17th November, 2008
The Huckleberry Finn Syndrome
My middle ds Louie has always suffered from what we call ‘Huckleberry Finn Syndrome’ - he is generally to be found barefoot, caked with mud, hanging upside down from a tree branch. He will invariably also have some creature about his person - a frog, a snail, a centipede… And his pockets will be filled with fossils, shells, string, broken pottery sherds, skeletal remains, dried mud pies…. and of course scattered amongst those more natural items the obligatory handful of Lego bricks unlike the original Huckleberry. As I was sitting here at the laptop checking my emails and watching my youngest ds 4 I realised that Erik is fast following in his brother’s footsteps. His once-white Winnie the Pooh T-shirt is covered with chocolate milk and mud and some purple sticky unidentifiable substance; his face is covered with chocolate milk; his hands are muddy; his hair looks like a bird’s nest. No matter how consciencious I am in preening and grooming him first thing - thorough ablutions, smart clean shirt; polished shoes; brushed hair - by mid morning he looks like a little wild woodland-and-wayfare waif. His pockets contain a broken snail shell, several pebbles, some decaying leaf litter and a dead woodlouce. Yes, our youngest has definitely developed Huckleberry Finn Syndrome too. I have read lots of articles on homeschooling that bizarrely state that homeschool children are always prim, smart, beautifully turned out, and always quiet, reserved and polite. Ok, polite is the only single term there that can be applied to my boys. They are generally noisy, wild, dishevelled, scruffy, mud-caked ragamuffins with scrapes and bruises. Only our eldest ds 14 has escaped this syndrome - he is our geek. He will only climb a tree if there’s a computer game in the treetops. There’s very little he cannot do with computers. He’d no doubt climb the tree if there was a corpse up there too with his gory interest in pathology and forensics (he’s CSI’s greatest fan). Then he’d build a Lego model of the crimescene. Now I’m going to somehow persuade Erik into the bathroom so I can removed the chocolate stains, get him into clean clothes and then have a funeral for the unfortunate woodlouce.
Posted at 7:17 am |