Stuff everywhere
Wifey was away last weekend, her first weekend away without the kids since, well, since the kids. Due to various blogging activities, I’ve done a few in the last eight years but she hasn’t and this was her opportunity to spend a weekend away worrying about how badly we’ll trash the house.
I realised recently when wifey was laid up in bed and I had to take a couple of days off work to look after her and the kids (one of tmy birthday too), that running the house is pretty much a full time job with three kids. The sheer volume of laundry, the incessant tidying up, the cleaning, vacuuming and everything else I didn’t do over those few days were enough for wifey to spend the best part of a week.
I’m lucky in that I get home from work at a reasonable time- usually around 6pm, which is early enough to sometimes eat with everyone else and always early enough to do baths and stories. By the time I’ve done those though, it’s often heading towards 8 o’clock and I just want a rest. I usually leave for work early enough that I’m at my desk for around 7:45am, so by the time I get to have a sit down, it’s well over 12 hours since I got going and to be honest I don’t want to spend the remaining hour or so before I go to bed tidying up.
Of course, with my better half working now that spring is here, that means invariably she’s massively busy on the days she works and spends the rest of time that she isn’t clearing up. It seems to be impossible to get get a cleaner round her that actually costs less than we get paid, so that’s a non starter and the children? Pfft.
Because neither of us like waste, threatening to through all their stuff away if they leave it lying about is a hollow threat and they know it. As I type this, I can see yesterdays school trousers in a pile on the sitting room floor, next to somebodies PJs that they took off in front of the telly. There are various toys positioned in a Home Alone fashion, ready to injured anyone who fails to look twice. And I dare not even look in their bedrooms.
I don’t know how we have come to this situation and the kids deal with any request to spend five minutes doing something with their usual procedure: rolling around on the floor sobbing hysterically for ten times as long as it would have taken to do the thing properly in the first place. Then they leave the room and whatever they were playing with in a shambles.
I’m thinking it’s time to relegate them to the summer house- it’s warm enough now and it might just stop them trashing the house…