Parent life / A Reception classroom, one fortnight in January 2007
Nine Days’ Notice for One Reception Playdate
Our youngest had been in Reception for a term and his name had never once appeared on the playdate board. He did not mind. I minded enough for both of us.
By the Reception door there is a wipe-clean board. Its job is to tell the teacher who is going home with whom. A parent on Mumsnet described its contents perfectly in January 2007: you write “Molly home with Polly” or whatever. Every afternoon I read it the way other people read A-level results. Every afternoon our youngest was going home with me.
He did not care. The same parent, whose daughter was in the same position, put it in a single line: “She is completely unaware of this however so not peturbed....but I am.” I have never felt more seen by a stranger’s typo.
She also asked whether it was because she was “on the periphery” of the other mums, which I read at 11.40pm and took personally on her behalf and then on my own. I counted. I had spoken to four mothers since September, and two of those conversations had been about a lost glove that turned out to be ours.
So I asked. The 2007 parent asked too, and was offered a date a week next Thursday, which is exactly what I got: a mother with a calm diary running a finger past swimming, past Kumon, past a grandparent, and landing nine days away. Rafferty, a week on Thursday. I said “Perfect!” with an exclamation mark you could hear.
Nine days is a long time to prepare for a four-year-old. I bought a second set of felt-tips, so there could be no fighting over felt-tips. I made a timetable. My husband, who considers himself the fun parent on the strength of one bouncy castle in 2019, asked why the timetable had a slot labelled “free play (structured)”.
I took the afternoon off. Emily, a co-founder of Happity, writes about doing the same for her son’s playdate and discovering the children did not want her around, so she worked, while still sorting the food and the drinks and making lunch. It was not, she says, a proper break. She at least had work to do. I had a laminated activity board and nobody to read it to. The boys ignored it and played under the dining table for two hours, in the dark, with one torch.
At ten to five Rafferty spilt Ribena down his sock. A father on DadBlogUK once let a visiting child go home from Box Hill in soaking wet trainers and wrote, afterwards, “What if? What if? What if?” I did the same, out loud, in the downstairs loo, scrubbing a sock with hand soap. His mother arrived, did not look at the sock, and said they’d had a lovely time.
The youngest has not asked for another playdate. I have. Rafferty’s mother is free a week on Thursday.
Sources
- Mumsnet: Play dates — etiquette and advice about giving invitations etc (Reception child)
- John Adams, Do you suffer from play date paranoia?
- Liz Melnyczuk, Remote, Flexible And Hybrid Working — How It Works For Our Small Business; Emily’s account
Notes from the School Gates is a light-hearted column: home scenes and family characters are invented; schools and public facts are real. About the column