Life story

On Friday after school, P's tooth was ridiculously wobbly, she had been playing with it all day no doubt and now it was hanging out her mouth comically. Pull it out I told her, go on, yank it. So she did, and when it still didn't come out she gave a it a double twist and a great big tug - out the tooth finally came, along with great spurts of dark red blood. I guess it wasn't quite ready. We giggled at P's bravery while A squirmed and squealed in the other room, not daring to look at either the tooth that had come out or the bloody gap.

I try not to put our children into pigeon-holes but if I had to describe them in three words it might go something like this:

A - the kind and sensitive, daydreamer
P - the wilful, competitive, brave one

Anyhow, the story goes that we were all cuddled up to watch the new David Attenborough series, Life Story, on iPlayer. If everything has been done, all the washing, feeding, cleaning and preparing for school the next day I like to sit and watch a programme with the girls. We choose something with animals in normally so this series was very fitting. And for those of you that have already seen it, you can imagine that my cosy snuggle-up session ended in chaos. In wailing. In screaming. It was a disaster.

The gorgeous fluffy Barnacle Geese chicks balanced precariously in their 400 foot high nest, only 2 days old and needing some food they had to get to the bottom where the vegetation grew. Being born so high up gave them a chance of survival, away from the nasty mean foxes down below, it was like a fairy-tale about to go very, very wrong. The Mother and Father goose flew off the cliff edge and encouraged their babies to jump out of their nest, unable to fly they squeaked and crashed violenlty into the cliff face, their little furry bodies tumbling and whacking against the hard rock as they journeyed to the bottom. Three out of the five made it at which point we had to turn it off.

P, the brave one, was heaving, shaking and screaming at the screen.

"Why doesnt the Daddy just go and get food for the chicks and bring it back to the nest.......sob sob sob....or, or, or they could've flown down on the Mummy's wings!"

She was utterly distraught, I felt a bit sad as well and hugged her little, upset body.

"It's only a chick, for goodness sake," said A the sensitive one, blowing all my pigeon-holing right out the window.