You are so banned from sports day

“You are never coming to my school sports day again!” Yes, my middle daughter has banned me and her sisters from any subsequent sports days. And our heinous crimes? Well, apparently this ban has been imposed because we were:
1. Larking about on the field in full view of other parents.
2. Giving each other piggy backs (I’m not guilty of course; my piggy back days are long gone).
3. Shouting “go Becky” at inappropriate moments, during team relay races.
I thought we were having fun; but come to think of it, I did notice she ignored us and pretended to be an orphan when we were waving. Well, it has been a long week and tempers are frayed. Hopefully by next year we will be forgiven and she will see the funny side. Summer holidays are looming and I now have all this maths homework to do. I honestly do not know how I am going to cope.
For me, one of the hardest parts of being a parent is that when I get them all to bed circa 8-9pm, I have two or three more hours’ housework ahead of me before I can even think about turning in myself. This precious time, from about 9pm onwards, is the time I spend writing – and now maths is going to have to be fitted in as well.
I have already started working on my Numeracy Module and am finding that while I can do some maths with no problems, I have huge gaps in my knowledge that will have to be filled.  The consequence of going to ten different schools when I was a child I supposed.
And as any parent knows, once you have a child, you never come first in anything in the family, ever again. And the more children you have the further down the pecking order you go.
I have been assigned some basic tasks by my tutor and one of them is to learn all my times tables. Not just all the easy ones – like the nine-times, where all the answers add up to nine. It’s true, check it out for yourself: 9, 18, 27, 36, 45, 54, 63, 72, 81, 90. See, it really works!
According to my maths tutor, not knowing your times-tables when attempting to learn maths is like to trying to write a novel before mastering the alphabet.
So I have to study Numeracy Module last thing at night when my children were in bed. Of course I’m exhausted by then, but this is what I want to do, so I just have to get on with it.
It was so much easier when I was at school and studying was what you were supposed to be doing. In my teens, I spent every Sunday night up in my bedroom doing homework and listening to Janice Long on the radio. Oh those were the days.
But I really do find that I am getting the hang of numbers, and if I can, then believe me, anybody could.