The incident, now referred to as ‘Choona Gate’, occurred a couple of months ago.  At first, it was the usual post school chaos, full of meltdowns, squabbling and demands for snacks. I was about to start getting tea on, completely unaware of the shit storm that I was about to be engulfed in.

Lulled into a false sense of security, I was delighted with the older child’s enthusiasm to do a bit of writing. She wanted to write the menu for dinner. Great I thought. It wasn’t just great, I was actually ecstatic, as so far there had been little enthusiasm for any form of reading or writing. Am all over this. No problem, I thought.

This is where it starts to go horribly wrong.

    

Explanations fail miserably. I mean, how can it make sense to a five-year old, when to be honest there’s no solid rules! We are now in meltdown.

After twenty minutes or so, things calm and we are writing again.

So yes, yes, I should have let her write it phonetically. My fault. It would have been avoided. In my defence, it made sense to me, to teach her how to spell the tricky words straight off rather than correct her further down the line. I now know differently.

From now on, we will only be eating jam, ham and eggs for our dinner, until we move through to the next set of sounds.

After finishing the menu, she decided she wanted to write the date.

It was Tuesday.

FML