Why I'm glad I only have two kids

Sshhh! Don't tell the kids you've seen me. I am hiding from them. I reckon while High School Musical is on the TV and the Lego is out in force I should be safe to slip away for a few minutes. It's been the school holidays for a week already and everything was fine until the rain set in. Now they can't bounce away their excess energy on the trampoline they are taking it out on each other and the dog. I've just resuced poor Tiggy from another one of Pickle's strangling assults of affection and banished him to his room. She's taken to hanging out in the downstairs loo where it is a) cool, b) quiet and c) out of sight, until someone gets the urge to pee of course.

Personally I just want a bit of peace to recover from the weekend. It was a mad one.
After some late night bowling and dinner at TGI Fridays on Friday night you'd have thought we'd all get a lie-in on Saturday. But Poppet surpassed herself with the early morning waking, appearing dressed and perky beside my bed at 4am. I'm wondering which to invest in first, a large clock and some lessons on telling the time or a set of black-out curtains.

One game of football and a trip to the Tesco's play centre later they still wouldn't lie down much before 10pm. But by then I had already sloped off out with a friend for an evening at the museums leaving poor Nobby in charge with just a bottle of wine and tub of Haagen Daaz for moral support. On Midsummer's night all the Budapest museums stay open till 1am and lay on entertainment. And my friend had a VIP tickets. So I ended up on the terrace at the National Gallery, overlooking the Danube, sipping champagne and listening to Nobby's new favourite band playing Ska music in Hungarian, daaaahling. Lovely. Then we took in a conjuror and dance display at Millenium Park before rolling home in the wee small hours.

Bad planning really since Sunday is Nobby's day for a lie-in, coupled with it being British Father's Day, so I didn't get the chance to sleep it off next day even though Poppet managed to sleep until 9. Sunday was party day - we held Pickle's birthday party a couple of weeks early because the actual day is in the middle of the school holidays and we didn't want one of those parties where only two kids can make it. Well, the theory was good but it back-fired on me beautifully. Having given out twenty invitations on the last day of term, banking on at least half of them jetting straight off to sunnier climes, fifteen kids turned up yesterday, along with twenty-fours hours of uninterrupted rain. Nice.

And this year they are at that in-between age where they don't want to play Pass The Parcel and Musical Bumps any more - at least the boys don't; Poppet of course couldn't wait to get her hands on something that needed unwrapping after seeing the mountain of presents that Pickle received - but the boys went on the rampage through all the bedrooms, returning to the lounge every ten minutes or so to grab some more sweets and crisps from the snack table before stomping back up the stairs to continue the domestic devastation. By far the favourite toy turned out to be a larger than life-sized but realistic-looking rubber tarantula which they took turns placing on people's shoulders or just beside them and relishing the resultant near-coronaries, several of which were mine since I am extremely skittish (ok, terrified) of spiders and they can get me every time. I bought the stupid thing for the Halloween bash and it added a nice spooky touch to the decorations at the time but that's no reason why I should keep finding it in my sink eight months later.

Having read the forecast and somewhat anticipated the boys' behaviour I invented a brilliant treasure hunt before the party started, one trail for the boys and one for the girls, and cunningly hidden photo clues around the house. However when I called them all to order and announced the game an unexpected hush fell over the boys and they all started looking at the floor and shuffling their feet, until one of them confefssed that they'd already found and followed half the clues, somewhat ruining the prospect of having them all occupied and off the coca-cola for the next half an hour. Poppet's team were quite excited though, since they'd been dutifully Passing the Parcel and Pinning-the-Handbag-on-the-Barbie for the previous hour rather than investigating how many small boys you can fit under a cabin bed, and quickly ran off in search of the first location. The only trouble being that the role of 'team leader' went straight to Poppet's head so she raced from clue to clue, ripping them open and flinging them over her shoulder as she ran to the next one, with six girls trailing woefully behind without so much as a look in and me shouting at her to 'share nicely'.

So the best laid plans and all that. Next time I'm renting a venue and an entertainer. Ooh, and a babysitter and a weekend in the Spa for Nobby and Me. Yes, I think that would be perfect.