The Banshee and the Dove

Saturday:
The single memorable feature of Saturday was F wailing like a banshee at Tarly's 4th Birthday Party. Obviously one doesn't expect a 5-yr old to behave like a 4-yr old, so F seemed to go for behaving like a 2-yr old for (what felt like) 2 hours instead.
I think other things happened that day - I'm almost certain F attended a drama rehearsal in the morning, behaved like a civilized travelling companion on the train and ate lovely party food and made perfume with a fair amount of decorum. I'm fairly convinced that I saw various people that it was nice to see, some of whom even gave me quantities of money. But I can't be sure because those have become the blurry distant sepia-toned vaseline-lensed bits and what remains still ringing in my ears and burning on my retinas is: square-mouthed "Wwwaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!" (repeat till end. Of sanity. And then a few times for luck.)
So that was Saturday. Entirely overwritten by 90 minutes of embarrassing, disappointing, stressful and exhausting parenting that happened somewhere in the afternoon.

Sunday:
F was in her drama group Xmas show, a version of Cinderella, as a dove in the littlies group of doves and magpies, involving a fair amount of happy arm-wing fly-skipping, sad gathering round Cinderella, arch-making, skipping round in circles and performing 'Nobody Likes Me Everybody Hates Me Might as Well go and eat Worms' with actions, among other items. F did pretty well for a 5-yr old who had not done any drama until 3 months ago. A couple of times she was in the wrong place but she wasn't the only one and generally did pretty well, bless her! I had watched the last run-through and it was amazing to see how, as is so often the case, having an audience brought the kids' best performances out.
Beforehand, I mucked in backstage helping with pinning costumes, generally helping out and then was on drink and mince-pie duty for the arriving audience, with another parent who also home educates her 9-yr old daughter. So we managed a few interesting conversations between serving fruit punch and juice. F got a certificate commending her for settling well into class and all the kids got loads of applause and seemed to have a great time. My loudest applause had to go to Allie, who runs those groups (4-7s and 8-11s) - she works so hard and has my absolute admiration for how well she works with the children, she gets cross with them but never irritable or bad-humoured, if that makes sense.
After the show, J, F and I went for pizza round the corner

In retrospect I've put F's wailathon on Saturday down to going straight from a very intensive concentrating rehearsal to the party. She shouldn't really have been seriously tired or hungry, so I don't think it was that. But maybe mentally tired from concentrating, over-hyped and no time to chill out in between, etc.
Anyway - bad day - chalk it up - move on - as a good friend advised yesterday, and we have.
Tomorrow is MMs Xmas party and then the week is looking reasonably clear for Xmas shopping, maybe another swim (can't say now because it has to be spontaneous!) and lots of work.