Parental involvement

I keep trying to write amusingly about Mabel's latest sleep regression (let's call it; it involves a nighttime cough and at least one molar), but it just turns into a long-winded whine. I should probably take a different tack.

I attended a nursery school meeting last night and found myself volunteering for a board position for next year. It's a co-op school, which means it's run by the parents, and the ultra-sexy position of housekeeping chair has been vacant for all of this year. It's not so much that I decided the school could do with my firm hand and expert sweeping motion, but more that I have an idea what this entails, it's pretty simple, and I felt it was about time for me to step up and help out a bit more than we've done to date.

Every family has to take on a role every year, but some are more time-consuming than others. Last year I volunteered to be librarian, which I thought had a nice literary ring to it. I imagined myself cataloguing books during quiet evenings, perhaps taking home a few well-loved volumes to mend, carefully re-shelving and tidying. It sounded ideal. In the event, it was less so, as my small and increasingly mobile appendage (Mabel) made it very hard to spend even a few minutes every week re-shelving books without having them all pulled out again at the bottom of the stack. The catalogue belonged to a teacher who was reluctant to give it up, and nobody really explained things to me, with the result that I spent ten minutes blithely distributing school library books in the bins containing the public library books, and then a fraught half hour trying to fish them out again.

Before I set off for this September's member meeting, I asked B what he thought we should sign up for this year, since being librarian had turned out to be such a bust. He was disappointed - evidently he has literary aspirations too - and said that if I took on the same job again, he'd be responsible for the tasks. So I happily and pointedly put his name down against Librarian instead of mine, to the confusion of the director, and to date he's done more or less as much for the job as I did.

So I felt we were due. After three years as a member, I understand the basics of the housekeeping position - helping to organise the twice-yearly cleaning workshops, showing up for most or some of those days, and arranging and reminding parents of their commitments (everyone signs up for one housekeeping job during the year - you might be laundering dress-up clothes in March, or cleaning toys in October, or organizing the medical kit twice a year - it's pretty simple). And I'll get to - I mean, have to - attend monthly board meetings. I think I can manage that. So long as nobody wants to see the state of my house before giving me the job.

When Monkey started at the school three years ago, the August cleaning workshop was actually the first time I interacted as a member of the co-op. (There's a new-member meeting in June, but we'd been away.) I was seven months pregnant and really quite enjoyed a two-hour window of something totally different: being toddler-free and chatting to another incoming parent while we wrestled with sticky green paper and a bookshelf. This August, I'll be able to welcome new members and give them their introduction to the nitty gritty of some of the things that joining the school entails: messing around with duct tape, cleaning paintbrushes, and sorting out boxes of tiny foam shapes, to name a few.