COVID April's Fools

April Fool's Day

We sit down to write a poem each with our kids. My son chooses acrostic, my daughter free style; her poem mention pranksters and Easter bunnies: oh the anticipation of chocolate in excess! The theme for my son's poem is the rebirth and the science of washing powder. April: the month of growth, green shoots of hope and the blooms! This would have been a lambing season going back to my childhood. We did not have any sheep (our neighbours did) just some chicken and a few acres of land for growing our own crops; mainly vegetables. And a small orchard of apricots, mulberries and plums. Often diseased for mother (a part time single mother) had no appetite for fruits. My job was tending the chicks though some years bird flu would kill the most. The most successful of our crops were aubergine so that we made aubergine jams and aubergine pickles in tonnes!

These I don't tell my kids yet. Just about the lockdown when snow was knee high.

Therefore I must be a natural in churning milk into butter and growing beans for our retelling of Jack and The Beanstalk with our kids. Who knows? Time will tell. My beans didn't germinate on the previous years.

Covid sharpens minds and survival skills, my husband argues. No Covid can make me to take up knitting again, I retort. My daughter who is a novice in all things crafts looks sad at my retort.

In the afternoon she brings me a pair of her tights with holes in both knees for me to mend. I put them away. We go to our local park armed with a pair of binoculars. The colours look vibrant almost magical. The squirrels square us up with their mean faces.

Evening: I make a bean casserole as my phone beebs. Its our comedian friend's new parenting podcast about the ills of home schooling amid Coronovirus. We giggle, my husband and I for my son's quote of the day is "Mummy I am so bored so that I want to ring our own Bell and scream who is IT?