Categories: uncategorized
Date: 29 July 2006 11:52:08
Smudgelet, fear not. Your time will come for things like the Prom - don't be in too much of a hurry to grow up. Everything you envy your older brother will be yours in time, but he can never go back to the joys of being nine.
It's been delightful to spend some special time with Smudgelet this week. He found the move from Primary to Middle far more traumatic - his short life has held too many goodbyes, and he thinks about them more deeply. He knows from experience that "I'm sure you'll keep in touch" doesn't actually hold water and his parting from old friends and beloved teachers has hit him hard. So we decided to make a celebration of it by using all his old school T-shirts (and, by accident, one of the new ones I've bought for Middle School!!!) to decorate. Buying fabric paints proved rather expensive, but some serious investigation led us to purchase a set of fabric crayons, complete with extra T-shirt, for less than £5.
For those T-shirts that had clearly fallen victim to art lessons, hastily eaten gravy or tomato-sauce dinners or over enthusiastic play on the school field, we decided to try our hand at dying. Hmmm... interesting. I read all the instructions and decided to plump for cold dye. Trouble was, in the excitement of choosing a colour, we forgot all that and arrived home to find ourselves with a dye that had to be applied in a saucepan and stirred over the heat (in this horrendously hot weather) for 20 minutes. Great. As a result I have two beautiful green t-shirts. I also have two beautifully green rubber gloves, a green bucket, a green drain, green fingers, a green spotted towel and...... aaaaghhhhhhhh........ a green speckled and stripey stove!
But we also have five brilliantly designed t-shirts, including my "penguin power" t-shirt and a fantastic "Goodbye primary, hello middle school" t-shirt which has seriously lessened the pain of transision.
Hooray!