Mini Proclaims’ singing might be better described as ‘enthusiastic’ rather than tuneful, but one can surely not fault her effort. Indeed, so compelling is her performance that even Little Proclaims (often Mini Proclaims’ harshest critic) felt the need to join in from her vantage point on the toilet.

Little Proclaims’ rest break is over now though, and she has returned to her bedroom to carry on with her mandatory hour-long reading session that she must complete before she is permitted any time on her beloved (but very much budget) tablet, on which she will no doubt waste two hours of her weekend watching inexplicable videos of other people playing games that she herself has no real idea how to play.

This is a typical representation of our Saturday afternoons at Proclaims Towers. We insist on the hour-long reading so that something good comes out of Little Proclaims’ day, but in truth, she already has a reading age that is 5 years ahead of her actual age and by the time the reading starts, she has already been to swimming lessons and French lessons. As is well-documented on these pages, she’s already fluent in French too, so we are pretty hard taskmasters as parents. She’ll thank us when she’s older. In multiple languages. Or she may just decide to have nothing more to do with the people who ruined her childhood. But she seems to like us for the most part, and you don’t get to be good at reading if you really hate reading in my experience, so I think she quite enjoys the mandatory hour.

Whether she enjoys it as much as Mini Proclaims enjoys singing is anyone’s guess. I like it when Mini Proclaims sings, but at the moment I’d rather she wasn’t because I know that when she is singing she is not eating her lunch. And we’re all waiting for her to finish her lunch, having enjoyed what is fast becoming our new weekend tradition of having a sit-down meal together. Cooked by yours truly and not too shabby, if I do say so myself.

Mrs Proclaims, Little Proclaims, and I all finished a good 30 minutes ago. Mrs Proclaims has retreated to continue with her genuinely never-ending PhD studies and Little Proclaims has gone to try and break the back of her reading hour. I am left with the youngest Proclaims as she ploughs her way slowly through a meal that she seems to be enjoying, but which she is consuming slowly due to her need to break out into song every few minutes.

The reason we’re all impatient for her to finish is not just because we’d all quite like to move on from that meal, but because none of us have had dessert yet. It generally seems wrong to start on dessert until everyone has finished eating the first course, but Mini Proclaims is really dragging this out. If she were showing signs that she didn’t actually want the meal, I’d probably relent and let her stop where she is—she has actually managed to consume all the vegetables by this point—but she genuinely seems to be enjoying the meal. Just at her own pace. And with her own musical accompaniment.