The vicarious ambition of a mother

The other day, I noticed my daughter singing her school harvest festival song with a vibrato. As I paused and caught her eye, she played along and exaggerated the effect. Lucky Ikea don’t do crystal glasses, I thought as she came to the end of her cadence: ‘The broad beans are sleeping in their blankety be-a-e-a-eds!’

Cats or dogs?

A couple of years ago, my mother drew an analogy which has stuck with me. It was in light of the respective stages my sister and I were at in our parenting journeys: she had teens, I had toddlers. I suppose we’d both been bending her ear with our gripes, and she compared our children to cats and dogs.