Co-owning and be responsible for three kids ten and under invariably means you have to let your stands slip in some (many) areas. That’s all well and good, the puddle of wee in the downstairs toilet (we don’t go there, it’s full of fearsome monsters), will in time evaporate if left long enough but it’s when the kids just fiddle with stuff incessantly that things get tricky.
It’s like my daughter and doors. She is pathologically incapable of walking through a doorway without fiddling with position of the door slightly. 10 times out of ten she will touch the handle slightly, causing to door to be less than fully open. More than once a week this invariably leads to Ned running full pelt into the handle and a period of long and protracted sobbing.
Then there is the moving of stuff. Woe Betide any adult who puts something down, even for a moment, because it won’t be there when you actually want it. It won’t be anywhere else that’s even vaguely sensible either. Collected all the school photo proofs together to go through and attempt the school’s impenetrable online payment system (hint: password reset every time you want to log in is the simplest way because a password that has to start with a letter, contain no more than 3 instances of each letter or number and have at least one punctuation mark isn’t ever going to get remembered)? Guess again because your two eldest kids forms and proofs will still be there but the youngest will take taken his to look at in bed. Then he’ll have used it as a bookmark. Then he will have placed his favourite book in a specially decorated cardboard box they made at school because where else would you keep your favourite book with the sodding form that needs to actioned by tomorrow morning?
Yesterday morning was peak interfering:
8:30am. Check all backdoors locked and bolted.
8:31 brush teeth
8:32 scooters now left out in rain, and back door unlocked
8:33 rage— Daddacool (@daddacool) June 29, 2017
My new process involves getting the kids ready for school, putting them out the front of the house, and then checking that all the doors and windows are locked. It makes me cross that I have to do that. It makes me even crosser when I do that and then find my house keys have gone walk about…