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The only good thing about being a parent is that eventually, once they've already broken you, your kids have to go to school and between 9am and 3pm you get a slice of your life back.
This all goes out the window when your kids are ill though. And it's more annoying if they get ill at school, because that's a whole extra pick up (if you've got more than one kid at school).
Ernie's school got in touch whilst I was recording Newsround to say that Ernie SAID he'd had diarrhoea. This meant that Ernie not only had to come home, but also that he couldn't go back to school for 48 hours. Well played Ernie. Though if you'd done it on a Wednesday then you'd have had two whole days off.
Now the thing is that Ernie says a lot of things. And maybe he knows that if he says he has diarrhoea then he gets to come home. I am not sure he entirely knows what diarrhoea is. He's said he's had it a lot but when I've checked his workings I have discovered he has not had it at all. Maybe one time he actually had it.
Did the teachers check? Did they fuck?
You might say that a teacher's job is hard enough already without having to follow kids into the toilet and use the Bristol stool chart to ascertain the consistency of their faeces. You might say you wouldn't want teachers to do that regardless.
But by just accepting the word of an 8 year old, who, with the best will in the world has an active imagination and talks a load of rubbish about 60% of the time, they have condemned Catie and me to a day and a half of parenting that we SHOULD NOT HAVE TO DO. We sent him to school so we wouldn't have to hear him claiming he's had diarrhoea. That's your job now. That's why you get such long holidays.
Ernie came home and to be fair he seemed a little bit under the weather. Though the one thing about diarrhoea that I know (having had it loads of times and sometimes then having been sick on it) is that you don't just have it once and then it stops.
My son did not have any more diarrhoea. And yet if we'd gone to the school with a handful of his poop and demanded that they look after him tomorrow it would be us who would be viewed as idiotic and wrong.
Rather than someone who just took him at his word.
Catie and me both have
a big gig in St Albans (still tickets for the second show) to prepare for, so we could have done without this. Though I am probably going to do all my work on my set on the day- maybe in the 30 minutes that Catie is on stage.
He wasn't too much trouble and I did just as much work as I would have done if he hadn't been there. That is pretty much none, but some admin that might have waited.
Maybe he did have diarrhoea but the lesson I want to teach him is that he mustn't ever SAY that he has. So that we can send him to school the next day if he's better/lying. So whilst we want to encourage him not to lie to his teacher, we also must encourage him to lie to his teacher.
It's tough being a parent.
Newsround about the incredible come back of an annoying, unfunny, overinflated 1990s comedy turn and the patheticness of a character relying on saying the same thing over and over again.
One person on Facebook asked "Who? Mr Blobby or you?" and I have to say I feel a complete idiot for phrasing it like this now.
Turns out Ally is a better ventriloquist than me.
