Other things I’ll miss now she has started school..

Credit: woman in suspiciously large Jackie-O Shades

1. Being late for work. Why be on time when spending your time fretting over how you’re never on time with a panic befitting the fear that some mythical meteor is about to crash land on earth – right on our house – is always preferable to actually being on time.
2. Stirring the various gangs of livestock out of their oblivious chewing with a predictable beep of the horn. Gets them and her every time.
3. All the little kids at her child-minder’s stampeding and shuffling towards the glass doors in various configurations of all fours like a remake of the closing credits from The Benny Hill Show.
4. Choosing the person to preside over her daily care after a careful selection process involving the ancient scientific method of instinct and instinct. Being dispossessed of this power is enough to send your average control freak over the edge.
5. All of us calling the designated daily carer-in-chief by her first name. The anachronistic but inescapable beginnings of insidious human hierarchies begins.
6. Keeping interaction with other parents to a sanity-maintenance minimum. I would rather chew my own cheek off to the rhythm of Enya’s Orinoco Flow than join the Parents Com-mit-tay. But see number four for odds of that not happening.

What did you just call me? That’ll be Mizz Neurotic to you.