Today I took off work a few minutes early to go and watch a Rules of the Road presentation at Nina's creche. The creches here are great, they have earthquake preparation courses, fire drills, emergency drills, suspicious persons awareness classes and road safety days.
Nina's class are still recovering from the "suspicious persons awareness" class. The school (all female teachers) had some man come in dressed suspiciously and try and drag some of the kids off. Worked a treat, now all the baby class are terrified of men who aren't their fathers or grandfathers. I see the point and I believe that the whole thing was explained in full to the 3 and 4 year olds well in advance. However as you can imagine the heads of 3 and 4 year olds are full of important stuff like princess dresses, power rangers and Anpanman, so there was no room for an explanation on acting/role playing. The following day half the mothers from Nina's class had to drag the children kicking and screaming to class because they were so scared of the strange man coming back. Nina survived because she probably didn't understand that much and hangs out with a pretty auspicious crowd (we foreigners) so it didn't have the same effect, all though she's not keen on men in woolly hats lately.
Today's Road Safety course was no exception. Two lovely female police officers and a male officier came in with their kiddie flash cards and went through all the rules and road accident scenarios.
It went a bit like this.
Police Woman: Now who can tell me what important piece of safety equipment begins with H?
Kids: Helmet.
P.W: And why is it important to wear a helmet?
Boy A: If you don't you'll die.
P.W: You could die, that's true. But what happens when you fall over and scratch your knee?
Boy A: Loads of blood comes gushing out.
P.W: That's true. Now who can tell me what's in your head.
Kids: Your brains bits. Blood. Jelly bits. White stuff (the list was pretty long actually).
P.W: Very good. Now when you hit your head sometimes the blood doesn't come out but your brain gets an awful bashing and shaking. It could be very serious.
Boy A: You could die (this child is obsessed with death).
P.W: You might or you could get brain damage and you wouldn't be able to see, or maybe you couldn't hear, your arms and legs mightn't work. You'd be in a right mess.
Girl: You wouldn't be able to eat your dinner.
P.W: Exactly, somebody might have to feed you. That's why it's very important to wear a helmet.
I doubt you could have this conversation at home in Ireland, well maybe you could but I guarantee some parents would be on the phone by 5pm. Now road laws are strict here but they're a bit behind with child seats, think Ireland circa 1990. The laws are in but not everybody is abiding by them yet.
Here's another excerpt from today's lesson.
P.W: Now, can anyone tell me why it's important to sit in a child seat?
Boy A: 'Cos if your Mammy crashes you could get thrown out the window, hit your head on the road and die.
P.W: That's true, you'd go flying out of the car and maybe die.
Boy B: There'd be loads of blood and brain bits on the road too.
P.W: Very true, so it's very important to always sit in your child seat. I'm sure ALL your Mammy's have child seats in the car.
Boy B: Mine doesn't.
Girl: Neither does mine. Maybe we should wear our helmets in the car?
Soon after this I had to scoop up Nina and leave or we would have been late picking up Aimee. I did however manage to catch the first 5 minutes of the senior police officer with her ventriloquist dummy doing a rules of the road skit. You couldn't pay for such entertainment.
