I don’t really recall what weekends used to be like.
Mine was pretty much filled with washing up, tidying up, more washing up, more tidying up, shopping for emergency groceries, shopping for emergency groceries again, interspersed with playing with the children, and repeatedly telling them off.
Do you ever have days - or entire weekends - when you feel like all you’ve done is reprimand your children?
I nearly snapped with our youngest earlier. After wondering where she had gone, I started hunting and found her at the top of my in-laws stairs. I had last seen her while escorting her to the downstairs toilet a few minutes before. Some kind of sixth sense kicked in and I checked inside her skirt. No knickers.
“Where are your knickers?”
“Upstairs”
“But you went to toilet downstairs?”
“Upstairs”
“Why did you go to toilet upstairs when I took you to the downstairs toilet?”
“Need a wee wee”
“Do you still need to go?”
“I been wee wee”
“Why did you leave your pants upstairs?”
“Pooh pants”
“Did you poo in your pants?”
“Yeah…”
By now I had flung her into the air, and carried her to the top of the stairs really rather quickly - not enough to hurt her, but fast enough for her to realise I wasn’t happy and we really weren’t playing a game.
We then reach the upstairs bathroom, and Grandad is in there. Suddenly at the prospect of not being able to go in there something clicked in her little head.
“That’s it - you’ve got no knickers to wear now, have you”
Mum appears at the top of the stairs to find out what’s going on - and of course youngest then performs full screaming breakdown where she won’t look at anybody or respond to anything. It also works in making me look like the biggest, meanest villain in creation.
Middle sister arrives at top of stairs. Never one to miss out on somebody else being in trouble, I immediate and firmly ask her to go back downstairs.
I finally ask Wend to go back downstairs so we don’t have any distractions, and little one finally starts listening to me. It turns out she hasn’t had an accident at all, and is re-united with her clothes once more.
She shows me how to get dressed, smiles, pats her skirt down, says “hahhhh” in the happiest manner imaginable, and skips back down the stairs.
This covers about 5 minutes of the weekend. Rinse and repeat for at least once per child per hour for the last two entire days.
The one respite - the final act of the children’s play when they pull you back from the brink with half an hour’s worth of magic was bathtime. I got to bath the younger two this evening for the first time in ages. Smiles, giggles, splashing, squirting of water, soap everywhere, and enough talc to sink a battleship - followed by a big chunk of Peter Pan while they lay in bed listening intently, and repeating the name “Tinkerbell” after me.
As I closed their door, a little voice whispered “can we have porridge for breakfast?”…