The next two weeks

Dig has gone to India today to tell everyone about commas, which means that Grit and all the little junior Grits are left to fend for themselves for two weeks.

For the big Grit, this is no fun at all, because there is no Dig to argue with and say 'get off the computer' to, or complain about and tell off for eating cheese sandwiches in the front room because they should know better. Unfortunately there is no-one around either to provide direction, structure and authority in a house with four females who share the fundamentally weak traits of being idle, self-indulgent, selfish, truculent and difficult. Not to mince words, we need a man about, and if not a man than someone with purpose and direction to help shape the hours.

Unlike big Grit, for the little junior Grits the next two weeks will not be one of anxiety or struggle between authority and autonomy. It will be like one long girly party because most of everything will go their way and be on their terms.

This will happen because mummy Grit is simply more of a push-over than daddy Dig. She will say it is alright to start a gigantic wall painting of a woolly mammoth while she is in her dressing gown and the paint is in the yard. She will say it is alright to start writing stories about penguins even though it is midnight.

In truth, Mummy Grit is a spineless backsliding weed who would shirk an argument with a seven-year old because I would lose. What's more, in the face of being outnumbered by the logic of three seven-year olds, I will probably not be able to offer up a good and reasoned argument as to why everyone should not stay up until midnight and get out the glue.

Over the next two weeks, Mummy Grit will, in all likelihood, become a seven-year old herself. She will reason that we don't have to get up at 7 o'clock in the morning for school because our education happens all day long, and into the evening too. Now it all becomes an educational learning experience, so getting out the glue is A Good Thing. And it doesn't matter if it happens at 11 o'clock at night, because it is 3 o'clock in the afternoon somewhere else around the world. Intellectually, I will justify all this by saying I am working with my children and not against them, and that there are some very sound principles of autonomous education and TCS parenting, and it is not just a Grit cover-up for being a spineless backsliding weed.

All of these arguments and rationales, played out over the next two weeks as mummy Grit and all the junior Grits work together in some mutually supportive arrangement, sadly without daddy Dig, will ultimately come to mean one thing. That the junior Grits can more or less do what they want and mummy Grit will let them. Oh dear.