On Monday morning my phone said "61 new messages" before I'd got my slippers on, and that was just the weekend. I counted one full week in February: 187 messages in Alfie's class group and 113 in Isla's, 300 exactly. I read about a third of them. The rest I scrolled past at speed, looking for the word "tomorrow", and that is how I missed non-uniform day.
It isn't that anything in the groups is unkind. A good fifty messages a week are variations on "Thank you" followed by "No worries" followed by a thumbs up, and there's a long tail of "Has anyone seen a navy PE bag with a stegosaurus on?" Somewhere in there is the one message that matters, and I'm the one who has to find it.
The Friday I got wrong
It was Friday 30 January, non-uniform in aid of the school's book fund, £1 a child on ParentPay. The message went out on the Monday, as message number 212 of the week in the Year 1 group, somewhere between a photo of a lost glove and an argument about whose PE bag was whose. It was also in the newsletter, on the app and in a letter in Alfie's book bag. I had all of it, and I missed all of it.
We found out at the school gate at 8:38, when Alfie looked around and said, quite quietly, "Everyone's got their own clothes on." Zain was in a Leeds United shirt. I stood there in the drizzle doing the arithmetic on a twelve-minute walk home and back, and then I stopped doing it. The teacher said not to worry. Alfie said he wasn't bothered. At tea he said he was bothered, in the voice of a boy who had been bothered all day.
Muting it
So on Monday 9 February I muted both groups. It's a simple thing: you tap the group name and choose to mute it always. You stay in the group, nobody is offended, and the phone stops buzzing. Nobody in either group has done anything wrong. The parents who write are being kind, nearly always, and the lost-glove photos do get gloves back. It's just that 300 messages a week is too many for me to read, and too many to be useful if I can't.
The groups are still there. I look at them twice a week, on purpose, which turns out to be enough.
- Sunday evening, as part of the Sunday sort-out: scroll back to Friday and look for dates, money and anything with a time on it, then copy it to the whiteboard.
- Wednesday at about 3:30, because I do the pick-up that day: a quick look for anything about tomorrow.
That's all. The real calendar comes from the school's Friday newsletter and the ParentPay emails, which I read properly. The groups are for finding lost things and for the occasional person who has lost an argument about a PE bag.
The one alert I keep on
Priya is in both groups, and she and I have our own chat outside either of them. That's the only notification I've left switched on. She texts me when something actually matters ("Non-uniform tomorrow, did you see?"), and I text her when I'm stuck at the office on a Tuesday and need a pick-up swap. It's a very small system, and it works because it only has two people in it. I don't think I'd have had the nerve to mute the groups if I didn't know she'd tap me on the shoulder.
Three weeks in
Since the 9th I've missed nothing that I know of. I knew about World Book Day on Thursday (Alfie's dinosaur is already out of the dressing-up box, and Isla has been practising "Wingardium Leviosa" at the cat), and the date of Isla's netball tournament went straight on the whiteboard. There have been fewer 8:30 surprises, and a quiet in my pocket that I had forgotten was possible. I think I check my phone less in general.
There are costs. I've missed a couple of jokes, and one very long thread about a lost scooter that I gather ended happily. I haven't minded. I may have a reputation now as the mum who never says anything in the group, which I can live with. And last Friday there was a message I'd have liked to see at the time, from a parent who had baked for the cake sale. I caught up on Sunday and sent a thank-you. A day late is still on time, mostly.
