Elves and Eggs

 

Whether it’s pirates, plays or poffertjes, the Dutch school year regularly throws up some sort of challenge for the unsuspecting expat parent.  

There’s nothing more stressful than checking the school WhatsApp messages at ten in the evening and discovering that your child has to come dressed as an elf the next morning.

“Oh, and could you also bring some eggs? We’re making pancakes.”

Now I don’t know about anyone else but I don’t have many elf costumes in my wardrobe.  

And I’m right out of eggs.

So maybe there’s more than a bit of relief among harassed parents when the end of the school year in the Netherlands finally arrives.

Wrong.

The last few weeks of the summer term are actually ten times worse. 

Every day in July there’s something weird going on at a school near you. 

One day you have to make sure your kid goes to school inexplicably dressed as a pirate-themed mushroom and the next you have to conjure up something odd for them to eat at lunchtime - instead of the usual cheese sandwiches.

Admittedly, I’m not too great at keeping on top of these WhatsApp posts from the school which leads to a lot of late-night stress. 

And, unfortunately for my children, I’ve also always struggled with striking the right balance between odd and inappropriate.

It turns out pickled onion sandwiches fall into the “inappropriate” category.

Anyway..

The parents of children of puking age also get an annual summer invitation to come and not only clean the actual school, but take the very battered and very dirty school toys home to scrub them clean. 

Not sure this happens in England.

“Where are the cleaners?” I hear you ask.

Where indeed.

And it really doesn’t seem like an invitation. More like an order.

It starts with an ominous email a couple of weeks before the end of term, requesting that your child brings a large shopping bag into school the next day.

The bag is then filled with “toys that have been played with intensively this year.” In short, they are some of the most rancid toys imaginable, all bearing signs of being drooled on, dribbled over and, judging by the stains, probably much worse…

Last year my wife tried to be clever and gave our child the smallest bag known to man. Even an elf couldn’t have done the weekly shop with it.

This year she thought she was being even cleverer by ‘forgetting’ the bag in question altogether. 

But, alas, there was no escaping our duty.  The teachers are wise to these tricks from desperate parents and have plenty of reserve bags on standby.  

And they are huge!

So, as punishment for being sneaky, we received a much larger mountain of rancid Playmobil toys than normal, all of which had to be thoroughly cleaned over the weekend. 

And, of course, they were all coated in dubious stains, marks and odours. 

Perfect timing.  Because the previous week, half the school had gone down with the bubonic plague.  

It was so terrible that all the classroom doors had a big red ‘X’ painted on them.

Clearly an excellent moment to be swapping moist, fetid toys under a grim cloud of disease. 

A doctor once told my wife that the average child is carrying around four different viruses at any given time.  I tried not to think about that, as my son handed me an oversized bag of soiled and soggy Playmobil toys at the end of the school day.

Back home, I grimly held the bag at arm’s length while manoeuvring carefully through the house and out the back door. 

I then threw the toys onto the table in the garden, added a large dollop of washing up liquid and then blasted them with the hose from a safe distance.

Then I left them to dry for about two days.

Only when I thought it was finally safe to approach, I slowly and cautiously crept outside to inspect the toys.

Rather like one would approach an unexploded WWII bomb.

Or a malfunctioning firework on a damp dark night in November. 

Deciding against a second blast with the hose due to time constraints, I quickly stuffed the toys back into the bag, washed my hands a thousand times with heavy-duty bleach and immediately drove them back to school, desperately wishing for a police escort and all local hospitals on standby.

Tyres screeching, I arrived at the school, jumped out with the engine still running, grabbed the bag from the boot and shoved it into the surprised arms of the first person who looked vaguely like a teacher.  

Then I fled the crime scene before anyone could ask questions. 

That was it.  

Phew.

Job done for another year. 

Nearly-clean toys ready for the next crop of drooling virus-ridden kids in about six weeks’ time…

So, yes, the last couple of weeks of school are quite a challenge.

On the very last day of the summer term, the school invites parents to come along, because apparently none of us have anything better to do on a Thursday afternoon.

They gather all the overexcited children together in the playground and everyone waves goodbye to the school year by singing something or other.  

And some dancing thrown in too.

It’s been a couple of years and I still can’t work out the point of it.  

I smiled and waved vaguely at my 5 year old and at my 8 year old while pretending I knew what was going on, but inside I was cursing the world, thinking about my missed lunch and my rumbling stomach.

Most of the other parents nearby seemed to be equally bemused, having presumably also missed lunch and annoyed their boss by leaving work early.  Not to mention battling through insane traffic for this strange five-minute ceremony.

When it was finally over, everyone was made to feel just guilty enough to take their children home instead of sending them to the after-school club as usual. 

So working day and possibly career ruined.  

And lunch.

On the other hand, all the teachers looked positively giddy at the prospect of six glorious weeks without your child.  They were heading off to the local cafe en masse to celebrate once the coast was clear of grumpy parents and snotty-nosed kids.

All except one teacher, who I immediately recognised as the one who received my half-cleaned bag of rancid toys earlier in the week.

She didn’t look like she wanted to celebrate the end of term.  

She looked like she was about to throw up her lunch.

But at least she’d had lunch.

Guiltily, I rounded up my children as quietly and quickly as possible and slunk off into the crowd, hoping six weeks would be just long enough for her to forget my face.