Busy bees

Quick straw poll - How many other working Mums, striving to do their best to keep up with juggling the dream dual lifestyle, have a husband with 15 shirts in the ironing pile??

Is it really just me? Any idea why Nobby should need more than fifteen shirts? And how he manages to get them all into the washing at the same time? Clearly I am spending far too much time enjoying my school holiday than keeping up with my chores.

The kids are being reasonably delightful. When I can drag them away from all the screens they like to glue themselves to, they have been quite creative.

Pickle produced a cute little double-bicycle for his two toy hamsters the other day. (I aim to keep him busy enough so he doesn't try to make one for the real hamster.) He showed it to us at breakfast and proudly announced, 'I've made a few improvements since the last model.'

'Really, darling?' says I, 'What did you do?'

'I've added a machine gun on the back.'

I am not sure I want to know the dangers facing these small, stuffed rodents which warrants the presence of heavy artillery so I just said 'That's nice, dear' and shut up.

Today the pair of them have produced a racing circuit round the garden which also involves jumping off the swingset, clambering up a steep embankment and leaping on the trampoline. Pickle says we are each going to have a sticker book to record our times in so I need to get my printer fixed so he can make them. Personally I am dragging my heels getting the printer fixed so I don't have to run, jump and clamber. Call Miss Lazy but I frankly, am I bovvered?

We had a welcome diversion this afternoon in the form of a free trip to watch the ice hockey world championship qualifiers at the Budapest Arena. It was my first school trip as a responsible officiating teacher and I have to say our crowd behaved themselves really well.

More than can be said for the brats in front of us, whose resulting mess will have taken the Arena staff the best part of an hour to clear up. Clearly they have not broken up from school yet, unlike us, so they'd been up at the grindstone all morning and decided to let off some steam on the school trip. Their teachers stupidly (or rather, having witnessed the chaos, very wisely) sat themselves in front of their group of fifty kids, perhaps thinking that a view of the back of their heads would be suitable warning to behave. How wrong they were.

Still, at least they all had a great time and the team I had chosen to support, the Netherlands, won the match.

Currently I am (supposed to be) wandering through that confusing and hectic world known as holiday packing ahead of our trip to Rome. I am a born procrastinator and I have to say, nothing makes me dither and dally more than the necessity to pack. So far today I have phoned the bank to tell them we are away, cleaned out my handbag, shaved my legs, tested the thermometer and dug out the suncream, but I haven't actually put any clothes in the suitcase yet.

Oh, but did iron a shirt...

School's Out!

The holidays are here! Blimey I never thought we'd make it but finally I have a morning where I can switch off the alarm, wave Nobby off to work from the comfort of my bed and not worry about occupying small people.

That is until Pickle decides he wants breakfast, Poppet needs some particular item of clothing and Tiggy's begging to go outside.

Would someone please invent a cure for little boys' backwards internal clocks? Every day of term I have to drag the little bugger out of bed, usually dressing him in the process to avoid the show-down later, but on weekends and holidays he is up at sparrow's fart wanting to get on my computer. I have a perfectly good alarm, which is OFF, did I mention, so I do not want appreciate waking up to the strains of Fred ranting away on YouTube.

It has been a busy couple of weeks at school, although I did manage to snatch a couple of days off when I caught a cold to go along with my tree allergy and couldn't make it past the bedroom door let alone the school gates. Somehow my class all managed without me thanks to my fabulous Teaching Assistant and colleagues and to make up for it we've been in full-on Blue Peter mode ever since.

I'll spare you the details but my final day at the 'office' saw me and 16 tinies up to our eyeballs in plastic eggs, glue, feathers, melted chocolate, cornflakes, tissue paper... and a live rabbit.

So far the holidays have been about as relaxed as a chimpanzees tea party, with football matches, lunches, parties - all for the kids of course. Today saw me braving the 'other side of the river' to find the Laser Quest establishment. Wow that took me back a lot of years to one certain 'team building' activity at that large company I worked in when we spent a happy evening blasting holes in our colleagues in the name of improving working relationships.

The kids played for about 2 hours and had a ball. Pickle decided after a while that stealthy hiding and creeping up on people was too much like hard work and became Rambo instead, stalking through the darkenss blasting anyone who crossed his path. Poppet was slightly more controlled and surprised herself with how much she enjoyed it.

Personally I naffed off to the local shopping mall for a sneaky burger and a mooch around Mango. We are off to Rome, daaahling, for the Easter weekend, so I wanted to get something new to pack. (Women's logic, don't try and analyse it.) The shopping centre was something of a maze though so I had to suck it up and brave the Customer Service Information point.

Rather a contradiction in terms that, could just be renamed The Point, although there is little point to it either. When faced with half a mile of mall which branches off at various places, 'downstairs on the left' holds very little meaning. Took me fifteen minutes to finally discover the toy shop where I was greeted with a vapid shrug from the assistant when I asked if she had such a thing as a frisbee.

Meanwhile I was fighting off the make-up demo stalkers left and right. Seriously, did I look THAT bad? I wasn't exactly the height of chic in my brown slacks and t-shirt, a fact that was kindly rammed home by a bunch of lads who I thought were checking me out at one point only to clock the high-heeled, tight-jeaned peroxide blonde they were really staring at. Am I bovvered? Really? (OK, a little tiny bit.)

Luckily Rose was at the other end of my texts to reassure me I looked great and translate 'eff off' into passable Hungarian for use on the slap-sellers.

The cruel truth is I should have had company today in the form of Ma and Pa but sadly they had to cancel their trip. After 2 weeks in and out of hospital with nose bleeds my Dad was finally persuaded of the logic of not hurtling through the air in a pressurised tube when just sitting on the sofa can start an episode. Poor lamb is miserable as well as somewhat sore round the nasal passages after all the stuff that's been poked up there lately. Fortunately he was OK when the kids and I Skyped him tonight so Poppet didn't have to wonder if he'd been snorting mice - apparently the weapon of choice for recurrent nosebleeds such as his is a Tampax up the schnozzer. Nice.

Get better soon Dad!

The tooth, the whole tooth and nothing but the tooth

It's a good sign someone's had a rough week when they pick up the intercom for the front gate and try to make a phonecall on it.

The perplexed look on Nobby's face while he tried to work out where the number pad was so he could dial was absolutely priceless.

Bless him, but I am not surprised he's disorientated with trips to both London and Paris this week on top of Vienna and Eger last week. I am expecting to find the car keys in the fridge any day now.

But I needed a bit of a giggle after my own rough week - it looks like Poppet, Pickle and I will be taking up residence at the dentist's from now on. We popped in to get a check up on the infamous capped tooth yesterday evening and ended up embarking on root canal work because the tooth has died.

That poor girl will rue the day she ever tried contortionism within splatting distance of an immovable object.

I have to say, watching her getting pumped full of anaesthetic and the dentist boring a hole all the way up into the root of her tooth then calling me over to have a closer look hurt me just as much as it shook her up. I now have the task of keeping the hole clean by squirting Listerine up it twice a day and inserting a miniscule spring to spruce it up like I was getting the gunk out of the plug hole. SO happy about that.

Luckily, now she's over the shock, there isn't any actual pain and I am continually impressed how kids just take stuff on board and carry on. Following our 2 hour stint in the chair last night it was 8pm and we'd had no dinner having gone straight from school after Poppet's pottery club (she's gonna switch to ceramics and get to work on a new tooth now, hee hee!)

We spotted a MacDos on the way home and stopped in for the easy option and somehow Poppet polished off a McNuggets McMenu and a chocolate McDoughnut still with half her face numbed and a tube sticking out of the borehole in her tooth. I had to have a Big Mac just to get over it (well, that's my excuse.)

So now Poppet is the class celebrity having worked out she can freak out all her friends by showing them her pet borehole. Though she wasn't impressed by the class who played an April Fool on her class by stealing all their clothes while they were in a swimming lesson...

The rest of us guffawed of course, a classic prank, nice one.

I managed to avoid all April Fools and instead my own little brood became April Stars by performing 'The House That Jack Built' and 'The Mouse and the Lion' in assembly. I nearly exploded with pride. We repeated the show for all the mums at the end of the day and I definitely saw some moist eyes amongst the audience (when all the camcorders moved out the way.)

Anyway, at this moment Nobby's just popped out to get beer and there's curry on the way so I think, barring any mishaps, Friday night wind-down should be good. This week can only get better.