It's sports day at the Mother Goose Montessori. The junior infants, also known as the Tigers, are lining up for the obstacle race. Parents with video cameras are jostling for good angles. Others, like me, are wiping away surreptitious tears, so moved are we by the sight of these angelic little faces displaying the full range of emotions - pride, excitement, concentration, confusion, fear.
My little Andrew is led by the hand to join the others, under starter's orders. He looks faintly bemused. They wait. Andrew tries to leave, but a Big Girl puts him back on the line. The whistle goes, parents cheer and Andrew, seeing the others take off, ambles back to sit cross-legged in his comfy spot on the grass.
Make no mistake about it, parents, your tots' performance on Sports Day will set the parameters for many years to come.
If they come in first, second or third, you're home and dry. They'll go happily to summer camps for the next seven years or so. If, however, your little one is standing there looking bewildered or not amused, life is going to be a lot more complicated. What you've got on your hands is an enquiring mind.
"Why are our plastic chairs out on the grass? Why am I expected to crawl under them? Which chair is mine? Whose stupid idea was this? Why can't we go home now?"
Fast forward five years or so. The harbingers of school holiday crisis are flooding in the door. Cheerful hi-yas from the youth clubs, sailing camps, art in the mountains, dance 'n' drama, football, tennis - a range of activities that would have had me singing in the rain during the long, green monotony of the summers of my childhood.
Our holidays were filled with self-styled entertainments. On a good day, skipping or swinging from trees if we could find a rope. Or endless solitary games of tennis against a wall with one's own Virginia Wade commentary. In August, we'd have a pretend Horse Show sans horses, cantering over a course constructed with forked branches stuck in the ground, supporting a cross branch. We would race against the clock and try for clear rounds, energetically thwacking our buttocks with switches as we approached the jumps. Sometimes we'd swim for an Olympic team in the slime of the canal. All the stuff we had no hope of doing for real, now on special offer and up for rejection by our kids.
"NO!" yells Andy, when I mention summer camps. "You said that if we went to computers last year, we wouldn't ever have to go to a camp again."
"I said if you went to computers and learned to type - but you wouldn't practise. If you had, you'd now know how to type for life - like learning to ride a bike." "We learned how to ride a bike - you're never satisfied," cries Andy, returning to a favourite theme.
"What about this one? It's got abseiling, kayaking and life-saving." I'm thinking of my own life here.
"Why can't we just stay at home and play?" says John. Why can't they? Why can't they have time and space to exercise their imaginations? Get together with their friends and explore their environment. Why am I resisting their natural childish desire to make their own fun?
"Because you'll just stay in watching TV and wreck your eyesight playing computer games," I answer.
"But we'll be out of the harmful rays of the sun," John points out smugly.
"Your friends will all be at summer camps and you'll be bored. And I've nobody to mind you." My voice starts to waver.
"Aha. The truth will out!" crows Andy.
"But we don't need minding, Mum. I mind the whole first class at school by myself when Miss Geraghty has to meet a parent or something."
"Do you?" I'm amazed. "How do you keep them quiet?" "Just tell them they're not allowed to do anything. Not allowed talk. Not allowed write on the blackboard. And especially not allowed to go to the toilet."
"And they all do what you say?" I'm keen to discover the secret of his success.
"I just tell 'em," says Andy. I leave it there, knowing he would spot it if I tried to use his own system against him.
Next day I give it another go. I remember the advice of my old boss on salesmanship. Don't tell them they need a pencil. Ask if they want a red or a blue pencil.
"Well," I begin, oozing false bonhomie. "Do you want to go to Irish classes or would you like to do the tennis camp?"
Irish classes. Irish classes?" Andy stops doing his back flips on the bed to give vent to his derision. I remind him that he got 16 per cent in the Irish test last year. "But I got 60 per cent in History. And look at this somersault, Mum."
Seizing the moment, I suggest a gym camp. "You're not the brightest penny in the fountain, are you Mum? I told you yesterday. I'm not going to a summer camp. Not. Going."
To be fair, over the years they have done everything except ballet and needlework. They have sussed that camp has much in common with school. They know that "the focus is on fun" means a lot of it is outdoors, weather permitting, which it mostly doesn't. And that "team participation" means getting picked last as usual.
Later, when I go to dig Andy out of his bedroom to come for a walk, I find him snake-sliding his way across the bed, in a complex series of manoeuvres. "Remember in Mission Impossible?" he says by way of explanation.
I do. Particularly the scene where my favourite French actor is crouched in an airduct, trapped on the tension end of a rope suspending Tom Cruise inches above the laser beams. A rat comes snuffling towards the Frenchman's face and he drops Tom Cruise a notch. "These guys have been through so much mayhem already," I remark to the kids. "Why is he so upset about a rat?" "He's French, Mum," says Andy with a Gallic shrug. "He's probably dying to eat it."
Now suddenly I feel better. Andy shows me how the lasers criss-cross the bed from spotlamp to doorknob to mirror and go zinging back to the window. And how he can slide under them only in the precise moment the bedside clock digit changes; and escape from the room only if he doesn't set off the highly sensitive under-carpet alarm wired into the sound system.
And I realise that there's actually no stopping kids using everything they see as fuel for their imaginations. That, in fact, all the grown-ups have to do is stay out of it and don't spoil it.