This morning started quietly. The clock radio cranked itself into life at 7am, the sun filled the bedroom with soft light, and the silhouette of a little person appeared in the doorway.
“Can we go downstairs?”
It’s perhaps worth noting that the children also asked each morning if they could “go downstairs” while staying at my parents last weekend. My parents live in a one storey house.
We said “yes”, and thought no more of it. We heard the distant murmurings of television, and drifted back asleep to the sound of the kitchen cupboards being banged in pursuit of breakfast cereals. We let the children do most things within reason; at (nearly) six and seven they can make their own toast, their own cereals, and desperately want to make tea and coffee - we insist on our presence for that one.
While drifting in and out of sleep, wondering how long I could stay in bed - knowing I had to have a shave - a little person arrived at the bedroom door.
“There has been an accident. Milk has been spilled all over the table, and all over your computer Mummy”.
I have never seen W get out of bed so fast.
After a few moments listening to her thunder down the stairs, admonishing children as she went, I decided I should probably follow along behind. If the claim was true, we were looking at a thousand pounds worth of dead MacBook.
Thankfully the bedroom claim was right up there with “she kicked me in the head”, “I not your best friend any more”, and “you never, never coming to my birthday party ever again”. There was milk across the table, but the computer had somehow avoided most of the splash zone. I considered mentioning that it might have been an idea not to leave the computer out, but weighed that against living longer than the next 30 seconds, and kept my mouth shut.
I stood rubbing my eyes and listened to the tail end of the show;
“What ON EARTH were you doing eating in front of the television? You know you don’t eat down here. Why weren’t you eating at the table? Why have you got a drink down here? What have we told you about carrying drinks around? …. (and so on, and so on)”
A few moments later we discovered that Little Miss 7 had fed the cats - a job she had promised not to do after a talking to yesterday. As W reached the end of her second lecture of the day to a sad faced little girl in the corner of the kitchen, the little girl (who had stopped listening quite some time ago) piped up;
“But I gave them all of it”