{Cheese and Beans}

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, Wendy 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.

What is it about Fridays? Where does our energy and enthusiasm go?

I was going to write a long post filled with bitterness, complaints, and general curmudgeonly pearls of spite. You might even call it “foaming invective”. Mid-rant, I realised that nobody would be at all interested in listening to my protestations, so I hit the delete key and held it down for quite some time.

Let me summarise that which I would have written if the “attack of sensible” had not happened;

• I have lots of things I would like to do
• I do not have enough time to do any of the things I would like to

The thing is, I quite like moaning. I’m good at it. I get in a temper with myself all the time – protesting internally at my private annoyance of the situations I commonly find myself in. The external manifestations are generally fast stomping around the house, heavy handedness, and refinement of a flustered look.

How do you deal with the every day slings and arrows ?

You find me on arrival home from a walk into town – an eleventh hour dash to procure food for dinner – and a hearing of our eldest daughter reading from a book of her teacher’s choosing.

These few minutes are grabbed in passing. A moment of calm delimiting the mayhem of the day; a day filled with the bustle of the morning routine, perpendicular progress at the office, and then greeting stress and further mayhem on arrival home.

Once the little ones are in bed we will return to our adult lives for a few hours, before collapsing into bed as the world tumbles towards tomorrow and it begins again.

I sometimes envy the single guys at work – that can roll out of bed with a finely crafted routine ahead of them to leave the house with seconds to spare beyond which they would be late for work. My morning typically starts an hour before I leave the house, of which ten minutes are spent on myself.

The morning typically includes;

• Tell kids to get dressed
• Attempt to walk downstairs without tripping over toys left strategically on the stairs
• Tidy kitchen sufficiently to make stuff
• Tell youngest to put [insert random toy name] back away, and respond to inevitable “Why?” with “Because you have to get ready for school!”
• Make two packed lunches for little people
• Ask middle child if she is ready for school yet – respond to “Yes” with “Where are your shoes then?” (typically responded to with “Oh…”)
• Make three breakfasts for little people
• Jump in shower, brush teeth, shave if time allows
• Get drinks for three little people
• Request that the wreckage spread across the breakfast table is re-l0cated to the sink in the kitchen.
• Make cup of tea for other half
• Make coffee for myself
• Ask all children again if they have their coats, shoes, and bags ready
• Get dressed
• Brush hair of each child, wondering how they have managed to tangle their hair to such an extent overnight that cutting it all off is turning into a sensible idea.
• Let chickens out
• Fetch mountain bike from shed
• Fail to find pump to put more air in rear tyre
• Begin walk to school
• Bellow at youngest children to stop as articulated lorry pulls out of petrol station
• Tell younger children off for not listening to bellowed “STOP”
• Have heart attack as youngest leaves scooter braking manoeuvre far too late approaching main road (repeat this again, and again)

I typically walk the first half mile of the journey with the kids towards their schools; or – as happened this morning – I accompany the eldest to her school gate (little miss 5 has “Maths Club” on a Monday morning – quite what it might involve is anybody’s guess – perhaps “two cakes plus two cakes = my cakes!”)

The craziness of our typical morning can be derailed by the slightest thing. Missing school clothes or shoes are a favourite. Discovery of no milk to make cereals, or bread to make toast are also common . We commonly have to deal with a belligerent four year old, who, in the middle of said toast shortage has decided that the only substance she will eat is chocolate spread on toast. All other suggestions are responded to with an unhappy grunt. People without children who are recoiling at the thought of feeding children such horrors as chocolate spread can go take a running jump – until you have experienced a mayhem filled morning, you are in no position to judge (and we don’t feed them it every day anyway).

If you are single and/or childless, and reading this with a significant amount of horror or justification for your childless state forming in your mind, I need to redress the balance a little.

You know the bit in Monsters Inc. when they discover the power of laughter? It works the same on grown ups. No matter what the kids have done – how naughty they have been – if they giggle, you’ve had it.

Tonight is a night off from both my professional and freelance work – the first time out I have taken in a week or so. It’s time.

Taking a friend’s advice, I have installed Spotify on my old Mac at home (the one with the dodgy battery that desperately needs a visit to Apple to use it’s AppleCare “fix me now” tokens). I am therefore listening to Nik Kershaw, rocking out in a scruffy T-Shirt, and jeans with nothing on my feet in our spare room.

The oven is warming up, ready to cook baked potatoes. I just drank an espresso (which was probably a mistake, given that I haven’t eaten since lunchtime – 9 hours ago).

I’m aware that this blog has been sadly neglected for several weeks – and cannot guarantee any change to that soon. I’m also aware that the various blogs on the blogroll are not being read either. I often find myself taking a quick glance at recent posts, and then feeling guilty that I should be doing something more productive.

While I know there is value in “doing nothing”, I am perhaps my own worst enemy when it comes to forcing myself to do it. I can’t remember the last time I sat in front of the television and watched a programme all the way through. I always have things to do… things to get done.

I am permanently either submerged in whatever I am doing, or distracted while doing less important things. It’s a weird place to be.

Even this evening – while attempting to do nothing – I am racing to write this, with the thought of reading and commenting on blogs later, catching up with writing emails to friends around the world, cooking dinner, washing up… it never ends.