Tonight was Parents’ Evening for Isaac, our five year-old son, who is in Year One. It went really well, which is all I’m going to say on it, because I don’t want to turn into one of those parents who goes on and on about how brilliant their little cherub is. Needless to say, we came away rather pleased with his progress.

What I would like to talk about, though, are the things my wife and I came across whilst leafing through his exercise books. To begin with, there’s this: something Isaac said which his teacher saw fit to write down, scribed for evermore in the history of time.

At some point Isaac and Freya have made the shrewd observation that Freya’s eyes are a mixture of blue and brown. Isaac’s eyes, on the other hand, are just brown. And yes, they both have feet.

I once told Isaac the story of how he did a poo on my arm the first time I held him as a baby. This has stuck with him, it seems, because he wrote about it at school, prompting a written response from an obviously bemused teacher (so bemused she spelt his name wrong).

As far as I can see, this reads something like:

If I pood on daddy’s arm he wude daddy say you at sed daddy sed him we hi was a babby when I was a babby…

His literacy skills are usually top notch, so I’m as confused as his teacher by this garbled sentence. It seems that Isaac, too, wanted another crack at the whip in order to get his point across; for later on in the same book the story is retold once more:

When I was a baby daddy holdid me and I pood on daddy arm.

Aah, much better – and the teacher thought so too, by her remarks. I have no idea what those weird hieroglyphics are, by the way, save for the smiley face. Note the handy little drawing of mummy lying on the sofa whilst a baby Isaac deposits his black meconium on daddy’s forearm.

And finally: some of you may have read my recent Parentdish post in which I talk about the fibs kids tell, and how one day Isaac came home from school and told us how he’d drawn a picture of us locking him in a cage and going out for the day (which we’ve never done, I should hastily add).

I was unsure as to whether this drawing was fact or fiction until today. Goodness only knows what was going through the teacher’s mind as she ticked it.