(sheepish look) You'll have to forgive my absense. The irritating thing is, the more material I have to write about my life, the less time I have to actually blog about it, so I have a bit of a backlog of unfinished ones to bring. Here's the first, more to follow when I can find the time...
Monday 6th April
This morning I was awoken at 7.15 by a small boy peering into my face and asking if I could put the Mr Men show on for him. I growled something and rolled off the bed and into my dressing gown. I went downstairs and picked out the program from the TV menu with blurry eyes, and then another child very unwittingly howled at me, ‘I want my milk NOWW!’
As we have covered before, I am not a morning person. Neither is the child in question. He knew exactly what he would get from a request like that, but his internal wisdom had not yet woken up, and neither had my patience. I decided to avoid conflict, and I blanked him. He didn’t take the hint and it took a lot of screaming and a long stint on the naughty step before he would calm down and make a polite request, in which time I had had my cup of tea, the others had all drunk their milk and we had all had breakfast.
On with the school preparations. I had warned them all not to mess around at all because Daddy is away with work and so I am flying solo. I counted them into their clothes and made them all line up ten minutes early with their shoes and bags on and ready. We were about to head out of the door when Crash suddenly wailed something intelligible. I turned round to look, and there was blood dripping off his nose. He had chosen that moment (bored, stood waiting at the door with nothing to do with his hands) to rip a small scab off the front of his nose. From the noise, I made out, ‘I meed a plaster!!’ I ran back to kitchen and got tissue, Savlon and a box of plasters and administered the first aid to him on the street. The tears and the bleeding seemed to stop quite quickly but now I had a son who looked like he had been in a boxing match on the first day back to school. The unruly look was exasperated, I realised as I was seeing them off across the schoolyard, by Turtle wearing his shoes on the wrong feet, and Scooby’s jumper being on back to front. I think I need to add to my checklist in the morning, ‘Item 257: Really, actually, properly LOOK at the children before they leave the house.’ At the moment I tend to be happy with a head and lunchbox count on the way out of the door.
Me and Baby came back to survey the desecration that had occurred in the house during the Easter holidays and work out where to begin. Baby thought that pulling all the shoes out of the cupboard was a good start; my preference was a cup of tea and an itemised list.
I spend all six hours of school time cleaning, reorganising things and recycling carefully preserving all the artwork they had created and dumped in the dining room. Three o’clock came round too fast, so I left what I was doing, picked up Baby and got ready to head out of the door, and then realised that my keys were not where I thought they were. I usually leave them on the sideboard in the dining room, but I had emptied all the contents of the sideboard onto the table while I dusted and reorganised it. The table was now covered with contents I had found scattered around the ground floor while cleaning, and were waiting to be sorted and put away. My heart sank. I put down Baby and very carefully began moving things around the table, trying not to mix up the different piles as I looked underneath them all. Baby helped by trying to dispose of the dusty-cereal-hoops-and-toast-crusts pile. I looked through every item, but no keys. I went back to the sideboard and moved everything on there, but no keys. I tried the floor, down the back of the sideboard, even in the shoes that were under the sideboard, but no keys. It was 3.10, school finished at 3.15 and it took six minutes to get in the car and drive across town, without finding a parking space at the other end. Panic panic panic. I began going up and down the house, into every room I had been in that day, which was all of them, and making bargains with God for what I would do for those keys. I looked to see if Richard had left his spare car keys. No, they must be with him in Ireland too. Darn it, darn it, darn it. Eventually, at twenty-five past three, I looked on the dining room floor, and there they were. On the floor. The floor that I had looked at about seven times, simply behind the table, between a table leg and a chair leg. That’s where they had been the whole time. I was hoping for a really dramatic story to tell at school when I got there late, like ‘Baby stole my keys and threw them in the toilet’, or ‘Baby tried to feed the keys into the video player’, but no, for once he had kept his meddling fingers to himself, and I was just stupid.
On the plus side, there were plenty of parking spaces by the time I got to school.
Next on the agenda was a trip to the supermarket. Don’t look at me like that, I never usually take all the children shopping with me at all, but I had been on a tidying roll at home and didn’t want to disturb it, and it’s probably good for the children’s life education experiences if they get to visit the supermarket once or twice before their thirteenth birthdays. I was prepared and had a list for Turtle to read to the others so they would all have things to focus their avid attentions on instead of creating havoc. We chanted the rules on the way in: ‘Stay next to Mummy; don’t touch anything; repeat’, and skipped straight past the DVDs, computer games and toys and straight to the vegetable aisle. And they were very good! They took it in turns to put the things I gave them into the trolley, they stayed where I could see them, they only asked for thirty or forty things they couldn’t have, and they didn’t smash the trolley into a single other shopper’s ankles. In fact, the only rule breaker was me, who after successfully whizzing them from the canned goods to the cereal without letting them see the crisps, chocolate or biscuit aisles, realised that Baby was no longer holding the shopping list. I do realise that giving the eighteen month old that kind of responsibility was not the best thing to have done, and also that at the end of the shopping trip, most people with a half a brain would manage to remember the two items that were left to get, but I don’t have half a brain left. I have donated large chunks of it to each child, and I am not sure how much of it I have left. Nor am I sure when they are going to start using their designated chunks.
So, because I didn’t want to have to make another trip for a vital item I’d forgotten, and I didn’t want to run past the sweetie aisles again, I said to them, ‘Boys, I need to go back, but I want you to stay. Everybody put their hand on the trolley. Hands on the trolley and don’t let go. Keep your hand on the trolley and stay next to the trolley and don’t move away from the trolley.’ I had run out of different ways to say it, so I said ‘Do you understand?’ and they nodded very solemnly at me.
I left them and sprinted back the route we had come, back to the last point I knew I had seen Baby holding the list (that place where my reason had failed to kick in and say ‘Hey! Baby holding list = not a good idea!’) but there was no sign of it. Darn it. I turned and ran back to the cereal aisle.
Here’s the good bit. The children had, very true to my instructions, not released their hands from trolley, nor had they moved away from the trolley, and were, in fact, still next to the trolley. The only trouble was, that the trolley was no longer in the cereal aisle.
Thankfully, they hadn’t got far, only as far as the bakery section (and nearly in the bakery itself but I got to them in time), which reminded me of the next item, which was bread. A bag of frozen sausages later, and we were at the till. My little helpers unpacked the contents of the trolley for me and found the list, which, again, rather undramatically, was in the most obvious place I should have looked, which was just the trolley itself. I held Baby’s fingers away from the packets of chewing gum and the credit card machine while Crash told everyone else in the queue, very loudly and proudly, ‘That’s ours!’ and held up every item between our ‘Next Customer Please’ signs to show to the other shoppers.
Out of the supermarket, we got home safely and they all helped me to put the food away in the kitchen. I was a bit stumped at the absence of some items, but it all made sense when I searched the bin and found that Baby had helped by lobbing them in there.
At some point, Crash did something. I can’t remember what, but it was worthy of sending him to his room, so up he went. I followed him up and then went into the bathroom, at which point the secret invisible sensor that I cannot find or switch off was alerted – the one that triggers the bladder of every other person in the house. Scooby hurtled himself into the room yelling ‘I meed a wee!’ so I graciously stepped aside and gave him priority, and went into the laundry room to put on a fresh load in there. Nearly hopping myself, I went back once Scooby had finished, only to find that he had decorated the toilet seat and the surrounding area with a generous sprinkling of his fluids. I curse the school for having urinals and teaching them the trick I kept from them for so long – that little boys can pee standing up. I crossed my legs and used a handful of disinfectant wipes to purge the area, and finally it was my turn. But I had forgotten to shut the bathroom door. Three seconds later, Baby walked in, grinned at me, and lobbed the Sky remote control into the bath. As I strained to check that the tub was completely dry, he decided to play a game of open-the-door-shut-the-door-open-the-door-shut-the-door as forcefully as he could, then, sensing my helplessness, toddled into the laundry room next door, which I had also forgotten to shut the door on. As I scrambled to finish my business and get to him, I could hear all number of buttons and dials on the machine being operated as it spun round in mid-cycle.
Finally I wrestled him away, took him back downstairs and began to make tea, counting down the minutes till bedtime. Forty-five minutes later, it was on the table and with the others sat down, I began to search the house for Crash, wondering why on earth I hadn’t heard anything from him for over an hour. I found him in his room, quietly reading books and began praising him for his good behaviour when I suddenly realised that the reason he was here in the first place was because I had put him in here for some misdemeanour and then abandoned him. I couldn’t even remind him why I’d put him there because I couldn’t remember either, so I told him firmly that his five minutes were up and brought him back downstairs.
We ate, we bathed, we brushed teeth, and then encountered a minor hiccup when I went to get pyjamas out of the dresser to discover that there were no handles on the drawers. Obviously, this was my punishment for forgetting about him for so long – Crash had decided to get creative. I quizzed him for a while before he admitted that they were all stuffed in the cavity between the bedroom floor and the bathroom ceiling (which we really need to hole up at some point) and they were returned to their original positions so the children could finish getting ready for bed.
Frazzled and tired, I churned out the shortest story I could find, tucked them all up and was thinking about my precious me-time downstairs with a cup of tea and a chick flick, when Turtle cuddled me round the neck from his bed and said ‘Mummy, I love you. You’re so beautiful.’ My heart melted as I kissed him goodnight and said ‘Ahh, that’s lovely darling, thankyou so much. I love you too and if you dare come down those stairs tonight, there’ll be no TV for the rest of the week. Goodnight sweatheart.’
I can't start a really good book unless I know I'm properly ill and will actually be in bed for two days straight.