The big parade in Santa Cruz which is scheduled for Tuesday 16th February is the Carnaval event, the one that all the tourists are here in Tenerife to see; the one ’second only to Rio’. But it is far from the only Carnaval event.

Every town in Tenerife has its own Carnaval with the one in Los Cristianos which runs from 5th to 14th of March and has a Viva Mexico theme this year being the last.

Even though the Arona Carnaval is not until next month, schools are out next week and so those schools which wish to do so will be having their Kids’ Parade tomorrow.

For whatever reasons my kids’ school was a bit of a wet blanket last year with none of the outings and fun stuff the kids had got to do in the previous years. There was no Carnaval Parade, no Canarian Day celebration nor big organised march through the streets to meet the Three Kings and have a picnic in the street.

All their excursions were curtailed too. No visit to the bomberos or to the airport or day spent at the Quimpi farm or environmentally-minded expedition up the side of the Red Mountain.

Although you might think the overall recession was behind the moratorium on fun outings I have a suspicion it was more to do with the teachers lobbying for better pay and jibing at the extra duties required of them in organising and sheperding these missions when they are not paid enough for their daily grind as it is.

Anyway this year somebody put the Ooooh! back in school and we are having a Carnaval Parade. Yaaay! The kids are all aquiver and very much looking forward to their special day tomorrow.

The following information should therefore be of interest to you whether you like kids and want to watch them all march past in their Carnaval disguises or whether you loathe the little monsters and want to stay the hell out of Dodge.

If you are in the Las Galletas neighbourhood tomorrow, the kids will emerge blinking into the sunlight at approximately 12.30. Some kids will be blinking more than others, especially my son who for some mysterious reason is being dressed by his teacher as a traffic light.

My daughter and her classmates will be dressed as natives of La Palma complete with white frocks (at least the girls will be in frocks) and big floppy dress hat.  This year the school chose the outfits and ordered them from El Kilo. Saved a lot of messing about of course but in typical Tenerife fashion we only just got the blouse and skirt home now (2.p.m. on Thursday the day before the big event) to fix or fiddle with if it is too big or small.

As is traditional, all the parents will be there, stepping on each others toes and jostling for position to get the best shots of their babies. It is all in good fun but if you should be there and happen to get a belt in the ribs, well, I apologise in advacne but you really should know better than to get between a mum and her dookied-up darlings.

Earlier on today, I posted about a child kidnap that was supposed to have occurred in Tenerife a day or so ago. At the time I felt sick to my stomach that a young child was in grave danger and I rushed to publish in the hope that, as the message  says below, it would help get the news out and may save the girl from being taken off the island.

Now, thanks to the intervention of Parque and DJandDeid of Tenerife Forum, I know that the information I received was false and I am just sick to the stomach that someone would think that anything of this nature was good subject matter for a hoax.

Why would anyone think this was funny? They even went to the lengths of including the picture of a littl girl, which I have since removed from the post.  I am sure I am not alone in publishing this information and feeling rather stupid right now… but what about the next time?  This stupid joke will make it much harder to get the message out when a child really is taken or goes missing

I was very silly to publish the information without checking its veracity and I apologise wholeheartedly to anyone that was unintentionally mislead and upset.

Original post:

A three year old child was kidnapped from the Taimaimo area one day ago. Elise was apparently taken by two men and a woman who were in a beige or brown SEAT Panda. Please do what you can to get the picture out there.  Please God, let this not be another Maddie or Yerami.

Alerta por el secuestro ayer de esta niña de 3 años  y medio  , Elise, en Tamaimo, Sur de Tenerife. Sus secuestradores, dos hombres y una mujer, viajan en un Seat Panda TF-7633-V (color beige o marrón).

En previsión de que puedan pasar a la península con ella, haz circular este este mensaje con la foto. Gracias…

In cartoons, when a character gets his finger stuck in an electric socket he  turns into a leaping blue skeleton all frazzled and smoking round the edges. It happens quite regularly in Tom and Jerry,  almost always to Tom.

I might not look like a leaping, frazzled, blue skeleton, but that is how I feel. I am Tom.

Something mysterious has happened to the size of my day. Sort of like my favourite Guess jeans,  the day has shrunk and left me unable to squeeze as much in as I used to.  No matter how hard I try, I just can’t pull the day up beyond mid-thigh.

It might look like I have it easy. I just fall out of bed, sleepwalk through breakfast, then bumble to the computer in my jim-jams and there I am, installed at my workplace for the day. No commuting stress to worry about, mad morning clothing  crises, or grumpy boss breathing down my neck…

Well, it might be like that, if it was not for the dogs (up at 6 to walk them) and then the kids to get ready and take to school, (an entertaining adventure which includes the six hundred yard dash to make it to the second school gate after depositing child number one at the first one).  Okay, but surely when I get back from the school run, I just  sit down in front of the computer and that’s me set for the day? Ahhh, no.

The minute the key turns in the door I am attacked by 85 kilos of canine. Tito yodels and slobbers  in delight usually anointing me from head to toe in strings of doggy spit while Skye weaves round my legs  doing the Boxer kidney-bean thing. I push my way through them and survey the battlefield that is my house every morning (and most afternoons and nighttimes too).

I switch the computer on to boot up while  I throw the dishes in the sink and drown them in scalding water and switch the kettle on. Finally, cup of tea in hand, I sit down in front of the computer and KABAM! another bloody power cut! YAAARGH.

Poor Tenerife Tattle is one of the things that is suffering at the moment. Being my own baby, there’s no one to complain if I skip a post now and then except my regular readers (and I have apologised personally to each and every one of them). Unfortunately my real babies are also getting less attention than usual, a fact that came home to me the other day, when my daughter came home with a special project for her tarea. She had to draw her national flag but didn’t know which country she came from.

It is not a clear cut question actually as she has a salad bowl of cultures to choose from in her heritage – although she knows that I am Scottish.  Wanting to do something different, she opted for the Union Jack instead of the St. Andrew’s Cross for obvious reasons. Even so, the conversation we had about it led me to fret that I was not doing enough to pass on any Scottish culture to her.

Seeing as it has been quite some time since I Stripped the Willow and my Scottish dancing skills were never that hot to begin with I decided to take the easy road and start her Scottish culture classes with a spot of home cooking.

God in Govan, what a nightmare! My daughter watched me tip a kilo of sugar and a healthy knob of butter into a pan and asked me if I was quite sure that I had read the  recipe. I told her all was well, and that this recipe for Scottish fudge was said to be failsafe.  (With a name like Scottish Fudge Fer Dunderheids it had to be).

We both watched and waited for the suger to turn to syrup and I regaled her with happy memories of toffee and tablet making in my younger years.  All was warm and fuzzy and I felt like we were having a real girly moment till she yawned and said she’s better go and do her homework. “Fudge!” I muttered to myself darkly, stirring what was becoming a very dark and sticky mess.

At the point where the condensed milk is supposed to glide into the pot, the whole damn thing exploded in a Vesuvial eruption of burning sugar. My husband let out a manly scream and leapt to the fore with a metal whisk. After he beat it into submission (and to the point when all hope of fudge had flown out the window) I took over the pot again. My daughter had returned and sat cross legged watching all the excitement. “Is it supposed to smell like that?” she enquired sweetly, wrinkling her nose.

In the end, my Dunderheid Fudge turned out to be Toothcracking Toffee. In order to make anything at all out of the sticky mess, I had rolled lumps of it into little balls and stuck them out of sight in the fridge. Now there they sit, looking like black bullets and welded so hard to the plate that you have to chip them off with a knife.

I think it is safe to say that so far, my daughter is not very impressed with the riches of the Scottish culinary tradition.

I received a message of sympathy from wee Margaret, a Scottish fudge-maker of consummate skill who urged me to give it another go.  Margaret is right of course, and my daughter and I have a date carved in stone to spend more time messing up the kitchen together. In the end, it doesn’t matter if we ever manage the perfect Scottish fudge. By not giving up we are putting a different Scottish lesson into practise – Robert the Bruce’s exhortation to ‘Try, try and try again’.

Modern Halloween, as in kids getting dressed up and going trick-or-treating, is not a traditional Spanish festival. In fact, the Spanish Bishops are getting a bit hot under the collar about the whole thing and are urging parents not to dress up their kids in costumes in celebration of this pagan event.

That doesn’t seem to bother my neighbour, Lola, much. She has been fussing and fretting over her kids’ costumes since the beginning of the month and seems quite bewildered at my lukewarm attitude. To be honest, I am just delighted that Gaga and her sidekick, Linda, are going to be throwing a party for the local kids which gives me the excuse to go out for a bit of kid-free gallivanting of my own. Let’s face it, Sami is a wee diablo for much of the year anyway, while Hania, well let’s just say she can be a little bruja when she feels like it.

Regardless of what the Bishops have to say, you can guarantee that unless you are smart and offl0ad the kids and shoot off out for the night or sit in pitch blackness with the telly off, your front door is going to ring off its hinges on Saturday night. So, just to help you out, I have prepared a little  list so that you  may have the right response handy.

Just fill in the blanks…

¡Caramba! ¡Qué un esqueleto espantoso! (Yikes! What a scary skeleton!)

• monster = monstruo
• witch = bruja
• fantasma = ghost
• vampiro = vampire
• werewolf = hombre lobo
• zombi = zombie

If you are having a party of your own, then there is nothing that screams Halloween more than pumpkin soup for which Andy Montgomery has provided a devilish recipe in the new online Tenerife Magazine.

And finally, I’d like to leave you with a little Halloween riddle that has bothered me for some time. Why do witches never have babies? Because warlocks have hollow weenies. Bwahahahah

Yippeeee! Only a few days to go till Tenerife schools are in!

Having had the week from hell (or to be honest the last thirteen weeks from hell)  I am prepared to admit that mothering is not my forte. Love them to pieces as I do, I find my two darlings in concentrated doses makes me go more than a little round the bend. How I envy those unruffled women who glide through parenthood so smoothly while magically keeping their homes clean and sparkling at the same time.

In comparison at the end of each day my hair is standing on end and I am having palpitations at the scary thought of the mountain of clothes to be washed toppling over and suffocating me in the middle of the night. Then having finally said my last goodnight and waiting half an hour for the inevitable squabble and squawk to die down in the kids bedroom I can then enjoy a precious nugget of silence before Tito starts baying his silly head off at some innocent person out walking their dog past the garden gate.

Having never been a religious person I am more and more drawn to the vow of silence.

But I digress. Back to school or at least back to the subject of school. Oddly where in the past the little ones were taken in a day earlier so that they could get settled, it seems this year that the intake for both infantil and primaria is on the same time at the same day. That can’t be right, surely?

With one set of buildings on each side of a main road and a janny (a janitor to those who do not speak Scottish) who seems to take great delight in ramming the gates shut if you are a nanosecond past the 9.10 am while galloping from one school building to the other, there will be utter chaos on Tuesday.

There is also the matter of the subsidised school books. At third year in Primary, my daughter is entitled to have her text books paid for by the cabildo but what a holy mess they made of that last year.  The list of books was not handed out till the last minute and there were not enough books on the whole island to cover the demand.  If this is your first year dealing with the state school system in Tenerif e you can get an idea of what to expect by reading  The Tenerife TexBook Fiasco and Tenerife Textbooks – the Saga Continues.

So with crossed fingers and a song of hope in my heart I am skipping off down to the school reception this morning with my babies in tow to find out just WTF is going on. Tra la la.

My own two kids go to state school in Tenerife and have done since entering pre-school at the age of three. Overall, my impressions of their experiences have been good. The eldest, my daughter, had a difficult start as we had not been successful in getting her settled in a Spanish guarderia (nursery) for the months before she started pre-school. She had’nt been immersed in a totally Spanish environment up to that point and it took about three months for her to find her feet.

My son had been in a Spanish guarderia first and had watched me drop his sister off at the Infantil section of her school for the previous two years. He sailed through the doors on his first day without a backward glance at his snivelling mother.

Now both are fluent English and Spanish speakers and are happy at school with many friends and a real fondness for their teachers. My daughter at only eight is showing a proficiency in French which she is picking up from her myriad French relatives who descend upon us on a regular basis.

My situation is obviously different from those who move to Tenerife or elsewhere in Spain with older kids in tow. What with the stage of the education process that they are at and the squeaky onset of puberty the pre and early teens are tricky enough to negotiate without throwing unnecessary hurdles at your child after all. What is the best solution for getting your kids settled in the Spanish education system if they are entering after the primary years?

Graham Hunt of Houses for Sale in Spain and author Nick Snelling discuss the options and the choices they made for their children in an interesting audio interview which I’m sure will be very helpful to those facing this decision.

The kids finished school on Tuesday but today was the day we had to go and get Hania’s report. Although I don’t really agree with an over-emphasis on grades at this time – I mean she is only seven! – I was still thrilled with her great marks  especially as she is studying in a second language. The teacher couldn’t say enough good things about my daughter while I sat there and wondered who it was she was getting her confused with.

As a prize for doing so well I took Hania to a toyshop and bought a present for her and her brother but first we went into the bank. I’d recently got a junior account in her name and this was her first time to put money in.  While we waited our turn, I gave her €10 and her bright yellow bank book and told her the lady behind the counter would put the money in her book.

“But is she going to give me it back”, asked Hania.

“No. You give her the money and she puts it in the bank and you’ll see the amount you’ve given her written up in your bank book.”

She looked at me in total disbelief and asked, “Are you mad?”

Ha.