Wearily upward

Spending 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for almost 9 weeks now with a 5 year-old teenager teaches one a lot of things. It teaches lessons on staying calm in the chaos, being positive in the pain, effective teaching methods, what really annoys one about members in one's home, and so on. The most recent lesson I have learnt is that I am an annoyingly hypocritical parent. Let me explain. My daughter and son share my almost outdated iPad Mini, although it's hardly fair to call it mine anymore. While Madeleine does math homeschooling assignments, Ruben watches and plays Number Blocks (thank you BBC!) on the iPad. When it's snack time, Madeleine gets a go on the iPad while Ruben eats his apple slices. It's like a well oiled machine most of the time. It does, however, mean that the iPad is always around. As it was today during lunch. Madeleine was, naturally, drawn to the iPad while eating her sandwich. She gets distracted like that easily, and I prefer for her to finish on...

For the last two years I've been keeping a tiny, wild, impossible dream in the back of my head. You know the kind: it makes one's heart beat faster with great excitement and a bit of dread, but one leaves it there because it just seems impossible, impractical, silly, unattainable. But every now and then the thought pops up again as one strays down that winding road of disappointment where reality and fantasy meet - no, collide - and the process of picking up and hiding away the pieces of one's shattered dream(s) commences. And then, as if to really nail down the coffin's lid on one's aspirations, the world falls into a seemingly bottomless pit of chaos. COVID-19, the effects of Climate Change, global violence and war, and neighbours who do not appreciate one's children playing in the communal garden (that's a personal one which is completely unrelated to the above-mentioned...). Anyway. It seems that now would be the absolute worst time to dream about ...