Just another mundane Monday

It’s Monday, it’s not five to five, and it’s not Crackerjack.

It’s the first day back at school.  It’s the first day of the new school run, and it’s the first day of attempting to establish some kind of workable routine in this house which does not involve cardboard boxes and takeaway food.

I am totally knackered.

I slept appallingly.  Terrible, heart rending dreams that had me sitting bolt upright in bed, gasping and tearful.  Lots of them.

One good thing is that I was able to get up at my regular school time (ten to seven, for those masochists out there), despite living out here in the sticks.  This was alright. The not alright bit was that I used to get me and Tilly up at ten to seven and would stagger downstairs for half an hour of solace with the cafetiere before Tilly actually got to the breakfasting stage.  I wouldn’t wake the others up until eight at the earliest.

Now I can’t do that.  We all have to get up at ten to seven, and be motivated and organised and functioning.

We leave the house at ten to eight, and that gives us time to get everybody where they need to be without tears and shrieking.

It’s not too bad really.  Apart from the whole having to lose my half an hour of silence.  I know I could set the alarm to wake me up just after six and solve the problem that way, if I were really that attached to it.

I’m not.

I just like a good moan.

Oscar and I eschewed crawling back to bed and setting the alarm for home time.  We were both quite keen on the way to school, but he started to perk up on the way home.  I was still quite committed to the bed idea, but I could see it being eroded as the miles flew by.

We went into Broughton Astley village to suss out the facilities.  We rated the local Co-op as average due to smaller size, lack of rhubarb, lack of trans gendered work staff (although that could change), and the fact that it was freezing.  The butcher’s was shut until tomorrow so we could not survey his sausages.  The bakers does a damn fine cottage loaf and excellent shortbread biscuits, and the library was good.

All the other shops were either shut, or just not exciting enough for us to care.

We spent the afternoon making Play Doh models of the entire  cast of Postman Pat, which Oscar then solemnly dissected with a pair of tweezers.  I have thrown away a lot of our Play Doh, as it has gone the colour of the universe (breen), and is rather hairy.  I have ordered some non hairy, non breen Play Doh as a treat.  Call me crazy, but I cannot forge alliances with Mrs. Goggins if she is bilious and bearded.  I dislike Postman Pat at the best of times. Until they gave him a wife and small child (Julian), I was convinced he shopped round the corner (not that it was a factor in my dislike. Mostly I disliked him because he was a boring prig).  It may, of course, be a marriage of convenience, to give the job of Postman more gravitas.  I note he now has a helicopter too.

The recorded delivery wielding fool.

The home time school run was lengthened by bad traffic, bickering  children, parking issues and the ongoing quest for rhubarb (Tilly is making crumble tomorrow at school).

Things are not helped by the fact that I am extremely impatient today.  I am tired, in that gravelly eyed way.  I am utterly sick of the children and their constant neediness, and I want a day off so I can lie in bed under the duvet and pretend to be single and childless.  I wouldn’t swap them for the world, but I would quite like to put them in stasis for twenty four hours.

I think it’s the combination of half term and moving house.  It has wiped me out completely.  I am a hollow eyed shadow of my former self.

What I would like to be doing now is drinking red wine and staring moronically at the television until I fall asleep.  What I am doing is blogging so that my hands have something to do while I am ‘helping’ Tallulah with her homework.  This is so that I do not actually throttle her.

She forgot to bring her homework folder home over the holidays.  This caused great consternation on her part in the middle of last week when I had finally cleared enough space to sit and do some with her.  She wobbled and wailed and shrieked.  I pointed out that there was absolutely nothing that she could do about it, nor indeed anything I could do about it.  She seemed to find this truth rather unpalatable, and continued wailing until I asked her what she was trying to achieve, other than rendering me deaf and homicidal.

She has brought it home tonight, and it all needs doing by Wednesday.  She is now doing the old one two manoeuvre on me, to see how much of it she can get away with either not doing, not doing herself, or doing to such a standard of indolent crapness that any time spent on it would have been better spent letting mum’s cat crap on a piece of paper and handing that in instead.

I have lost my temper once.  There is an ultimatum on the table now.  Either she does it right, without making a fuss, or if she can’t do it, asks for help without a) making a fuss and b) totally ignoring whatever comes out of your mouth, or it gets put away until Wednesday and then she can reap the whirlwind when she hands it in.

It has focused her mind rather wonderfully.

 

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