W has gone on a school trip with our eldest daughter today - acting as a helper. I’m almost apprehensive about the state she will return in.
In her absence I have been doing everything possible to grease the wheels in our house and make the day pass as easily as possible. This morning was a crayon festival in the lounge - doing a 3 foot long Jackson Pollack inspired wax crayon mural with the children.
Lunch was a break from “the norm” - and partly a reaction to last night when the youngest kids hardly touched their dinner. We had beans on toast, which they thought was fan-bloody-tastic - followed up by Muller rice, and an orange each. I had to chisel the beans off the middle child’s face, and pull sauce out of her hair afterwards. Her eagerness to get the food in her mouth seemed to outweigh making the knife and fork arrive at the right place in her face.
This afternoon they are having spectacular space hopper crashes and building sand castles in the back garden. Thankfully the weather is good which is making the constant stream of entertainment much easier. Inbetween being Dad, I am doing washing, drying towels, washing dishes, and tidying up. Amazingly it’s all going remarkably well so far.
Throughout the last few weeks both W and I have been waiting for some kind of “major thing” to happen that we have no tools to deal with. It hasn’t happened yet, and we have no idea where it might come from, but we both fear “it”, whatever it might be. There has to be something somewhere that is going to trip us all up spectacularly…
If you have kids, or little ones in your family, what caught you out?
Postscript - I just wandered into the back garden to check on the children after writing this, and thought “where have the chickens gone?” - and discovered they had all escaped into next door’s garden. Rather than leave the kids alone, I cut a hole in the fence, and enticed the chickens back with promises of corn and slugs… and then set about repairing the fence. I also set about fixing every other damn hole in the fence while I was at it.