I’m hiding in the study for five minutes - and using the time somewhat productively to splurge various throughts through the keyboard into the interwebs.
I return to work tomorrow, and today has been something of a marathon - and it’s not over yet.
We woke at about 8:30 this morning, and both nudged each other repeatedly to get up and make a cuppa, make the girls breakfast, and start on the dreaded task of taking down the Christmas decorations. Somehow between 8:30 and 9, each time I fell back asleep my brain roared into action and created a new dream.
The final dream involved being in a car with a work colleague, and finding ourselves in the middle of a gunfight with gangsters in a parking lot. Bizarre.
I haven’t had a shower yet today - which was probably a wise choice as our tactic to get the decorations down quickly involved me getting the girls out of the house for an hour or so. I took them to the park across the green from our house. This would normally be an easy way to kill an hour, except the temperatures in our part of the world have not risen above zero for the last few evenings - a frost encrusted playpark awaited us.
What to do with three little girls who have been cooped up in the house for the last few days? How best to keep them warm in a sub-zero park? Oh yes - why not kill Dad?
For the next hour, I chased, ran, dodged, and otherwise sprinted around the park like a lunatic after the girls, and them after me. I was a monster, a robot, and any number of other nasties from their story books. Screams, shouts, and breathless laughter filled the air and echoed from the houses as I ran the children ragged.
This lunacy - me running all over the park after the girls - seems to be a rare activity. You would think other parents might do the same, only they do not. Do other parents not see the delight in their children’s faces when Mum or Dad lower to their level and take part in their games? Is it really that hard to entertain your children (even if the only reason in this case was to keep them warm).
We wearily trudged back after an hour or so for hot chocolate. The girls were horrified to see the Christmas tree had gone, and the various decorations were now stacked into huge boxes in the middle of the lounge.
The next task seemed to consist of me climbing the stairs and ladder into the loft 68 times carrying unfeasibly large boxes in order to remove all trace of Christmas until next year. By the final few journeys the novelty had worn off and I could feel myself becoming more and more bad tempered about it all.
As the saying goes “a cup of tea solves everything” - so that’s what I did.
The rest of the afternoon has been filled with washing up, tidying up, hoovering, picking stuff up, putting things away, and generally fighting to tip the scales towards tidiness away from the children’s persistent attempts to turn the house (which was tidy for all of five minutes at about 2pm) into a complete hell hole once more.
When I finish writing this I will no doubt spend another hour directing and assisting the kids with clearing up the wreckage they have caused in the last couple of hours.
And this is a day off.
p.s. I may well post the various portrait shots I take within posts - as with this one - rather than cross post into the LiveJournal self portrait section. I’m just not enough of a narcissist to keep taking pics of myself and shouting about them. I will try to comment on other’s photos though.