Tiredness In The Aftermath Of The Far Flung Commute And The Piratebirthday Party

It’s the Thursday morning after the longest Wednesday. Now there’s a great first sentence. As you will already know if you’re an obsessive reader of my online goings on, I was in London yesterday morning for a meeting that marked the end of many weeks headbanging, gnawing of elbows, and cursing colourfully. While it would have been good if I had been well while working on the project, I’m glad to say a relative calm has descended this morning. Five minutes peace before my schedule fills up once again. What I didn’t relate yesterday was the events that followed my journey home. Our youngest daughter was six years old yesterday, and as befits “our way of doing things” (which is regularly termed craziness by various other parents we know), we invited ten of her best friends to a party at our house. Almost without exception other parents remarked “ooh, you’re brave” on hearing our plans Perhaps it’s the same chip on my shoulder about wealthy parents shipping their kids off to boarding school, but I tend to think parents who always ship their kids off to soft play places for their birthday are being lazy, missing out. W didn’t know if I was going to get back in time for the party “ I had no clue how long I would be in London, and no idea how long it would take to get back. The prospect of rain, and a house full of six year olds started to look pretty awful to contemplate. You should have seen her face when I knocked on our front door at 2:45pm fifteen minutes before the start of the party. I was there on condition that I write my notes up immediately from London, after which I could join the party. Locking myself in the study, I heard the arrival of lots of little people while typing furiously on the work laptop, and eventually emerged to find no sign of little people. The rain never came. Our garden had been transformed into the set of Pirates of the Carribean : Birthday Mayhem. The W House will forever more be known as the “Pirate Hideout”, and the climbing frame now has a mast, sails, and a Jolly Roger hanging aloft. I’m told there were chocolate gold coins hidden all over the garden too (notice past tense there). We fuelled the kids up on junk food, fizzy drinks, and birthday cake, and effectively launched them. It was interesting to see the effect on some of them “ they really didn’t know what to do with themselves. By 6pm the final stragglers had left, amid choruses of “isn’t your garden wonderful”, and “you’re SO brave!” from the various parents that had escaped their young charges for a couple of hours “ who were now clutching party bags and asking if they could eat everything they found inside. Finally silence. I turned to the fridge, started to pull a bottle of wine from a shelf, and looked at W. “Yes please!” I then spent a couple of hours late last night setting up Google Apps, Outlook, and two Blackberries for a friend and his better half who live around the corner “ it really does never stop sometimes