Christmas Winter Wonderland

Not often you can say that about Britain!

Happy Christmas to my precious 17 Followers & anyone else who reads me. Thank you for keeping me going!

Wishing you all a
very Happy New Year.















My two on a snowy walk.

The Best Laid Plans Of Mice & Men.......

So Christmas was nearly off for us this year. This was going to be a post about the BA strike, but then it kind of snowballed, if you’ll forgive the pun.

As I said last year in my blog, here Christmas doesn’t really happen in Albania. 25th December is an ordinary working day. Having been a communist state it wasn’t celebrated. It is changing year-by-year, signs that commercial Christmas, at least, is being assimilated: lights, trees, shops selling decorations creeping in etc. But last year it was a bit of a damp squib. Not much festive run up, not much happening, & we felt the kids missed out a bit. So we decided to treat them to a wk in England with grandparents, going to a panto, to Hamleys, to see the Christmas lights in Oxford Street, a carol service, & so on.

However on Monday after the BA strike ballot results we had to break it to our children that actually we weren’t going to be going to England for the Christmas week because of the BA strike. We were 4 of the million people about to be affected by the strike. The children took it surprisingly well. I have come to the conclusion they are used to our unpredictable life. Our son is one of those ‘glass half full’ kind of boys & all our daughter knew was that she wd now get to be a lamb in the end of term nativity play after all.

My husband and I, however, were infuriated. Our chance at a quick getaway from Albania for some festive cheer for the children had been stymied. He had worked for the airline for 12 yrs. & knew what the Unite union was like, from the inside. Because he took voluntary redundancy we are still eligible for staff travel for the length of his service with them. So we get cheap, but standby, flights. He was not an air steward but was in management (boo hiss) He was very careful not to admit this to cabin crew when flying, as ‘management’ is generally seen as ‘the enemy’. The unions have held the airline to ransom for years. Of course pilots, crew & baggage handlers can do this. Without them the company founders. I am glad Willie Walsh is taking them on. Somebody had to sometime.

Oh I could tell you stories about the unions & the deals they have secured; like this one I particularly like, though not a cabin crew one; BA wanted to put CCTV cameras on the baggage belts so they could see quickly where bags had got stuck. The union were in uproar. Invasion of privacy, checking up on them etc. They negotiated a deal eventually that, yes, they would accept the cameras, only on the condition that even if a handler got caught on camera stealing from a bag it, could not be used as evidence against him. Beggars belief hey?

A fellow manager told my husband that when they join BA, cabin crew are given ‘Golden Handcuffs’ which they choose to slip on & then can't bear to remove. With starting salaries at £26,000, rising to £35,000 (double what e.g Virgin stewards earn) & Cabin Services Directors earning £56-£59,000 the strike can hardly be about money. It's not. On staff travel they get 1st class, (because cabin crew look after each other), they stay in 5* hotels when working on flights, & on e.g. a long haul flight their allowances will tot up to £995. People often complain that many BA cabin crew can be miserable or snooty etc. Basically they are probably thoroughly bored, but can’t leave. What other job would earn you this amount with 1st class travel & 5 * luxury thrown in, all for being a glorified waiter?

As we had expected to be in England, we had presents to collect that family hadn’t posted, bike parts, a ski helmet, school texts for me etc. So, after much deliberation, we decided I should go & do a mad 3 day dash, stuff my bags with all the British booty I had to collect & sneak back under the radar on the Sunday before the strike started.

This would mean that the kids got their Christmas presents, I could teach my play next term & my husband could bounce down hills on his new springy front shocks, (suspension forks) and IF the strike should be called off, my husband could bring the children on Saturday 19th. Win-win. As long as he could get back on standby, the flight wasn’t cancelled & it didn’t snow…

So that’s what I did. I must say it is easy to demonise the air stewards &, for all they do not live in the real world with their privileged life style, to be fair they were led astray by the Unite who only asked for a yes/no on the strike/don't strike ballot, they weren’t told it would be a Christmas strike or that it would be 12 days. Many said they wouldn’t have voted for that.

But I have to say however, that on the flight over, I was very impressed by the air steward who dealt superbly with a woman, who after we had ascended through very, very turbulent skies, heavy dense clouds, burst into tears & was in a real state. The steward led her to the back of the plane (behind me) and comforted her, brought her a cup of tea, arranged for the Cabin Services Director to come & explain exactly what was happening when the plane experienced turbulence (not sure if this was because it was beyond her to do so…), kept reassuring her, (which included telling her they had brandys in the trolley should she need them), but basically sat with her, calmed her down & checked in on her throughout the flight.

How this woman had ended up in Tirana (a Brit) when she said she hated flying & clearly had not done it very often I don’t know. On our descent, the air steward talked her through it again, but the woman was in tears again. I must say in all my years flying I have never descended with someone sitting behind me in such a state, whimpering & wailing every time we dropped down a bit. She cried, she squealed, and then kept asking, “What was that?” And “Is this normal?”

So we arrived to bitter temperatures & snow. A friend texted me when I arrived to say the strike was off. Hooray, so I knew my husband & children could come too. This was only the start of the adventures though. I don’t think we could have picked a more eventful week transport & weather wise if we’d tried.

Diary of a Snowy Christmas week in England. What the news today called ”5 Days of Transport Misery.”

Friday. My ebay car, bought in the summer for £450, failed its MOT & needed some pipes replacing which the garage had not been able to get for over 2 wks, (so much for buying a Ford because its parts were cheap & readily available) so I had no transport & my dad (Holder of ‘The Kindest Man in The World’ Award) has uncomplainingly ferried us back & forth to various places numerous times during our stay.
Saturday. My 9 yr old cooks meals for my ‘snowed under with work’ husband back in Tirana. They catch their flight amidst lots of snow, & cancelled flights, but their flight managed to arrive only an hour late. Children got to bed at 1.30a.m. But we're all here. Let the festivities begin!
Sunday. Lovely, uneventful day. Carol service at church, lunch with daughter’s godfather &, excellent as ever, Oxford panto. Oh yes it was (sorry). Children were unfazed by the sight of wild boar, furry rabbits & feathered game hanging in the Covered Market. When you regularly see cows & sheep slaughtered by the road & hung up & skinned, the covered market is tame I guess.
More flights cancelled as weather worsens. Eurostar tunnel closure.

















Monday. Fabulous Christmassy day in London. Hamleys, Selfridges window displays, Science museum, Fortnum & Masons, hot chocolate at Maison du Chocolat with our 9 y old’s godfather. My son shows his ‘3rd Culture Kid’ credentials when he innocently asks if we can drink the water the waitress had brought us alongside our hot chocolates. She looks slightly askance, uncertain as to whether this is a joke or not.
We have tea at Patisserie Valerie’s on smart Marylebone High Street, where 10 minutes after arriving they have a power cut. How nice of them. We immediately feel right at home, & the children don’t bat an eyelid but just carry on chatting & playing. However, the waiters are slightly more fazed by this turn of events & we are told we have to leave. We get our tarte au citron fix at ‘Paul’s down the rd.
It has now been snowing very heavily for 2 hours. The roads are slushy, it is freezing. We wait 40 minutes for the ‘every 15minutes’ bus to turn up. It does. It takes us 4 hrs to get back to Oxford. My father, (recent winner of the ‘Most Patient Man in The World’ award), has been waiting 3 hrs for us.
Children get to bed at midnight. Husband packs case to go back to Albania (he cd only spare 2 ½ days from work) We get to bed at 1.15a.m. We get up at 5.15 a.m to get him to the 6 .30 a.m bus to Gatwick. Eurotunnel still closed, everywhere still snowy.

Tuesday. Hubby is very worried about the snow, the roads, cancelled flights, full flights, getting fired (his boss told him it was very risky & unwise to go to UK at such a crucial time of his organisation gaining independent financial status, if he couldn’t guarantee getting back). He was fielding calls from the Bank of Albania, his lawyer & his NGO before he even knew if he had a seat on the flight. Turned out there were 5 commercial passengers ahead of my husband’s staff standby ticket. By some miracle he got on. Phew.

Went carol singing round my parents' village with my oldest. Beautiful, clear starry night.

Britain has ground to a halt. We fly back on Christmas Eve. I will let you know if we get back on the flight & get back in time to buy a turkey (at least you can buy them ‘Ready Dead’ in Albania now.)
Our flight is also full & we are on standby. And it’s still snowing…

Funny Stories

Last night was one of those occasions when I felt, “I really like this living abroad experience.” (It happens more often now.)

We were having a meal with the director of my husband’s NGO & his wife & his American boss & his wife who were visiting from Cyprus. We hosted it because for people like him who travels loads for work & is constantly in different countries & bland hotels/guesthouses, visiting a home & having a home cooked meal then becomes the novelty & a treat.

We have done this a few times now, & I love it because I get to meet the people my husband works with & his work becomes more real to me, but also because you meet like minded people, from all over the world with whom you share a common purpose & you get to know some fascinating people who have lived in interesting places all over the world.

And when you live in these sorts of places as an NGO worker, life is much more unpredictable, unusual or unexpected things happen & (in hindsight of course) it can often be very funny.

So it was inevitable that conversation turned to people we’ve all known who always seemed to have a mine of interesting stories to tell as a result of living in some of these places.

I still remember a colleague who was visiting us from Bosnia with his wife, who was just such a person. He told us the story of having to dive under his table in the, then only, Italian restaurant in Tirana in 1996, to avoid the bullets as a gunfight broke out between 2 rival families. A waiter & 2 customers were killed.

He tells these stories in such a dead pan, matter of fact way, & indeed they probably are to him because this sort of thing happens to him all the time, even though he’s ‘just an NGO worker’, not a war correspondent or anything. However he said his closest shave was one time in Bosnia in the 90s when he got kidnapped; sack over the head, bundled into the back of a van etc. Fortunately they weren’t very professional & he fought his way out somehow. He said he knew he had to do something immediately if he was to have any chance, before he got driven into the middle of nowhere.

The funny thing about the story though, was his wife interrupting him, saying,

“What? You never told me you’d been kidnapped! How come I don’t know this 15 yrs on?”

Strange the secrets a man, well this man, keeps from his wife...

It was, in fact, funny though, not awkward, as she herself recognises this is typical of him & the scrapes he gets into. In some ways it’s probably better she doesn’t know.

Then the conversation turned to our own funny stories & unusual incidents. I liked our American visitor’s story best because it really summed up for me the nature of these cross cultural experiences living abroad, namely: lack of resources, unpredictability, the need to improvise, to be resourceful, flexible & adaptable. And the ability to laugh at your situation.

Our friend had been living in Moscow in an 8th floor apartment (15 yrs ago) & had slipped a disc badly. He was bed ridden for a few weeks, & realised he would have to call International SOS & get medivacced out to have it sorted.

Of course International SOS had to use their counterpart in Russia. So 2 stereotypically butch male nurses arrived (in order to lift him onto the gurney). This gurney, by accident or design, was actually slightly convex instead of concave, so he was in even more agony. They negotiated him into the lift, which refused to work. Remember, he was 8 floors up, unable to move, on a hospital trolley.

Exemplifying the 1st pre-requisite of living in a developing country: the need to be a jack of all trades & to improvise & ‘make a plan, one of the nurses, undeterred, took the front off the control panel in the lift & proceeded to rewire it until he got the lift to work.

Once at the bottom of the apartment block, our American emerged, feet first on his trolley, to the awaiting.........hearse. There was no ambulance available which could accommodate a prone 6 foot 4 man on a gurney, so a big black hearse had been commandeered into action. The nurse slid him into the back of the hearse & off he went to the airport with his (obviously seasoned) wife giggling helplessly at the sight of her husband’s size 12 feet waggling through the back window of this hearse; no doubt also disconcerting observant passers by.

I imagine he is one of the few people to have had the experience of travelling on his back in a hearse & emerging to tell the tale…

The thing I liked about this evening was that we could empathise with each other’s tales & swap similar experiences with each other. Not that my stories were anything like these. If we had told a story like this in the UK, in many cases, it would be to an audience, it wouldn’t be a shared dialogue, so in a way it made me feel I belonged & less of 'the odd one out'. Group therapy I guess- NGO style.

Cyber 'Space'

In that place in my life where there is normally cyber activity, there was only 'space' for the last 2 weeks (of the non cyber variety). We were offline because our landlady forgot to renew our shared subscription, they cut us off 5 days early too & took another 10 days to sort it out & put us back online. Admittedly I now have a netbook, but not an iphone or blackberry. But it is still very inconvenient. We don't even have internet at the school I work in so I have been dashing into the odd cafe with wireless, (there are a few here now), to go online but I am always in a hurry & somehow didn't get around to writing a post. Anyway apologies & I hope someone somewhere out there missed me!

I always rather hope that someone will send a message saying where are you or what's happened, but I guess I don't blog enough or have enough followers for it to be noticed. I was teasing Iota when she was away last week about how silent the Halls of Cyber Space were without the sounds of her comment clogs ringing through the Cyber Ether as she strode around the blogosphere. I am not a Big Noise in Cyber City so I tend to wear slippers & pad silently, or tiptoe apologetically.

Anyway I always think I spend too much time blogging, emailing, ebaying, doing research for my lessons, Facebooking, & still get frustrated because I don't manage to blog that often or read & comment on many other blogs.

So I thought I would have lots of free time this last 2 wks with no internet, but I didn't seem to. It was good in a way, it made me reaslie I don't spend as much time as I thought I did, but it was quiet, without the blogging community, the emails from friends, skype and so on, which my computer companion offers me. We have no road name, no street address (few do in Albania) so no post, no landline either & mobiles are very expensive here, so my computer is my contact with the outside world, my mail, my phone, my main communication.

But it's a good sign that I coped & didn't get depressed, as is the fact that I don't find much time to blog at the moment. It means I am much busier, working a little (which has done wonders for my pyschological well being) & of course being a taxi, as my chidlren have found more things to get involved in, thanks to parents setting up after school clubs etc.

But the evenings are the time I often dip into cyber space, when not struggling with learning Albanian verbs (I keep telling myself its keeping senility at bay & saves me from doing Sudoku), preparing lessons or grading papers. So as I had a little space, I made this. Sorry it's a terrible photo, new camera & it was too close, cdn't focus. The sun, face, hands, feet & flowers are buttons. There's a bit of embroidery but only very simple e.g the flower stems & sun's rays.

My children's school requires indoor shoes (& as of this yr-health & safety rules are creeping in even here- they have to be 'off the floor' in a shoe bag on a peg.) My son wants one now, he's having a kite (geometric shapes equals easy).

I did feel rather like an old 1940s advert with my husband sitting by the fire (ok wood burner) reading the Telegraph (a friend brought it back from his recent visit to the U.K a real British paper in English, you can't be choosy) & me sitting next to him on the sofa sewing. Well at least I wasn't darning his socks (though I have also been known to mend his clothes I must confess) And actually it was very peaceful & quite therapeutic.

A Good Day

Today has been a GOOD day. Not only because it has been one of those fantastic Mediterranean Autumn days, after 8 days of non-stop rain, with a sky so blue, you could slap a paint label on it saying 'Cerulean', & any artist would reach for it to paint their sky, with the purity of its pigment.

Not only because my husband has finally, finally got his NGO's licence application into the National bank after 6 months of sweating over legal documents, burning the midnight oil, adapting, re-doing, re-meeting, adjusting, re-wording & nearly giving up & resiging on several occasions. (I am used to the latter reaction now & am quite impressed that it doesn't phase me in the slightest. It's all part of working in a still-developing country) I know this now & I'm proud of him for persevering as I know he always will.

And not only because my son and daughter both got an award for the 'value of the month' last month, 'Respect' Each month a child from each grade is chosen to be rewarded. My son was rejoicing because he said "At last I have a rewad for something other than 'orderliness' (not quite sure what that entails in a school anyway, & probably neither is he....)
And I was rejoicing because I thought what a great thing that my children show respect to otehrs.

The Award vouchers could be used at a cafe for a hot chocolate etc, & there we bumped into his teacher & we spent half an hour chatting to him. My son was so animated talking to her & she was singing his praises & saying how she loved teaching him, & clearly the feeling is mutual. Once more I mused, "This is a good day" when I thought back to last year & the struggles we had with his teacher who seemed so uninspiring & was doing more to switch him off than switch him on.

But mostly this is a good day because today a child's future has been decided. Today my brother & his wife were accepted by the adoption panel to adopt a child. And I am so very proud of them. They have 2 children already but for health reasons my sister-in-law has been advised not to have any more. My brother always wanted a son, but also they always wanted to foster or adopt to give at least one child a second chance. They have put themselves through the gruelling year long process during which a social worker examines the minutiae of their family & married life, delving into all the nooks & crannies, looking for the wood lice under the stones of their life, inviting them to nail their colours to the mast, to decide what they believe about parenting, what their values are, how they deal with different situations, how they resolve conflict etc.

Yesterday a friend of mine who works with the Roma, had to get emergency services here to remove a baby from its Roma mother because it was failing to thrive, & she didn't want it & was neglecting it. If it is put in an orphanage its chances of adoption are very slim. No one wants to adopt a Roma child. Today a child in Britain will be adopted because a panel deemed my brother & sister-in-law 'suitable parents'. Can you imagine going through that whole process only to be told "Sorry , you don't make the grade"?

In Britain there are 59,500 children in care awaiting fostering or adoption. In 2007 only 3,500 were placed in adoptive families. I agree there have to be precautions & processes but with so many children needing adoption & relatively few coming forward, why do they make the process SO difficult & reject a significant number? After all who is a perfect parent & who can necessarily answer the questions satisisfactorily? Does that prove you can parent well?

My sister-in- law, who is actually training to be a social worker, says she thinks the process is very good & that it is for this reason that successful adoption rates are so high. They match the child to the family. She thinks this way is infinitely preferable to adopting a baby which is an unknown quantity. I guess a lot of it comes down to what you believe about nature & nurture.

So now their search begins. They have to decide what degree of issue, problem, disability or abuse they feel willing & able to accept. It is a sobering truth that in the U.K today almost every child available for adoption has come from a drug dependent/alcoholic or abusive backround. The majority of children awaiting adoption are also from black or Asian backgrounds whilst the majority of adoptive parents are White.

It is amazing how complex family life becomes once it is picked apart & analysed. I can't imagine going through such an intrusive process & having to accept someone else decreeing whether I am fit to be an adoptive parent. How many of us would embark on it if we had to go through this process before having a child normally?

We have often wondered ourselves whether we should adopt as we always wanted a large family. We also wonder if we could. I never quite get my head round the idea of it. How could I love a biological child as much as my own, what if we ruined our existing family with a problem child? What if I showed favouritism? We still return to this issue & mull over it, not least because living in the places we have, you see so many children in desperate straits & realise what a massive difference you could make to even one life.

But for now, I am proud of my brother & his wife, & their two children who were very much part of the process, for taking this huge & selfless decision. I am looking forward to meeting the lucky little boy, who is out there somewhere, who will in due course become part of their family.

Sleepover

Our children had a sleepover last weekend. It was with the family we do most things with here. It is wonderful to find real friends when you are abroad. It can take a long time. They have made the biggest difference in us feeling settled & at home here. We do have a small group of friends here now, but they are the only family we are close to. The down side is I always feel we should spread ourselves thinner, have more options, than always be relying on the same friends to do things with. Our children, it seems, have no such qualms. Our son, aged 9, & our daughter, aged 5, get on famously with their 2 girls aged 8 & 9 & their son aged 5 (in fact he's our daughter's best friend/'Prospective Son-in-Law & recipient of kisses.)

They car share every day/play tennis once a week, go to football practice & (apart from the 8 yr old) are all in the same classes, yet still they badger us for play dates. I love the fact that on sleepovers my son aged 9 happily shares a room with their 5 yr old, chatting & playing animatedly with him. And the girls get on very well with my 5 yr old daughter. I love the fact that they all mix & match & get on so well, much as it would be in a big family (in between the squabbling of course) where you play with a wide range of ages. 3rd culture kids do this all the time too. You have to make friends with, & play, with whoever is available in places where there aren't always that many options... It's advantages are that it really teaches your children to be adaptable, flexible & to make the best of the situation they're in.

So the children were wildly excited, they love these sleepovers so much they don't even miss us, or have the slightest wobble. We, too, have often gone away together for a few days even when the children were very small so it was nothing new. We were looking forward to a night out & a Sunday morning lie in.

Except on the following morning I remembered; I hated sleepovers. It's worse than a trip away because we are in our own home, but without the children. It always feels like a foretaste of the empty nest & I'm not ready for that, not even for a little premonition of what it will be like, even though it suddenly dawned on me that our son is, at 9 1/2, slightly more than half way through his childhood at home now.

You wake to the sound of silence. The flat suddenly seems to have expanded & developed echoes. No-one comes bouncing into bed, no clattering of plates as our son lays breakfast (a self appointed task); there's no murmuring & discussion, audible from the next door room, as the children play with a mish mash of lego, 'My Little Pony' & playmobil. Light sabers meet hair accessories, miniature lego ogres battle glittery baby ponies.

I love those sounds, so familiar I hardly register them anymore (like the constantly barking dogs) Until they stop.

To be fair the 'coming into our bed' routine has recently all but stopped. With our son it went on till he was 7, but now he has a sister to play with, who is much less interested in stories, so they play instead. He still comes in for a story occasionally & they always come in to tell us to get up or to ask us to help with something.

Our daughter is much more independent than our son though. So last Sunday, having felt the lack of them on Saturday, my husband called out to our daughter in her bedrooom "Would you like a story?"
"No thank you Daddy."
So I tried:
"Would you like to join us in our nice warm bed?"
Politely, but more firmly, "No thank you mummy, I'm busy playing."

I can see I'm going to be useless at this 'letting go' lark, whereas my daughter has it sussed already.

Prima Ballerina

My daughter did ballet for the 1st time on Friday. She has reached that 'stage' of being very into 'all things ballerina'. I confess myself a little perplexed how these things happen in a little girl who has lived in Asia since she was 20 months old, followed by Albania, so she has not had Angelina Ballerina, Cbeebies, pink-toy-aisles-in-Toysarus indoctrination. Yet I can tick off these stages like a handbook check list of Girl Toddlers. (Admittedly she also features in the extra chapters on "Tree climbing" "Playing Star Wars", "Having Ninja Turtle Sword Fights" & "Spying" for those 'Girl Toddlers Who Have Brothers'. But honestly, with my very unscientific survey, it seems it's nature, though very odd to have 'pink', 'ballet' & 'princess' genes, don't you think?

In Sri Lanka people didn't wear pink, not an Asian colour, doesn't go really with Asian skin. You never saw little girls wearing it. Her friends were from myriad different cultures, we didn't have tv, there weren't toy shops geared to little girls; yet she went through the "Everything Must Be Pink" stage, the "I'm a princess & want to live in a high tower phase", the "I want to dress up as a fairy at a every opportunity" phase, "I'm a mummy & this is my baby" phase (this, at least a logical one) & now here we are safely arrived at the "Ballerina" stage.

I don't remember this stage myself. I do have very vague early memories of doing ballet & not enjoying it much. I have afriend who never grew out of wanting to be a ballerina, she even now, in her 40s, adores ballet, goes regulalry & even queued up, to bid for, & buy one of Darcy Bussells' ballet costumes (it IS absolutely beautiful, & tiny, in all the places you'd like to be tiny).

My daughter had her ballet shoes, but otherwise no 'outfit' She wanted to wear one of her fairy outfits. I persuaded her to put her track suit bottoms (greeted by a look of horror) & her 'twirliest skirt' in her bag, to cover all bases, & promised we would look on eBay for a ballet leotard. She was v keen to have a frothy skirt, wrap over cardi etc. She even put clip on earrings on for school that morning.

She does love dancing but you can see it's more about the outfits & shoes (which she wore ALL weekend afterwards) than the ballet itself. Her 1st comment after the lesson was,

"Mummy they have this changing room which is so lovely. It's full of pretty dresses & costumes for different ballets. It was all she wanted to talk about!

My children get a lift on Fridays so both my son & daughter were dropped off at the ballet school, & I drove to meet them there from the other side of town. However I didn't reckon with the lunch time trafic & got there half an hr after it started. Other mums told me this is ballet Albanian style, it is1 1/2 hrs long (for 5-7 yr olds??) & even that is a concession, when normally Albanians expect you to have lessons three times a week. She also locks the door so parents can't watch once she has started.

So I couldn't get in & rescue my poor son. I was armed with books to read, Nintendo, conversation, as it's too far to go away & come back; but he was trapped in there for the full 1 1/2 hours. I felt terrible. I went & did some shopping & chatted to the other mums. Finally it was time to collect them. We were greeted by the instructor(? What do you call these people, Madame?)

I was 1st in, to get my 9 yr old & apologise profusely for having made him wait so long with 10 little girls,& lots of pink froth & prancing as they did their butterfly impressions.

The ballet teacher greeted me with, "Your son's very gifted."

And around the corner popped my son grinning from ear to ear. He had decided he might as well join in as he was getting bored waiting, & loved it, & now wants to join the class himself. ....

"I can't wait to tell my classmates I'm doing ballet" he said, & added;

"Can you look on ebay for a leotard for me too, mum?"

I love the fact that my son is such a mixture & is very much his own person. He doesnt worry remotely what anyone thinks of him, but sometimes I think he has no sense of self preservation...

My husband took it surprisingly well, all things considered, & who knows, it may improve his footballing skills....

Meanwhile what's the boy's equivalent of a ballet tutu? Just wondering what to put in the ebay search engine....