Five Little Ladies
When I left work yesterday evening a memory flashed through my mind about our middle girl inviting two friends for a sleepover. I guess somewhere in a forgotten corner of my brain I was hiding behind the hope that they would kind of look after themselves, and that I would have fairly quiet evening.
I am an idiot.
As per usual, my other half is involved in half the things going on in town, and I found myself washing up, cooking, washing up again, making beds, tidying up, and a hundred other things before the house fell silent. I attempted to watch TV at 10pm but gave up shortly afterwards.
This morning I woke at 7am with Miss 10 stood next to the bed, asking if she could get in the paddling pool. I said no, and fell back asleep.
By 8 I was up, making breakfasts, washing up again, and trying to tidy up the wreckage caused by four little people. Here's where the weekend really pulled the chain on me and started laughing in my faceI had promised to take our eldest daughter into town for breakfast. I was almost looking forward to it, when I quickly realised that it wasn't going to be simple at all any more.
After half listening to my orders for the day, I found myself dragging the kids towards town single handed to get a breakfast that was so late it had turned into early lunch. Suddenly I was clock watchingwe had to eat and get eldest to the church hall to take part in a training session that my other half was setting up for. I then had to get the others to the park for a while, and then return to ours for 1pm to meet one of their parents to pick them up.
I posted a photo of my young charges to Facebook as we marched towards town, and got responses along the general lines of “how mad are you?“In the middle of the chaos I started to get bitter about having to fit in with everybody else's schedule all the time, but it kind of got erased by quite the most amusing fat angry little man complaining in the cafe.
He had spotted a sign outside stating that people could buy a breakfast, and receive another one free. There were obviously conditions associated with the offer, but apparently the sign outside didn't mention anything about themso he shouted at the top of his voice at the store manager in front of all the customers for quite some time. He went a funny shade of purple while completely disregarding everybody staring, and me grinning and shaking my head. I felt kind of sorry for the staff after that, and made a point of being courteous and happy throughoutas were all of the kids, which says a lot about ours, and our friends parenting.
Eventually we neared home, via a patch of stinging nettles that Miss 10 expertly found while trying to put her lollypop stick in a bin. She screamed several streets down on the remainder of the journey, and then nearly damaged the foundations of the house when I sprayed the impressively lumpy skin with wasp sting stuff. Wails and gnashing of teeth turned into sobs of “I want Mummy”, which is invariably what happens when I tell her to be brave.
Throughout the afternoon we said goodbye to the sleepover accomplices, and I did more washing, and more tidying up. Finally the evening arrived, and I found myself building a website for somebodyracing to get it done before she popped by. The only problem was I had the day wrongwe'll be expecting her tomorrow nightIt's been that kind of weekend so far. Running like mad, and getting nowhere.