Well the Kid’s Parade went off very nicely yesterday although I did get into trouble for calling it a cabalgata. ‘It’s not a Cabalgata,’ my daughter informed me witheringly, ‘There are no floats!‘

In previous years the kids went dressed pretty much as they liked or possibly as they last had for Halloween which would explain the preponderance of devils, witches and mommias, but this year was different. The school chose the disfrazes and they organized getting them or making them as the case may be.

This made our Kids Parade more like the real thing where the dancing troupes called comparsas wear group costumes and pass the spectators together in a band.

First off were the traffic lights of which I have to apologise to all the other mums because my little semaforo clearly shone the brightest.

There were roving gangs of pirates, chefs in tall paper hats, American tourists in loud shirts brandishing cameras, Hawaiian dancers (who certainly seemed to be having the most fun!) and  ‘Indios de La Palma’, a nod in the direction of the immigrants who left the Canaries for the Americas and a traditional part of the Carnaval of Santa Cruz de La Palma since the ’60s.

My daughter has been teased by one of her classmates lately, who calls her ‘Ugly’. Telling her that little boys are more likely to torture the little girls that they like the best fell on deaf ears I am afraid, but guess who that is on her arm???

Ha! Change the world as much as you like but the little things will always stay the same.

I took many, many photos on Friday and in all the streets are thronged with parents, grandparents, friends and townspeople. As one local said to me,  ”This day makes us all happy. It is not only for the kids but also for the town.”

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.

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.

Well that was interesting. One bolt of lightning and kaboom. Lights out from one end of Tenerife to the other. That certainly inspires confidence in the island’s infrastructure in the event of a real emergency doesn’t it.

This past few months we’ve had a bit of a survivor thing going on anyway watching Les Stroud struggle to feed himself and get a fire started  in various extreme, exposed and uninhabited parts of the globe.  We’ve snorted at Bear Gryls ridiculous efforts to be rugged before nipping off back to his four star for the night and marvelled at Ray Mears’ effortless ability to stay warm, dry and fed in the most unlikely of places.

The 80’s series of Survivors in which 98% of the world’s population is killed off by a deadly virus  attracted our attention for a while. The acting and sets seem a bit jaded now but in a lot of ways it can still hold its own next to last year’s version which finished on a cliff-hanger so all we know  is that after surviving plague, kidnap and a murderous politician, Abbey has now being taken into custody by some mad scientists who are quite willing to kill her to crack the secret of her immunity … oooohhh.

Anyway, you’d think with all that I would be quite well prepared to deal with a couple of electricity-free hours wouldn’t you? I could’ve practiced my skills with my fire key and flint stick, rustled up a few rabbit snares and picked some wild berries and edible leaves. I could have but I didn’t.  Instead I patted my unconscious computer and wandered past the kettle a couple of times before resigning myself to the very mundane task of cleaning my desk. Under piles of to-do lists and Extremely Important Papers! I found my lost ipod shuffle and a bowl of unused sugar sachets. Here’s a picture specially for John who recently cast doubt on the existence of my sugar sachet Spanish stash.

I also walked the dogs and sat for a while watching the clouds gathering in the distance. Though we were anticipating a wild night it didn’t come to much more than a downpour in the early hours of this morning and the sun was out again by the time I took the wee ones to school this morning.

Even so, half the little guy’s class didn’t show up and his teacher led in the fila muttering under her breath about those who were afraid of a little bit of agua.