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Today was the first day of teaching. Now this is an anathema to me. If there had been an exam to be a mum, I'd have scraped a C (in old money - otherwise possibly an A*). An example - I had always prided myself on telling the truth to my daughter....right upto the time a few weeks ago she fell and split her scalp open, and had to have staples. I explained the process to her, and what would happen, and that yes it would hurt, but only a little bit then it would stop hurting. Afterwards,on the way home, a small voice came from the back-seat "Mummy,you know how you always tell the truth? Well, do you mind if sometimes you could just fib?".

So, yep, me and kids (especially other people's); it's *really* hard work. I felt very much like Joyce Grenfell but less pearls. I was teaching the class how to draw birds, so first off was "what's the difference between a bird and an animal?". They got the hang of that, but it's so hard to keep on track when a voice says "but Miss, your sheep looks like a hamster". The next stage was teaching them the different shapes of beaks and claws, eg certain birds have beaks because they eat certain foods. "Diego, what sort of food does a chicken eat? No, not alligators. Anyone else?".

And that was the hour. Tomorrow is getting them all to draw a duck out of two circles and a rectangle, and then to talk about how to use a pencil, and then how to use water-colours. At some stage we shall actually do the drawings themselves.

I had a mouse man in yesterday to sort out the vermin. Apparently, they like to get in at ground-level (in our case the basement), and it's actually a bad idea to put bait in the kitchen as although this will kill one mouse in unspeakable ways, it in the mean-time lays a trail of pheromones encouraging all the other neighbourhood mice back in. He showed me all the mouse tracks in the snow at the front of the house. Lovely.