What we learnt from Coleen Rooney's I'm A Celebrity family prep
Listen, Coleen Rooney didn’t get to where she is today by being a slouch. She is a details woman. Look at the face, the bod, the hair. The pursuit of any person in her social circle who sells stories about her to the tabloids. She does not mess about.
So I was not at all surprised to see that Rooney’s preparations to go into the jungle for I’m A Celebrity without her four sons (Kai, 14, Klay, 11, Kit, eight and Cass, six), had military-grade precision.
I always imagine that rich people swan off abroad, without a care, whenever they want, leaving their children with two nannies, a cook and a Mandarin teacher for company.
But perhaps Rooney is more down to earth than I give her credit for and it’s pretty fascinating to see the minutiae she has gone into.
I wonder what we can all learn?
She has two massive whiteboards
These are covered in schedules and instructions – on both sides. Telling her Instagram followers that she has been very anxious about leaving her children while she goes to Australia, she explains that the whiteboards are covered 'front and back [with] four weeks of timetables, football runs, parties and everything'.
What, only two?
What jumps out at me is that it’s only four whiteboards-worth of instruction. I’ve got two children – a girl of 13 and a boy of 11 - and if I went away for a month I would be writing on the walls, the windows, drawing arrows and diagrams. There would be a manual on the kitchen table that would run to several hundred pages. My son alone has six different uniform changes per week for various school and sports commitments and if you don’t remind him daily, he will leave his wet swim kit in his locker until it disintegrates.
People might ignore them..
Writing plenty of instructions is a given, but you do have to accept that people might ignore them, or not even read them. I once went out for the day – a single day – when my eldest was three months old and left her with my mother. Along with the bottles, nappies and the pink rabbit that played a tune when you pulled a cord out of its cotton-tail, I left four pages of typed instructions. What to feed her, when, how. What time to put her down for her nap, where, exactly how dark it should be and what time to wake her up.
I arrived home at 4pm to find my baby fast asleep in the crook of my mother’s arm, (she was supposed to be woken no later than 2pm!), while my mother read out bits of the instruction manual to my sister on the phone and laughed like a drain.
As far as whiteboards go, I have two: one in the kitchen and one in the kids’ bathroom. My children are encouraged to write down on the kitchen whiteboard any foodstuff they finish or need, to help with my shopping list. The whiteboard in the bathroom contains various laundry and face-washing instructions.
My children completely ignore both whiteboards. 'Read the whiteboard!' I shriek, exasperated. 'The what?' they say.
An army of friends and family can help
Rooney has also drafted in “an army” of friends and family to help her, which is all very sensible but what if you don’t have an army of friends and family? What if your family lives far away and your friends are only just about managing their own children? Perhaps 'friends and family' is a euphemism for 'nannies, housekeepers and cooks', which would make much more sense. But I don’t have an army of those, either.
There is power in a hand-written card.
Rooney left cards and a teddy behind for each boy on the day she departed, so that her children would find them when they got home from school and know that she was 'constantly thinking about them'. I once went away for four days with my husband when my children were five and seven because I thought it was completely insane that we had never done this. My children went to stay with my mum, again. I definitely hit Rooney levels of pre-planning and organisation for that trip. I packed outfits for each day, in labelled bags. I also left them a wrapped toy and a note – also labelled with the day of the week - to open every day I was away.
You can probably guess by now what happened when I got back, which was that I discovered that they had worn the same clothes every day and the gifts had gone completely unnoticed in their bags. Instead, they both fought over a stone they found in my mother’s garden that looked 'like a dog'. (It didn’t.)
And finally...
In the end there’s not much you can do to assuage the range of emotions created when you, as a parent, go away without your children. All the lists and the planning is helpful, sure, but it’s really all done to make you, as a mum, feel less anxious, (and guilty), about it all. Do children need quite that level of micromanaging to survive? No, of course not. Will that stop mums like me and Coleen Rooney? Not a chance.
In the end, the army doesn’t exist that can keep children’s lives on track quite like their own mother. Kai, Klay, Kit and Cass will, for sure, have quite the adventure without Coleen, I just hope they manage to change their clothes at least once.
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