Partly in order to force myself to take a lunch break, and partly to answer a recent question posed here, I’m going to run through a typical “day in my life”.
7am
Wake up to the sound of our younger children (ages 5 and 6) causing mayhem in their bedroom, the bathroom, and along the hallway. One or the other of them will invariably wander into the bedroom after a few minutes, asking if they can go downstairs. Our response is always “get dressed for school, and have a wash first” - they never learn this.
7:20am
Downstairs, showered, dressed, making breakfasts and/or lunches for the children (and myself, if I remember - which I didn’t yesterday).
8:00am
The running battle commences to get all three girls looking presentable, with school bags, coats, and shoes ready to go. Invariably one of the children will be found hiding somewhere, playing with a toy when they know damn well they should be getting ready.
8:25am
We leave for school on foot, or on bicycles. If it’s tipping down with rain, W might take the girls in the car,but it’s rare. We drop our eldest off first at the junior school, and I also say my goodbyes - leaving everybody behind for the remainder of the journey to work (I ride a mountain bike to work).
8:50am
I arrive at work, wander up to my desk, power up the computers, and begin my work for the day. It’s worth pointing out that if I had been working on-site somewhere, I would have been up an hour earlier, and none of the earlier events would have involved me - I would have been trundling across the country on a train.
12:30pm
Lunchtimeto a world of craft projects, homework, toys, colouring, noise, and games. The tone of the first word of the greeting from my better half informs me how the day has gone. I drop my bag and immediately begin helping with tidying up, washing up, and preparing for dinner.
6:30pm
Dinner! We all sit down at the dinner table, and share our day with each other. It started out as a crafty trick to get the younger children talking more, but has become a normal part of our everyday life. Not sitting together to eat seems very strange now. Following dinner I wash the dishes, and clean the kitchen again.
7:30pm
The younger children go to bed (they share a room), often under duress. They get their pyjamas on, brush their teeth, are are read their bedtime story by one or other of us. Some days they fall asleep within minutes, other days they are wide awake and causing trouble. Thankfully the days where they get separated and scream the house down are rare.
8pm
Bedtime for Miss 10. She will invariably have monopolised television while her younger sisters were being put to bed, and will protest at having it switched off in front of her face if she fails to respond to our calls. She does a pretty good line in unhappy faces, and is an expert tactician when it comes to stalling for extra minutes.
8:30pm
The evening is finally our own - except there is normally ironing to do, washing clothes and packing bags if I am going on-site with work, and various other tasks that would be made more difficult with the children around. I will invariably spend most of the evening working on freelance projects, keeping up with friends, writing blog posts, or learning new stuff related to web design. Television doesn’t really happen much for me any more.
11:30pm to some ungodly early hour
I may finally fall into bed at anywhere from about 11:30pm onwards, depending on what I’m doing, and how distracted I have become in doing it. 2am is not unknown.
Perhaps the scary thing is that this routine goes on day-in, day-out. The weekends are roughly the same, except the day is filled with me playing with the children, shopping for food, visiting family, attending school events, or (more usually) working on freelance projects.