Morning in the Life of a Mother - 6 months on

Back in September (September? It seems like a lifetime ago), I did a post entitled 'Morning in the Life a Mother'. Judging by it's popularity there are a lot of mothers out there who need this kind of post. I think it makes them feel normal. Or better. Or just not quite as bad as they were feeling they might be. Or (in fact) just not quite as bad as me......

Anyway, in the interests of keeping up the experiment and also because, since then, I have moved to the other side of the country and the toddler has started pre-school (oh how deeply deeply happy does this make me?) I thought I would do an update.

So here, my dear people, is what my life is like now, 6 months on. In some some ways its easier. In some ways its more 'challenging'. In every way it is, still, 'Slightly South of Sanity':

My day starts (yet again) in the early hours of the morning. 3am to be precise. My OH has gone to London on a train (hopefully with a rucksack full of tinned mackerel....) and I'm lying next my older child (who has no bed and no bedroom due to the building works that are STILL going on in our house) when I hear the painful cries of the toddler echoing up the stairs.

MUMMMEEEEEEEE.

MUMMMMMMMMMMEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

MY BLUE RAG!

MY BLUE RAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!

Oh yes. That's right. He's in bed without his beloved 'blue rag' (the same one my OH sucked down the hoover that fateful day). Last night he fell asleep in the car and was put in his cot and everyone failed to notice the blue rag was missing.

I have better things to do at 3am then scour the entire house for a piece of tatty blue muslin cloth the size of a flannel, but such was the volume of his rage that I felt I had no choice.

20 minutes later (he's still at full volume) I contemplate cutting up a pair of blue pyjamas but know, in my heart, that will never pass muster. There is only one blue rag.

10 minutes later I find the 'blue rag'. In my bloody bed. In my BLOODY BED! The one I should have been sleeping in. I have no idea how it got there. An evil joke indeed.

I throw the 'blue rag' on to his sweaty, rage filled face and within 20 seconds he's asleep (how does that work? That love for a piece of cloth!? CLOTH! Cloth with powers).

I, eventually, fall back into a fractured sleep. Until.......5am! Yes at 5am he's off again. This time he's soaked in his own piss.

Jeez - can he not leave this a few years? You know, until the years of 12 pints of Stella and a bad kebab?

Clearly not. He's done so much wee it's gone through a 'super' nappy, through his pyjamas, through his entire bed. I fumble around drying him off and changing his bedding (well throwing a large towel over the wet - one of my new 'makes your pubic hair look infested ' towels no less). I go back to bed. As my head hits my pillow, my eldest son rises up from his pillow and attempts to start up a conversation about British Summer Time. Not now son. NOT NOW. And then a freight train goes passes. 'Hold me up mummy! HOLD ME UP!' (he wants to watch it out of the Velux windows in the roof - the ones several feet above the bed). I groan from my pillow and the freight train passes. He starts to sob.......

Sometime later I admit defeat and give up and get up.

I pick my way downstairs, across the dusty, nail-strewn, jagged floor boards and to the ground floor. The ground floor which is basically a building site apart from the living room. 'Living' room in the loosest sense of the word as all the furniture from everywhere else is piled up in it and there is approximately 2 square foot of carpet from which to operate.

I take the children in some breakfast (which may or may not have been dry Mini Weetabix on a plate) and place it on their 2 square foot of carpet.

I go to get dressed and return to find they have both disappeared. They are now underneath the pile of stacked furniture somewhere near the window, somewhat like vermin.

A lot of shouting ensues and the older one extracts himself. The younger one is, however, stuck. I can't reach him, he can't get out and I can't move the furniture.

Sigh.

I eventually manage to drag him out screaming (whilst standing atop a pile of boxes) by one arm (which, miraculously didn't dislocate).

During this time the builders have arrived and let themselves in (they have a key). They are contemplating the today's re-plastering as I am contemplating getting the children dressed.

The older child's school uniform is thick with plaster dust but I'm beyond worrying about that (he wears a sort of 'dusted and distressed' look). The younger child meanwhile has noticed that his pyjama bottoms feature Iggle Bloody Piggle and he won't take them off. Every time I try to pull them down he screams and screams and screams, shouting 'NO GIGGLE ON, NO GIGGLE ON' louder and louder. In view of the fact that this scene is being watched by a team of builders I decide that life is too short to wrestle with a semi-naked toddler on 2 square foot of (dusty) carpet and he can bloody well go to pre-school in his pyjama bottoms.

I start loading the car with the 250 bags my children seem to need for school only to realise that I need to tackle the builders about the subject of the upstairs paint-job.

You see yesterday we asked them, via a rather crackly mobile phone, to paint one of the bedrooms blue below the dado rail and cream above it. That is blue and cream. I came home to find it beautifully painted in.......blue and green. As in 'blue and green should never be seen'.

Oh.

'We did wonder what on earth you'd been smoking!' one of them replied.

Hmm, clearly not as much as they have.

Anyway the blue and green is staying. I can't be arsed to get it changed. I will theme the room around 'the world' and the green can be the land and the blue the sea. Some stick on sea monsters and a few volcanoes and 'voila' - Laurence Llewellyn Bowen eat your heart out.

Anyway this decorating conversation took place whilst I was stacking the car with stuff and thus we set off without my son's swimming bag......

Sigh.

Sometimes later we are stuck in traffic when my son notices a large badger at the side of the road (yes, seriously, the Haunting by Badgers continues).

'Mummy, is he waiting to the cross the road?' he enquires.

Considering his body is tilted at an angle of 45 degrees, his tongue his sticking out and he's stiff as a board, probably not but lets not dwell on that. At least he's got a view of the pylons......

We (finally) get to the school.

Lockers are loaded, book bags deposited, coats hung. Original son hits the playground and KABOOM - straight over his own feet his face hits the floor.

Nasty.

Blood, spit and tears.

The bell goes.

'Mummy (sob, sniff) you can't leave me when I'm still hurting!'.
'Darling, I can and I have to........' (I think I'm more scared of his teacher than he is).

Smaller child gets hustled into playgroup (in his pyjamas) and I hit the road off to see my new nephew.

Bum on sofa, tea at hand, baby in arms, several hours later........OH. MY. GOD.

I've forgotten to get the toddler from Pre-School.

Gulp.

I (eventually) track down my mother (who is on the banks of a canal feeding some robins....) and inform her of my utter failure. She comes to the rescue.

And by then it's the afternoon and as this post is about the Morning in the Life of a Mother I have to stop there.

Which is probably a rather good thing.

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