Teaching a spider to moonwalk...

Recently my daughter was asked to write a short paragraph about herself, including her likes and dislikes. After a strong veto of the suggestion that she listed ‘hitting my brother’ and ‘this form’ under dislikes, I left her to it and came back to find a neatly written paragraph which contained the line “I don’t like wasps or spiders or anything that moves weirdly”.

I love that so much, it made me realise two things. Firstly, that children are so honest about things whereas for adults, admitting our fears and weaknesses is really hard; the second is that children are really lucky that their dislikes are, relatively speaking, rather small... I’d love the only thing I was worried about to be something that moved in a funny way!

It made me think about what I dislike and I’ll admit that I agree with Abby, spiders and wasps are up there, though I have a few pet peeves such as rudeness, poor grammar, things not going right first time; every day stuff that one has to put up with so we don’t go all Michael Douglas in Falling Down at least once a day.

The big one though, that has to be my biggest weakness- and my biggest strength- is this hatred of not being perfect... I think I’ve probably mentioned it before and I’m well aware that it’s a ridiculous target- an acceptable aspiration but not something I actually believe I can attain. Despite that logic, I still hate falling short of the mark, but that’s something I’m getting better at dealing with and eventually- I hope- I won’t mind it so much.

In the meantime I’m left wondering if Abby would find a moon walking spider scary (because that’s the definition of a pretty weird way to move), or even funny...