Boys will be boys. Or will they?

Yesterday, I sat in a sweaty church hall. I was one of around 50 parents desperately fanning themselves to keep cool in the muggy atmosphere created by summer sun beating down on the corrugated roof of a building packed with too many people.

As I shifted in my moulded plastic seat, my thighs sticky with sweat I noticed that the accouterments collecting around the other parents feet - lunch boxes, water bottles, spare shoes, unnecessary cardigans, reading books - were almost universally pink and sparkly. Fairies, unicorns and unfeasibly cute kittens were strong motifs.

As the mother of four boys, this should be a strange environment for me to find myself in. But I felt right at home. We were waiting to watch my middle son take part in a musical that he had spent the previous week rehearsing at a holiday drama scheme. As the other participants trooped onto the stage the reason for the sea of pink glitter became evident. He was one of just four boys - but that's just normal in my household. 

Ballet boys

My eldest and my youngest have both learned ballet and in every class they were the only boys standing, pirouetting or arabesqueing. For the two years that my eldest took ballet classes I was a mother alone holding a navy blue coat or chatting about superheroes as we waited for the class to start. 

I was the only mother who had to soothe tears because their child was not allowed to wear a beautiful pink skirt to dance in, but instead was relegated to boring black leggings, the only mother who had to explain gently why my boy had to dance with a flag, rather than the much more appealing glittery pom poms the girls got to wave around. 

It's been tough being the mother of boys, but not in the way that most people would imagine it to be. I have never washed muddy rugby kit, I have never shivered beside a football pitch, or even had to endure one on the TV, I don't have to deal with wrestling on the floor or with cuts and bruises from playground scraps. 

It's not easy being blue

Instead I have to buoy up confidence that it's OK to be different, that just because you are the only boy who loves pink and dolls, that's just fine. If you would rather read a book than kick a ball around it will probably be the best life choice you can make (that is unless you have the skills of a budding premier league player - see I don't even know an appropriate name to slot in here). 

The number of times I have been jokingly told that with four boys we almost have enough for a five-a-side football team, only to quietly think to myself that I am more likely to end up with a corps de ballet. 

It's not that my children don't show any male traits - they are messy, loud and addicted to computer games - it's just that they just don't fit any of those other obvious boy stereotypes. 

Think different

Not that it matters to me, as I watch typical boys struggle and fail in comparison to girls when it comes to exams and career success, I am wholeheartedly glad that my sons are much closer to the female of the species. At my eldest's end of term prize giving ceremony once again he stood out as one of very few boys who was honoured with an award. But I couldn't have been prouder to have brought up a boy who swims against the crowd. All those lunch hours spent happily buried in a book are really beginning to pay off. 

While I am all for girls being allowed to do just what they want, to play with trucks and become front line soldiers, perhaps the parents of boys should be equally keen to break down gender stereotypes, if only to ensure their sons don't get left behind playing footie in the park, while the girls scoop up all the prizes. 

For the budding arsonist in your family

Boys and fire are a magnetic combination. My eldest has never been able to resist the lure of box of matches and often had to be restrained from dragging all flammable items from the house in order to see if he could set fire to them. Now his particular obsession with all things incendiary could be dismissed as a mildly disturbing one off, but then along came his little brother and cousin .

They spent one sunny afternoon last summer engrossed in setting fire to elastic bands on my brother-in-law's patio. The acrid scent of burning rubber filled the summer afternoon, like the barbecue from hell. Clearly my oldest boy was not a one off.

Then friend told me how she once came home to find her home filled with thick, dark smoke and her middle boy standing in the kitchen looking sheepish. The source of the smoke? Her kitchen bin, which he had fashioned into a makeshift indoor fire pit that he had been using to burn much of the contents of her kitchen cupboards just to see which was the most impressively flammable.

This, I conclude, is enough evidence to prove that boys + fire = happy, if, slightly singed, sons. The problem is finding a way in which they can play with fire without setting fire to ether themselves or the family home. Solution, a neat little kit sent to me by Certainly Wood, which is ideal for the fire mad child in your life, although with appropriate adult supervision to guard against third-degree burns.

Delivered in a smart green box, it contains enough logs and natural firelighters to create a sufficiently impressive blaze for the most fire mad child, plus, and this is the draw for any children who less impressed by the sizzle of blazing bonfire, a kit to create your own Brit version of the American 'delicacy' s'mores.

As with all snacks of American origin, these are over the top, sickly sweet and absolutely irresistible to children. For the uninitiated they are fashioned from two biscuits, a slab of chocolate and a fire roasted, molten marshmallow.

So we kicked off by lighting our fire, a job that my 11-year-old fire fanatic grabbed as his own. So sticks and ingenious natural firelighters, which look a bit like tiny bales of hay, were neatly stacked in the barbecue and leapt into bright yellow flame at the touch of a match.

As a family with our own wood burning fireplace, I know this is a sign of quality. So many times my husband is left cursing over poorly seasoned logs that steam and belch smoke, but refuse to light. The wood in this pack was of a much more amenable nature and, even when we popped on one of the larger logs into the fire, it burnt merrily with no need to cajole it into flame with extra kindling.

Once our fire was burning away it was on to the fun bit and the whole FDMTG crew were equipped with s'more ingredients. Out came the cookies, the supplied chocolate hadn't fared well being stored in a overwarm house so we substituted it for some of our own stash of Cadburys and the most important ingredient - the marshmallows.

Soon all the boys were happily toasting away over the flames. There were tears when one marshmallow escaped its skewer and dived to certain death in the fire, but overall the horribly messy combination of charred marshmallow, chocolate and cookies was a hit. Faces were smeared with sticky goo, chocolate formed impressive moustaches above their upper lips, and the ensuing sugar rush was just what the doctor ordered right before bedtime.

Given that it is the season of bonfires this was certainly a way to indulge a fascination with both fire and food. We even had enough top notch logs left over to have a fire of our own with them the next night and they blazed away just as merrily then, though after having scrubbed the children clean following the previous night's sweet snack extravaganza no marshmallows were allowed near the flames!

Boyhood

As the mother of four sons how could I resist a film called Boyhood? Richard Linklater's intimate portrayal of 12 years in the life of an average Texas family is compelling viewing for anyone who is in the process of rearing a family. It explores the formative years of a boy called Mason, whilst taking in the lives of those around him including his divorced parents and sister Sam, played by Linklater's own daughter.

As it was filmed over 12 years in real life there are none of the unconvincing prosthetics or awkward jumps between different child and teen actors. Instead the real growing pains of the children involved are captured in all their celluloid glory. It shows the main character's growth from a cute six year old into a disaffected and pretentious teen without pulling any punches. In fact, Ellar Coltraine, who plays Mason, says he cringed as he watched himself literally grow up onscreen.

It is probably this realism that makes the film so compelling. At almost three hours long I was convinced I would be twitching in my seat long before the end, bored by a self indulgent director's inability to edit his own work. Instead I was riveted. Mason's family isn't that similar to mine, there were just two children instead of four, mum and dad were divorced and the family lives a peripatetic life of moves, new partners, siblings and schools, but some things are universal.

I got a not entirely pleasant insight into what young boys get up to when unsupervised. It appears that this revolves around sex and drink, with a few soft drugs thrown in for good measure. This is not particularly comfortable viewing for a mother of pre-teens, but I guess it lets me know what I am in for.

But scene after scene tugged at my heartstrings as I saw my future, or at least a version of it, played out in front of me. I watched as Mason pushed his mother away when she went to give him a goodbye kiss at his new school, as he was embarrassed by her pride in his graduation and most heart wrenching of all the scene where he leaves home for college. His sobbing mother declares it the worst day of her life, and I was crying along with her at just the thought of my boys leaving home.

It is a fascinating film that kept me captivated from beginning to end. But more than that it made me go home and stroke the baby soft skin of my five-year-old twins with a new found appreciation. It highlighted just how fast time goes with children. The parents compare notes at Mason's graduation party, incredulous that their kids had both left high school. I know that sensation well, where you feel as if just a moment ago you were cradling a baby and now you are making applications to secondary school for that same boy.

It is so easy to rush the business of being a parent. When you are under the daily cosh of school runs, washing, cooking, taxiing and nagging to do homework, tests and music practise, it doesn't feel like a magical time to be treasured. Instead you want to get through the day and into bed with a good book. At least I know that's how I feel, but this film did give me reason to pause.

It made me think about how I am missing the best bits, or at least failing to savour them as I spend so much time grumbling about how hard it is to rear small children. It's not that Boyhood sugar coats the early years. They are shown as the familiar chaotically harassed mess of pick ups, drop offs, arguments about school work and a juggling act of earning a living alongside bringing up children. But when viewed in sharp contrast to the adult years that leap upon us so fast, they take on an altogether more precious feel.

So Mr Linklater thank you for making me smile, cry and pass two and a bit hours in the company of your celluloid family, but more importantly for showing me that I should stop from time to time and relish my boys' boyhood, for it is a just a fleeting moment in a lifetime that passes all too quickly.

The perils of tearjerking TV

I used to be quite heartless. Before giving birth gave me a core of mush in more ways than one, I would  scoff when my mother burst into tears over some heart rending tale of child abduction or a the grisly murder of a girl around my age. I couldn't understand why tales of some stranger's suffering touched her so deeply.

Well the boot is firmly on the other foot now as I was reminded when I watched the Richard Curtis drama Mary and Martha the other day. This rather heavy handed and implausible tale centred on two mother's who had lost their sons to malaria. One of the dead boys was around the same age as my eldest, cue floods of tears at this unremittingly bleak story.

As the two mothers compared notes on their top life moments, starting with the birth of their boys and ending with all the days their sons' had been alive, I was thundering downstairs to shower my sleeping sons in kisses, dripping those maternal tears onto their cheeks as I went. My husband who had rather grumpily been woken by my nocturnal weeping asked, really rather reasonably: 'Well why on earth did you watch a program about children dying?'

While I take his point, sometimes it does me good to remember just how precious my annoying children really are. Having spent the day refereeing various pointless skirmishes over the ownership of toys and whether or not it was a reasonable request to ask a four-year-old to at least attempt to put on his own shoes, it is sometimes hard to hold onto the concept of childhood as a golden time.

Watching the agony of those onscreen mothers who would never again have to remonstrate with their boys about mess, bargain over the eating of a few more vegetables before pudding is back on the menu or nag endlessly in the vain hope this might mean that homework or music practise actually got done, served as a painful reminder of what a gift the mundane actually is.

Of course it would make you into rather a tedious type of person to be walking round in a perpetual state of recognition of what joys your children are. In fact people would soon start to question or mental capacity if you were to don a beatific smile of gratitude as your little terrors thumped one another and whined at you to buy them sweets in the corner shop.

That said it does no harm to indulge in a little bit of a tearjerker from time to time, even if all it means is that for just one morning you might think twice before starting to scream when your seventh suggestion that shoes and coats were put on as it was time to leave for school about ten minutes ago was ignored. If you can hold on until your requests reach double digits then that sad screenplay has done its job.