Katyboo1’s Weblog

We’ve packed two suitcases and have several more to go.  Lucky for us we’ve got all day tomorrow to arse about, catch a ferry and get to our hotel in Vancouver so we’ve decided that today is a two suitcase day and tomorrow will be plenty of time to see to the rest.  We’re probably kidding ourselves.  We will no doubt faff about and end up making the ten p.m. ferry by the skin of our teeth, but what the hell.  I’m not doing any more packing tonight so that’s that.  I hate packing to come home almost as much as I hate packing to go.  It’s a different thing, but just as stressful.  What I’ve found is, even if you don’t buy anything on your holiday.  Even if you give stuff away to beggars in the street, you will still find that what you went away with, and what fitted perfectly in your suitcase is now twenty times larger than your suitcase and shaped like a dodecahedron mixed with a kitten.  This means that you work twice as hard to pack.  When you add all the random shite that we’ve accumulated over the last three and a half weeks it’s a feat worthy of Mensa.  I might well be on the Mensa packing hotline to them tomorrow.

It’s so weird what random detritus you accumulate on your holidays.  I was thinking this as i was trying to fit a pair of arm bands, some pink sequinned slippers for a large footed bear and some stacking crayons into a suitcase in a cunning tetris like way and failing miserably.  In the end I went for the ‘bugger it, I’m just going to heap it all in and sit on the lid approach.’  It seemed to work, but I am almost certain that one of Jason’s jobs tomorrow will be to hot foot it to Walmart and purchase a canvas hold all to stuff with all the rest of the randomly weird junk we have that will refuse, positively refuse to go in the rest of the cases.

Today we bought more towels to replace the pink towels that we dyed and have also added random pink dyed towels to our extra luggage allowance, as I don’t care what colour my towels are as long as the children get dry.  It also seems a shame to bury them at the bottom of the garden to hide the evidence.  Jason has pointedly refused to allow me to pack Tilly’s one deer antler, so I am going to have to do either some serious diplomatic talking or some shouting at her tomorrow.  Probably, my gut tells me, a fair bit of both. 

They will all be hideous tomorrow because of the packing.  Particularly Oscar, as we packed most of his toys tonight.  This will mean that he will automatically loathe and detest the things we left out for him, and will either  want to a) play with dangerous knives and the cut glass punch set which is in one of the cupboards just at baby height and which he has so fair failed to spot, or b) unpack all the rest of the luggage as we pack it.  What is most likely to happen is that I will get home to find that I have no pants, but that I have an ornate crystal punch set that I don’t really want as the last time I drank punch it was 1978 and at a christmas party.  I thought it would be nice.  It was in fact rather boring and was rather like a soupy fruit salad.  I believe someone may have put some banana in it, which didn’t work at all.  Bananas that aren’t covered in ice cream and chocolate sauce are just wrong.

We went to Spinnakers for a farewell to Victoria lunch.  The children decided to be difficult today so this meant that rather than go for something that she knows she likes, Tilly went for something that might be horrible.  She chose the three cheese pizza, but horror of horrors they had put herbs in the tomato mixture, so she ate half a slice and then sat looking stricken and sniffing gently into her orange juice, which was cheery.  It was like having lunch with the albatross of doom, rather off putting and quite, quite annoying.  We went to the bookshop to do our last book swap.  This of course meant that Oscar did a spectacular pooh in his nappy yet again, although I did manage to get the last Ian Rankin in trade paperback for six quid, so I was very happy thanks, despite the hideous aroma.

We went to our friend Janet’s for dinner.  She had made a huge effort for the children and bought them some really lovely toys to play with; she had also rented them a dvd and cooked them a child friendly tea of macaroni and cheese with sausages.  This meant of course that there were bound to be problems.  Tallulah took violently against her dinner and had a temper tantrum worthy of the terrible twos because we said that she couldn’t have one of the gorgeous cakes Janet had bought for pudding if she didn’t eat the miniscule amount of dinner on her plate.  If she had been a sensible girl and even had a couple of forkfuls it would have been fine, but instead she gave a real belter of a performance which meant that Jason ended up taking her out in the car and driving her round the block for half an hour while she howled, wailed and generally thrashed around.  It was a real shame.  Tilly and Oscar polished off their dinner and got cup cakes with giant icing roses and sparkly rings in with ice cream.  They were most pleased with themselves.  Tilly had a beard made almost entirely from lavender coloured icing and cup cake crumbs.

By the time Tallulah came snivelling back in they had made a start on watching Toy Story in sugary anticipation.  We took Tallulah’s cake home with us, but she was so evil on the way home that she lost cake privileges tomorrow as well, silly girl.  Sometimes when a girl has to have a full on tantrum she just has to, and that’s all there is to it.  It’s good to know that her lungs are still in full working order, although my ears are ringing somewhat.