Easter Sunday
I got up an hour ago – a little after 8am – and still find myself sitting alone downstairs. I can hear noises from the upstairs bedrooms, but nobody has appeared yet. It's Easter Sunday. I don't know where the Easter eggs have been hidden – I know that several were bought last week – before we ran out of money again. My salary should hit the bank tomorrow.
While walking to the store in town last night to get medication for our eldest daughter (who has had a stomach bug all the way through Easter weekend so far), I laughed at my own thought processes – I went from “what's the point in having a blog at all”, to “maybe I should reach out more” in the space of 200 yards. Along the way I passed a cafe that opens late – and started judging the sixty-something crowd of people sitting around a long table inside – a phone was being held up to take photographs – I wondered how long it might be until the photo appeared on Facebook to show everybody they knew where they were not.
(an hour passes)
My other half appeared downstairs. Her Mum and brother are coming for lunch – meaning that she's running from room to room, tidying up, putting things away, and so on. This means that everybody else needs to also be tidying up, putting things away, and so on – it's just the way things work around here. I imagine I'll be tasked with peeling twenty thousand potatoes later. I just finished cleaning the bathroom – which partly involved filling a plastic bag with two hundred bottles of various things that nobody ever realised they ever needed (and probably never did) – skin scrubs, repair creams, “ultra hold” hair gels, makeup removers, eye drops, and god knows what else. Nobody has used any of it for weeks – all I have left out is a tub of hand cream.
Cleaning toilets is one of those jobs that I imagine teenagers fully believe fairies accomplish for them.
Our middle girl ate an Easter egg for breakfast. This was entirely predictable. She last had a wash several days ago, and will wonder why her face has erupted in spots just in time to go back to school. Both of our younger daughters seem to have become allergic to water at the moment. I'm not sure if it's just chronic laziness, or “being a teenager” – we generally have to threaten them to make them set foot in the shower, brush their teeth, brush their hair, or anything else that transforms them into a vaguely presentable person.
Anyway. I need to help. First job – extending the dining table to make room for seven people to sit around it. My parents gave us the dining table not long after we moved in – there's no way we could ever have afforded anything like it – I imagine it will be handed down through the family for generations.