I sat down to begin writing this evening with memories of a stereotypically draining and stressful Monday morning running through my head. While contemplating the title “Monday Monday”, the Mamas and Papas song burst forth somewhere in my brain, and my mood transformed.
Applying liberal dollops of hindsight to the day, I can’t really complain about much.
The kids drove us up the wall this morning - Little Miss 5 decided that 4:30am was a great time to be getting up, and waking her sister up. She walked in to ask us pointless questions 4 times before 7am (our normal “scrape out of bed” time) - I lost it following a particularly explosive volley of shouts and burst into her room - not quite knowing what I was going to do when I got there.
I burst in at the precise moment Little Miss 5 was performing some kind of elaborate gymnastic feat between the two beds - about 2 feet in the air, cheered on by Little Miss 4. She spotted me mid-flight, and somehow landed in a lying down position in her own bed, arms at her sides, looking as guilty as a puppy next to a pile of poo.
Given the 4 hours of sleep I had managed to get, and thoughts of a full work day ahead, you can imagine my mood while attempting to make packed lunches. After putting the wrong thing in the wrong sandwich for the wrong child, W barged me out of the way and told me to go and get ready for work.
I returned to find her patience exhausted too - fighting a running battle to get hair brushed, and various school books, coats and shoes found.
I became hair salon for five minutes. Our eldest (9) claimed she had already brushed her hair. I begged to differ; unless “Neanderthal” was the new fashion statement in the playground. Two hundred “Ow!”’s later, she no longer resembled Stig of the Dump.
Bizarrely, the walk to school was calm. You could surmise that it’s the house - our house from hell - that infuses the children with it’s unique brand of chaos. The same force that causes the kitchen ceiling to leak, the drains to block, and cupboard doors to fall off.
By now you’re thinking “but he said there was nothing to complain about?” - that’s because all of this is normal.
It was even pretty normal when I walked in this evening, and within half an hour two of the kids had been sent to their bedrooms. Little Miss 4 had announced earlier, on discovery of what was being cooked for dinner, that she didn’t like it and wasn’t going to eat it. She learned all about having no dinner, and practiced her usual tactic of screaming the house down (from behind the bedroom door that she shut behind her).
All normal stuff really.
Any new parent would be horrified by the warzone that our house sometime resembles - but any experienced parent smiles, or confides “thank god - I thought it was just ours”.
The weird thing is, after the numerous punishments handed out today (threats of no dinner, no TV for a week, no Halloween sweets for a week), the kids will get up again tomorrow with a clean slate. They will munch their breakfast, not get their school things ready, and then ask if they can have television on… and then ask “why?” when we say no.