Hey Branson! Watch your back!

The husband and I need fret not a minute longer about our non-existent pensions. For our middle child is going to be the next Richard Branson and we shall enter our twilight years rich beyond our wildest dreams.
My boy and his friend have set up their own business, selling miscellaneous items of various worth (2p all the way up to 10p, with some luxury items up to £1) to friends and neighbours.
They have set up a stall of sorts on the pathway at the front of our house. It’s a very quiet cul-de-sac so there’s not a lot of footfall. But they are thinking big and if they are to be millionaires they have to start somewhere.
They stock a wide range of items – when I drove past today I was offered a half chewed pencil void of a lead for 10p. I passed on that but was interested in a black DVD player remote control that looked awfully like the one we own, it even had the same black electrical tape that our one has sported since Finn broke it in half trying to hammer imaginary nails into a wall.
I bought said item for the extortionate price of 40p.
Caolan has so far pedalled the entire contents of his own pencil case and a good portion of his brother’s.
He sells works of original art, mainly pencil sketches of stick men with guns and colourfully attired zombies, at discount prices.
Entire unopened packets of biscuits have been going missing. When questioned, the child told me he is selling them to his friends at 5p a pop at his stall. Taking into account his costs, labour, rent and rates, he is still making a profit of 75p per packet. Which in my eyes is a business victory.
I got an inkling he had a business mind when I took him shopping. I had picked up 20p change from the car instead of a £1 coin I needed for the trolley. When we walked all the way to the shop I discovered my mistake. The boy announced that he had £1 in his pocket and that I could have it only if at the end of the shopping expedition he could have the £1 and the 20p by means of accumulated interest.
There are no flies on him.
I remember having my own business at his age. Myself and my friend from across the street fancied ourselves as miniature florists. There was a lady in our street who had a gigantic overgrown bush at the front of her house, which would burst into bloom for two weeks of the year with magnificent magenta flowers. My friend and I would wait until the flowers were almost ready to fall off, pick a few, mix them with some greenery and sell them to our neighbours for a staggering 20p a bunch.
We actually met the lady who owned the bush on our travels. She asked us where we got the lovely flowers. We lied, told her we gathered them from another location, and to our shame she bought her own flowers off us. We only charged her half price at 10p. We did have morals.
I remember the sheer joy we felt counting our profits. £1.30. We thought we were millionaires. We bought so many sweets in the shop we need an actual plastic bag to put them in. We ate them all and my friend was sick on her living room rug, which is always a sure sign of a good time.
So I’ll let my boy keep his stall, and I’ll encourage his mini-entrepreneurial spirit. For it is he who will be paying for myself and the husband's terribly posh and expensive old folks home further down the line.

The Nursery Blues

Got an awfully bad case of the Mummy guilts last week.
My youngest son, who has been attending nursery school since September, had a day off because he was sick. I wrapped the boy up in a cosy blanket, fed him warm toast and worked from my laptop within ear’s reach of his pitiful pleas for more tea. We lazed around the sofa watching Thomas the Tank Engine, reading books and generally, bar the temperature and the occasional violent regurgitation of foodstuffs into plastic receptacles, had a lovely day.
When I brought him into nursery on Wednesday he cried, begged me to take him home. He said, in front of his teacher, that he didn’t like school, he didn’t like his friends or the toys and that the nursery staff always burnt the toast they give them at break time (which I later found out to be a blatant lie).
My heart broke for the little guy – you and I know that lightly browned toast is a basic human right in most civilised countries – and for a brief moment I did consider taking him home.
The teacher told me that taking him home would be the worst thing I could do. She said that the child would still be sitting on that sofa, watching Thomas the Tank Engine and hollering for more toast when he was 22 years old if I didn’t make a stand now. So I kissed my boy, told him I would be back soon and I walked away, the sound of him screaming ‘Mommy’ ringing in my ears.
You’d think by this stage I’d be well versed in leaving crying children behind in nursery schools. You’d think that by now I’d know that five minutes after I left he would have been distracted by some shiny fire engine and would have forgotten all about me.
But no, the Mummy guilts hit bad. I sat in the car outside. I got out of the car and went to walk back in to get him. I got back into the car. I took out my phone and dialled the number of the nursery to ask if he was OK. Then I hung up before they answered, they would think I was a neurotic Mum.
There are big windows along the front of the nursery. So I formulated a plan whereas I could catch a glimpse of my boy and go home happy, safe in the knowledge that he wasn’t screaming the house down with the most severe case of detachment anxiety those nursery workers had ever encountered.
So I inched my way along the school wall like a spy and peeked around the corner to see if I could see my son. And there he was near the window, playing happily with his friend, not a tear in sight. In fact that boy was laughing like he hadn’t a care in the world.
I drank in the scene for a minute. Him forcing a toy horse into the driving seat of a miniature Ferrari, his friend stealing the car and knocking over the horse. And then he looked up, saw me and although the windows were sealed and soundproofed I could fathom, judging by colour of his face, that the sheer volume of the screaming emanating from the depths of that child’s lungs was exceptional, even to the ears of childcare professionals who had years of experience in their field.
Before I ran away I saw that the boy beside him was screaming, the girl to the left of them was crying, the boy at a nearby table began to cry. I can only imagine that the simple matter of me spying on my boy to see if he was crying after me set off a catastrophic chain of events that led to half that nursery wailing at their teachers well into the afternoon.
Sorry…