slave galley clearly did Alex good.
 |
| We could have left them there all day. |
As they grew, they started to assert their independence in countless different ways. First it was sleeping and then eating and one by one the barriers were broken down and the obstacles overcome until now they are fully functioning 4 year old adults. They have all the power of preference but none of the responsibility of choice and I fear that this is likely to continue until they earn their first pay check.
Until then, the erosion of control is gradually replaced by the need to manage their increasingly wilful disobedience.
At the moment I am deep in the territory of threats, bribery but mainly counting to five.
Most conversations go something like this:
Me: "Sophie - can you put your shoes on lovely?"
Me: "Sophie - can you put your shoes on now? We are leaving in two minutes."
Me: "Sophie - I've asked you to put your shoes on twenty-nine times? If you don't have them on by the time I count to five, you are not taking teddy."
After rushing from one to three with no discernible indication of compliance, four gets dissected into ever small fractions, until at 4 and 16/20ths, the leading foot makes its first slow move. Eventually, she leaves the house with a sandal on one foot and a welly on the other. A shaky compromise has been achieved, but at the cost of any semblance of my authority.
Clare on the other hand is super effective in the face of the merest whiff of non compliance. Alex is staked out in the desert by two and rowing a slave galley by four. Five never comes and I don't even think she knows what would happen if it did.
But Alex's time on the rowlocks has served him well and by the time we finally dug them out, Tom and Jenny had chartered a Hobie Catamaran and were amazingly willing to let the children on board.
Perhaps sailing a dinghy on some chilly lake in Wiltshire is not a fair comparison to careering across the temperate Atlantic foam in a superfast twin hull with a maniacal career capsizer at the helm. Tom spent most of his childhood trying to sink the unsinkable and Alex probably didn't fully appreciate this as we lashed him into an outsized life jacket and plonked him unceremoniously on the canvas deck with one simple instruction; hold on tight.
 |
| With Hindsight.... |
My job was not to save him if we went over; it was to film it for the board of enquiry.
My boy is a plucky chap. If he was anything less than fully satisfied with the pre-launch safety briefing, we never heard a peep. If he found that compliance with the International Avoidance of Collisions at Sea Regulations left something to be desired, well, he took it all in his little stride.
Breaking out the shoreline surf, I'll confess that he looked a little unsure whether he had made the right decision. As he skimmed over the 50m contour line and the water 12 inches beneath his bottom on the nylon deck webbing turned to inky blackness, a small smile had returned even as the spray plastered hair to his forehead. By the time we prepared to round the first inflatable yellow buoy with the nose threatening to dig in and catapult us all into the drink, his grin was broad and he may even have emitted the odd yelp of excitement.
What is certain is that back on dry land, he had pinched a phone and chartered a 37 foot Bavaria in the Adriatic for the summer half term long before Sophie had returned from her drenching.
She was less impressed with the whole affair.
Perhaps I should have been more firm with her from the start.
The slave galley clearly did Alex good.
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