My four-year-old has a life plan...

Trouble is my mind’s gone blank. It comes of having a four-year-old boy, you see – one that commands almost constant attention.

“When are you going to give up that dummy?” I asked the other day. “When I’m 48,” said he, obviously drawing on some sort of secret life plan he has concocted in one of his quieter moments.

I love the inventiveness of a fresh four-year-old mind.

His teacher told me, with no small measure of outrage, that it was the first time in 40 years of teaching any child had poked out his tongue at her.

I was amazed. Not that the Boy had done the offending deed, but that he was a poking pioneer after four whole decades of her teaching reception class children.

“Oh dear,” I told her, bluffing my way wildly through my first school telling off in about 30 years. “If he’s started to act up he must REALLY love you. He’s only naughty for the people he loves . . .”

When I got him home that day I challenged him on this offending behaviour, and he said there were tiny wee men in his tummy who pressed buttons that made his tongue leap from his jaws. You can’t argue with that. Or keep a straight face.

Despite his growing delinquency though, he is starting to grasp some of the conventional learning at school, though at home he has to have regular rollerskating breaks if we’re doing anything vaguely stationary.

It may be just me, but I do believe four is too young to have to put on a uniform and go to school five days a week, despite the reception year being mostly about play. Two-thirds of his first school year has gone by and he still tells me he has missed me when he was at school – every day. I don’t think four is old enough to deal with emotions like that on a daily basis.

It may be because he is a summer baby, of course – very young and very little compared to some of his sophisticated (the girls) and humungous (boys and girls – what on earth do they feed them, fertiliser?) peers.

Still, I’m determined not to worry about any of it. He won’t be walking down the aisle poking his tongue out, and there won’t be any ridiculous ‘Early Learning Goals,’ where you’re suddenly in competition with people a quarter of your life older than you, to meet in later years.

But if he sticks to his self-imposed life plan he may still have his dummy.

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