Sunday Morning
I woke a little after 7 this morning, looked at the bedside clock, and quietly wondered how long I could get away with not getting up for. After perhaps half an hour, the curious part of my brain that whispers “you're wasting the weekend” instructed my body to scrape itself out of bed. Ten minutes later I got out of the shower, found some toothpaste (it turns out my other half stole mine when she packed her wash-bag to go camping), and then set about the most important activity of the morning – making coffee.
Skip forwards another few minutes, and the kids had arrived downstairs. Miss 12 generally gets up straight away on a weekend – fearful of missing out on whatever is going on elsewhere in the house. Miss 15 is another matter entirely (partly for reasons I'm not going to get into today, but I do promise to write about soon). Suffice to say she has medication to take every morning now, and has to eat breakfast. It turns out the easiest way to wake her up is to let sunlight and fresh air into her bedroom. I wonder if she has Transylvanian genes ? Actually – that makes no sense – sunlight would cause her to recoil and shrivel up ah maybe I am right?!
My other half is on her way home. I received a text message an hour ago. She had been camping with the local Brownie pack (for those reading overseas, Brownies are the youngest group of Girl Scouts in England). She has been “Brown Owl” for several hundred little girls for the last 8 years, and is about to hang up her badge. She's had enough – done her bit.
I'm listening to the “Favourite Coffee House” playlist on the Spotify web player while writing this. I've wondered several times about paying for it, but I don't actually mind the adverts at all. I think of it more as a commercial radio station than any sort of streaming media service. I guess we're already seen the light at home – we sold most of our DVDs a couple of months ago. We realised it had been months since we played a DVD on the television. It's even rare that we watch broadcast television – we tend to stream everything because we're never around when thing are on. Like most parents, we don't get to sit down until everything has already finished (or days later).
Anyway.
The overnight camping adventurers will be back in a minute, and the kitchen will be trashed. Whenever my other half goes away with any of the kids, the house generally gets tidier and tidier during her absence. It's actually quite presentable at the moment (for a change). All of the good work will be undone in the next half hour. You know what though? I would much rather have a busy, chaotic, noisy house than a pristine, “just so”, sterile house. Friends always comment that our home is welcoming – which I suspect really means “you're house is just as untidy as ours”. I think I've said before – on a good day our house resembles “The Burrow” from Harry Potter – the Weasley's family home.
Right. Time to get on I suppose. Fill the washing machine up again. Suggest to the chilren that they should maybe think about getting dressed. Make another cup of coffee.