Carlo is still only two. Last week he started school. Ecole maternelle might have the classroom ambience of a kindergarten, but it is structured as a school. The kids go from 8.30 to 4.30 every day except Wednesday, the harried teacher has a curriculum and issues a detailed report (Maria's ran to eight pages of line by line pass/fail marking). They take lunch together - three courses, naturally - in the school canteen. The playground is filled with bigger kids. It is school - though the primmers.

On his first day he understood that the soft slow days of creche were over, baby. We trotted down to school bright and early, only to be told Dad had messed up and we needed to come back after lunch for the first day. When we finally got into the classroom, he was right at home moving from table to table playing with the equipment, checking out the other kids, batting his eyes at the teacher. All the kids had a parent present. I was the only Dad. We went home after a couple of hours and he was very happy. Some schools apparently let the parents stay for days. Not ours. On Day Two it's drop-off and leave. Parents do not enter the school grounds and long, overly-emphatic signs are posted at the front door to remind us. So on the second day there were floods of tears and pleas not to be abandoned. Carlo was even worse. A week later he is still desperate at the start of each day and exhausted at the end. The teacher says he stops crying as soon as we leave. Well he's not in actual danger, he is not hungry. What can you do.

Maria, on the other hand, has leapt into her new school. This morning I asked her if she likes it better than her old one.

"Yes, because they give us HOMEWORK!"

She can't wait to get more. Sitting down practising writing the letter 'r' in that silly old fashioned script is more fun than Game Boy. (Everyone in France has the same handwriting - attache style. There is one national standard for the way letters should be shaped. It is is a stupid way of writing. But 'everyone must write the same' is a crazy egalite thing). She is in love with her teacher. She is in love with her big school bag. She hectors Dad about the way her school books were neatly covered in plastic, though not quite neatly enough. She hands over her school cahier - with all the school's news and instructions - and informs me that if I can't read it I have to give it to mummy. The rules are clear and hard, and she likes the certainty of knowing what to do. No quarter is given for her language skill: everything is in French. So she speaks all day at home in English but she's learning to read and write in French and I find myself worrying she will only ever read and write in French and struggle in her mother's tongue.

At nearly six she is ready for big school.