James Proclaims!

Every Saturday, during term time, I take Little Proclaims to French School. In spite of the fact that I, as a child, hated every second I spent in school, I am nothing if not hypocritical, and I make sure my eldest child not only attends compulsory education, but also has to give up at least some of her evenings and weekends to enjoy (or endure) additional learning opportunities.

Actually it’s Mrs Proclaims who is the driving force behind most of these activities. Except that Mrs Proclaims doesn’t drive. So after Little Proclaims has been signed up for an activity, it sometimes becomes my job to actually get her there. In that sense we are both the driving force, Mrs Proclaims metaphorically and me rather more literally.

As I have revealed on these pages before, Little Proclaims is pretty much bilingual. This is mainly due to the efforts of my wife, who is no slouch at French and is currently working towards a PhD in French Literature. I, too, can speak French, but not as well as my wife and now not as well as my five year old daughter. I still have the edge on Mini Proclaims, but I fear this will not be for too much longer.

Anyway, most Saturday mornings I drive Little Proclaims to French school, which is in a different town to the one we live in. And because my wife is not stupid, I also take Mini Proclaims with me. Mrs Proclaims reasons that if my weekend is going to be curtailed by taking my eldest daughter to an activity then it won’t be made worse by taking the little one along for the ride. That Mrs Proclaims then has the house entirely to herself for three hours every Saturday is just a happy by-product of her organising additional academic input for our child and was never part of some dastardly masterplan.

Or so she claims.

Most of the time it goes fairly smoothly on the way there. Getting two small children into the car with sufficient time to drive the 30 or so minutes it takes to get to the school is not without challenges but we usually manage it. Because the venue is an actual school site, complete with playing fields, various sporting clubs also play their Saturday morning fixtures there so the car park can be a little hit and miss, but for the most part Little Proclaims makes it to the lesson on time and Mini Proclaims and I kill the ensuing 90 minutes either by frequenting a local supermarket for groceries, or going for a walk. Well I walk. Mini Proclaims sits in a pushchair and sings. Before she got as big as she is, I used to walk her around in what might be described as a ‘papoose’. But she’s a bit on the heavy side for that now, so it’s a pushchair all the way.

On occasion Mini Proclaims has thrown a spanner in the works of this mundane but not unpleasant Saturday morning routine. For Mini Proclaims sometimes likes to experiment with being car sick. Not always. Indeed it’s a relatively rare occurrence. Rare enough to catch me unprepared. And therefore disastrous when it happens, because vomit does not, on the whole, smell very nice. And, particularly during the ‘papoose’ days, being stuck with a child who smells of vomit for 90 minutes could be quite challenging on the nostrils.

We hadn’t had an incident for a while, so I should have expected the backseat explosion we had this Saturday.

Fortunately Mini Proclaims had had, amongst other things, strawberries for breakfast. And while, if I’m honest, the carbon footprint of said strawberries was probably shameful, it turns out that strawberry flavoured vomit smells mainly of strawberries.

Which is not at all unpleasant.

I’m not sure if strawberries always offer this level of mitigation when it comes to vomit. I have no idea if other fruit can be substituted to achieve a similar effect. I’m not sure I care to carry out additional research if it can, in any way, be avoided.

Still, I think that Saturday morning strawberries might need to be a staple for my youngest child for the foreseeable future.