The other morning, Michael asked could he bring a bag into Montessori school. He and his sister had been whispering about this earlier in some excitement. In a moment of weakness, I said that he could and in he trotted with a pink poodle bag strapped to his back.
When he got in, he could contain his excitement no longer; he opened up the bag and, to my intense astonishment, began distributing envelopes. “We’re having a party,” he announced to his classmates. I managed to get one of the invitations from one of the other children. It said, in his sister’s handwriting “We are having a ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ party”. It gave a date (aha her request for a calendar explained), time and address and included a drawing of Thomas.
I was impressed by her organisational powers. She had said that she wanted to hold a party for the boys and I had fobbed her off saying that we would have something for their birthday in September and we couldn’t afford to throw parties at the drop of a hat. She was undaunted and said that she only wanted a party for playing games not for food which might, she could see, be expensive. I resorted to the grown-ups’ favourite phrase and help in ages past “We’ll see.” Clearly, she felt that she needed to take matters into her own hands. The teacher rescued all the invitations from the boys’ classmates and the Princess and I had a discussion about the power of the written word.