FFS!? Friday : The holiday journal

Miss7 has struggled with her English comprehension a bit this year.

I know, how is that possible when she’s the offspring of such a literarily gifted person as me?

(Sarcasm people, I’m not delusional, it was sarcasm.)

She’s awesome with the reading and the spelling.  It’s the handwriting, story telling and sentence structure that gets her.

Her teacher and I agreed that having her do a journal while on holidays would be a good way of keeping her practice up, by writing a few sentences each day.

Which just means that I can’t laze around the pool every day, sipping cocktails, lest her journal read like a bar bill. FFS!?

So far we’ve waged epic battles over what she writes about each day.

She wants to write about her brother dropping his ice cream on the pavement and picking it again, me stepping in to stop him eating it, him throwing an epic tantrum which resulted in me licking the dirty bits off so I could shove it back in his mouth and shut him up. FFS!?

This happened at a water park.  She had no interest in writing about the slides she went on, the butterfly she had painted on her face, or the one time she played happily with her siblings that day. FFS!?

We’ve spent almost an hour arguing about whether she should write about her sister’s random and serious statement during a lull in conversation at lunch:

“FUCK IT”

That caused me to snort juice out my nose, across the table, and all over her brother.  He started squealing “GROSE!” and his sister kept chanting “FUCK IT!”

I suggested she write about the temple we saw, and maybe a few of the new Balinese words she’d learnt.  You know, instead of her swearing sister and my juice spraying nostrils. FFS!?

Fingers crossed

Every day I worry about what journal-worthy experience I can give her.  It is seriously getting in the way of my cocktail hour. FFS!?

So that I look good (why else?), I’ve started steering her towards something positive that happens each morning.

Because I can only be an awesome parent for so long before I screw it up, therefore I must engineer a situation that makes me look good before midday, so that she can then go and write about that before something less appropriate takes place. FFS!?

It’s totally stressing me out. FFS!?

I remember #1Nana making me write a daily journal when we went to the US when I was 11.

I fucking hated doing it.

And that involved Disneyland.

I can only imagine how Miss7 feels.