Over to you

So you wake up and you stretch out an arm and you find a man in your bed. Your first thought as you wrap yourself around his warmth: "Fabulous, there's a man in my bed". His hand slides down your smooth and naked thigh and he murmurs something you cannot quite make out. Your second thought, and it follows light-speed quick, bearing in mind the room is black dark and you have only just made it to the surface of the day: "I can have a lie-in." You remove his fond hand as the baby starts to mew along the corridor. "Darling," you tenderly whisper into his ear. "You're on."

Daddy's home

My husband is back. This is a good thing because I get to point the children at him and say: "Look children, daddy is back. Mummy is just going for a bath. I'll be out in three days." We have only had one row so far because he made us late for a children's party. We are driving along; he is behind the wheel and I am wrapping the fleecey, black, baa-lamb puppet present in paper that says "Merry Christmas". My husband has been home for three hours. I am not in a good mood. I would go so far as to say, I am in a bad mood. Snipping off a dangling piece of cellotape, I said: "This party was really important to the boys. I really did not want us to be late for it but you had to take them out. You couldn't just let them play for half an hour and get them ready. If I had been on my own with them, we would not be late." My husband psshawed (if that's a word, he made that sort of clapped out steam engine sound anyway) and snarled: "That's outrageous." All this, by the way, in glorious sunshine, driving too fast along country roads which are too narrow . My six-year-old spoke up for sanity in the back. "Daddy's been away for a long time Mummy. He's still getting used to it. OK?" I hate the way men make you feel so unreasonable.

So long. Farewell.

That went well. The rented house looks like a shipwreck. Clothes, books, toys and bedding are strewn across each and every room while in the hallway, plastic binbags breed like something from a low-budget sci-fi movie. I keep thinking: "Socks for school tomorrow" and realise I have no idea where they are. Then I think: "Knife, I need a knife for the bread". No idea either. I may send the boys to school wearing saucepans on their feet.

Then, it all got much worse because my husband left to catch the train for London. He is away for three weeks on a work deadline. Just before he left, the children wanted a hug so he went upstairs to kiss them goodbye. This gave me the chance to pour and swallow the remains of a bottle of chablis in the kitchen and burst into tears. I had just got my act together and he came down again to tell me he had screwed the tops of the children's wardrobes on so they would not come down and kill them but I had to ring the TV repair man tomorrow because the TV is not working. I stopped crying at the thought of three weeks with three children and no TV. But by the time we said goodbye, I was already snuffling away again. As he headed into the night with his smart trolley-dolly suitcase on wheels, I closed the heavy wooden door behind him and went back to the kitchen to pour another glass of whatever I could find. Cooking oil probably. I was just about holding it together till I heard the siren wail of my six-year-old from the top of the stairs. Two minutes later and my husband cracked open the door to slide in a stray children's car seat; he glanced up the staircase to find a sobbing six-year-old dressed in a robots' sleepsuit with his legs wrapped round his crying mother. "We'll be fine. Go and get your train. Hurry up or you'll miss it." I waved him away. As the door closed heavily behind him again, my four-year-old came out of the bedroom. He kelt down and kissed me: "I love you mummy," he said and lay next to us on his tummy as I patted his brother's back and rocked him gently back and forth. "Shush now," I whispered. "Shush. We'll be fine."

Dollies and Disability

We had to go into school this morning for a daddy's reading day which entailed TW reading a book called Vesuvius Poovius which is all about poo and how to get rid of it. Not quite sure if that is what they had in mind when they asked my husband in to read but the children seemed to like it. I am, however, disowning responsibility if any of the other mothers start telling me little Johnny is stashing his number two's under the frontroom rug.
While I was there the baby crawled across the classroom to the doll's house. As she pulled out the dollies, each was revealed as more unfortunate than the next. Among the inhabitants were an old lady clutching a zimmer frame - fair enough, grannies do get that way. Granny had a lot on though, living there as she did with her middle-aged son on crutches, another bespectacled momma's boy with calipers and a blind daughter who could not move anywhere without her white stick. Infact she could not really move with it. Meanwhile a little granddaughter dominated the sitting room in an overly large wheelchair while a deaf black teenager, presumably a lovechild to the calipered one, sported an NHS hearing aid and learnt signlanguage. Two other elderly wooden dolls lay around on a bed upstairs, presumably dementing quietly while two child dolls, fresh into their 15th foster placement contemplated arson and the doll that looked closest to being a whole-bodied adult considered coming out as a moulded plastic lesbian. Talk about The Curse of the House of Usher. If there had been a cat, it would have had three legs. Apparently, local education authorities require schools to buy Caribbean and Asian dolls at the same time as Caucasian. Quite right too - the children up here never see a black face. But all things in moderation and that was more of a care-home than a doll's house. According to the classroom assistant, it is all about diversity and inclusion. Really? What about escapism and imagination?