Man Down – Rihanna.

This is what it has come to. The only time I get a chance to blog is when I’m sick.

We’ve all been passing some sort of bug or other back and forth for a number of weeks now and it seems to have landed squarely on my chest and doesn’t appear to be going anywhere fast. This is probably the last quietish weekend that we’re going to get for a while and so desperate measure are called for – I’ve stayed in bed…

I have Daddy Simon’s blessing/insistence on this so I’m trying not to feel guilty about it. It’s not yet 1100 o’clock and I’ve had 3 coffees,a shortbread biscuit, a day old pain au chocolat and about half a bottle of ‘non-drowsy Covonia’ so it would be fair to say that the caffeine/sugar/medication combo has me buzzing like a bumble bee.

I’m trying not to think of the carnage that will no doubt be unfolding downstairs in my absence and have removed my hearing aids in order that the soundtrack is marginally muffled.

So where to start – it’s been ages…

Firstly it took some time to relocate the WordPress tile on my phone because the little beggars are able to delete and reshuffle the apps on an unattended and unlocked iPhone – and when I say I unattended I mean pickpocketed.

Our little cherubs are now almost two and a half. I’ve stopped counting their age in months now – the maths are too time consuming for my feeble mind to be able to switch from counting down the minutes until they next go to sleep to working out to working out exactly how old they are. So I just round up.

This means that we’ve survived approximately six months of the ‘terrible twos’.The optimist in me says that means we’ve only got six months left to go while the realist in me rolls about the floor laughing at the optimist and wondering when he last took a reality check.Any broody sentiment that I may have had over the last year or so has been well and truly thrown across the room and thoroughly stamped into the ground with an accompanying “WAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!”

Once they’ve gone to bed in the evening and the gin has started to kick in I can identify that it must be an incredibly frustrating time for little ones.They have started being able to do lots of things for themselves and can now mostly express what they want and like but still don’t have the understanding of why they can’t always get what they want.(Any parent that is looking to return to the work place after spending time with their children should always remember to add ‘Hostage negotiating skills’ to their CV’s.)So I’ll usually have another gin and resolve to be more patient and understanding the following day.

Most days the ‘patience and understanding’ that I’ve channeled the previous evening has beggared off before the breakfast dishes have been cleared away because I’ve forgotten that getting the wrong coloured cereal bowl can crush the soul of the tiny human being that is STILL brandishing the fffffliippin’ toy fire engine that he has been told to put down sixty seven times before his life’s happiness was cruelly destroyed by the same blue bowl that he’s been rejecting the contents of since he discovered that there was more than one type of cereal.

Madam doesn’t usually start to kick off until she’s finished eating her Malties and helped herself to some of Daddy Simon’s whilst not so silently judging her brother’s outburst and calculating how she might be able to outdo it later in the day.

Day to day life needs to strike the right balance between routine and different things to keep their little minds engaged and burn off some of their endless,endless energies.We’re still incredibly lucky in that for the most part they both sleep well. I’m very well aware that they won’t be partaking of an afternoon nap for that much longer and so I’m doing all I can to nurture/preserve/eke out this two hours oasis of sanity in my day. At this point they’ll ask to go ‘sleepy bye-byes’ and I’m more than happy to oblige. They still settle down for the night pretty well at half past seven and will usually go through until six thirtyish or so. Of course I’m touching wood as I type with crossed fingers that this continues long after nap time is a distant but happy memory.

So we have Tiny Tunes and Twins Club as organised activities in the week. Usually a trip to a supermarket for a top up shop and maybe a couple of walks out weather permitting – sometimes I even get to catch up with other ( not-so) grown ups.

The majority of the weekly shop is done online and delivered early enough in the day in order that Mr/Ms Tesco shouldn’t have to negotiate the fleet of enormous off roaders that the school run scummy mummies have littered the street with. There’s still a handful of them that like to park their saggy butts on the garden wall and flick their soggy butts on the ground around before climbing back into their bullybuses and roaring off at a rate of knots ( USUALLY WHILE BLANTANTLY ON A MOBILE PHONE!) to what I can only hope is a very long overdue hair appointment.

The school are fully aware of the issues and I’m pretty sure that there are many,many more schools out there that are in a similar predicament. Equally, I’m aware that SUV’s and off roaders have their benefits and I can’t ever rule out having one ourselves. Many of our friends and family drive them but I would imagine that they would do so more considerately than the aforementioned self-centred morons that continue to frost my cookies on an almost daily basis.

End of rant. Thanks for sticking with it.

So.Yeah. Weekly shop. Delivered to house. Ok – since my last blog Tesco and Sainsbury’s have decided to do a bit more for the planet (Yay!) and have done away with the plastic bags for both home deliveries and Click and Collect.In the run up to this mahoosive step forward in reducing global warming we ( the customer) were assured that the delivery drivers would be happy to bring our shopping in and help us unpack.But they’re not. They’re unhappy at how much longer it’s taking them to get round a run now and there has been a significant difference in delivery times and their working day. From a personal point of view it’s not ideal to have someone trekking through the house dodging the little rugrats that have completely lost interest in Bing’s latest banal adventure in favour of cross examining the unfortunate individual that drew the short straw at the depot that morning.

Alexandra favours an indirect approach –

” Who’s that?”

“What’s his name?”

“Why is he in my house?”

Calder is a bit more hands on and has a tendency to sample the goods as they’re being unloaded – not necessarily stopping to remove the peel from bananas or satsumas nor the plastic wrapper on tomatoes and mushrooms. He doesn’t need to know the whys and wherefores of the stranger in the kitchen he’s just so happy that he can tell some one – ” I done a poop in my nappy.” – without the fear of being swept up off his feet and being turned upside down.

So where we’re at is –

Supermarket shop is unloaded at front door – item by item into the hallway whilst Shouty and Loud rattle the baby gate at the living room door and protest about the unfairness of their temporary incarceration.

The delivery person seems fairly appreciative of the fact that I’m pretty swift at the whole unpacking and piling up behind the front door and I’m just grateful that it’s not always the same poor sod that get saddled with delivering to us,so I can trot out the same old look of surprise at there being wine in this week’s delivery.

Of course at this time of year the central heating that usually blasts off the previous night’s chill is now shooting out the door towards that ever growing hole in the ozone layer … but I’m sure that the bean counters know what they’re doing…

Flipping ‘eck!

Can you believe that it’s now almost seven o’clock so I need to wrap this up and publish before it spills over into Sunday and I need to come up with an appropriate Sunday Showtune title.

Now I’ve not spent all day on this .I ventured downstairs at lunchtime for cuppa and a bacon buttie and was pleasantly surprised at the fact that I could see a clear path through to the big table. Alexandra and Calder did seem to have genuinely missed my presence because they were so attentive,both insisting on sitting on my knee whilst I enjoyed my bacon sandw…… oh hang on ….. little bleeders!!!!!!

I’ve had a bit of a nap and a long hot shower so I now feel much better than I have all week.

Daddy Simon and I pitched in together for the teatime mediations – and I felt sufficiently well enough to join him in a Gin and Tonic – extra lime for me – vitamin C and all that.

Kids are now in bed, take away ordered and we’re just deciding what to watch.

Who knows when I’ll get back here again-not too long I hope- but in the short term there is always little snapshots of our adventures over on Facebook -you don’t even have to request me as a friend – it’s simply Twinningatparenthood.

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