It’s the eve of our four-year-old starting school and we had the obligatory home visit a few days ago.

The teacher and TA were lovely, and the school have a great way to make the visit seem more exciting by sending you a yellow balloon with a smiley face on it in anticipation of their visit, so that you can blow it up and display it outside to identify your house.

This works swimmingly unless there happens to be a howling wind and torrential rain on the day, and we went out to discover a string flapping around on our gate and no balloon on the end of it.

All week I’d nonchalantly decided not to worry about cleaning the house as we are still in the middle of decorating. This lasted until the morning of the visit, when I panicked about being judged and went round blitzing everything with Flash wipes and spraying polish in the air so it smelt like I’d actually bothered to dust. I then realised I’d cooked smoked haddock risotto for dinner the night before and the smell was still clinging to everything in the kitchen.

We had a great chat while Herbie ran round the table in circles and then totally unprompted produced a box that he never plays with, containing all his letter and word cards – excellent work, I thought until a lone McDonalds Happy Meal balloon bobbed through the kitchen door and I died inside.

Image from Pixabay