On having a dirty house and why I won't clean up the crumbs, no matter who is visiting

I have a dirty house. No, really I do. When I began working full time around two and a half years ago, my thoughts turned to the many conversations I'd had with many of my friends (and fellow mothers) who discussed with me the frustration of working all week, only to have to work some more at the weekend carrying out household chores. Some talked about how they were negotiating with their other halves so that they could hire help, a cleaner. Thus giving way for them to spend time with their children/family or having time for self care (most likely at the bottom of the list of priorities). As time has passed over these thirty odd months, I have delegated more and more to my offspring. They each have weekday and weekend chores and they are very basic. Put dishes away, take recycling out, make beds, lay clothes out for next day, pack bag ready for school. Less regularly, they are asked to wash dishes, iron clothes, vacuum the house, clean the bathroom and toilet. Often, my husband and I find ourselves absorbing the delegated chores back into our own duties, thinking that we are being kind and helpful to our not so little anymore offspring. Well, this week, I lost it. There's nothing worse than feeling that you are being taken for granted, that your offspring (who you breastfed and tenderly weaned, whose poop you endured, whose every need and whom you mostly put before any needs of your own by the way) are behaving consistently selfish. I lost it. I shared my feelings. I shared the stress of the accumulation of duties that need carrying out versus the depleting amount of time set aside to complete these duties. I shared again, how they need to do their part and step up once more, as they have in so many, many ways that have made me immensely proud in the transition I have made from stay-at-home mum to working mum.

So. As much as everyone is doing their part and as much as my husband and I drill in this notion of working together as a team to make our family life run smoothly, I am coming to accept this. My house will sometimes be dirty. I know that my offspring won't always move the sofa to vacuum the nooks and crannies behind it. I know too that they might not move every shampoo bottle, cream or vitamin bottle off the ledge to clean the bathroom properly or remember to change the hand towels. I know they definitely won't remember to dust ... anywhere. I know too that when the weekends come, we can't wait to get out and be in the countryside, to explore new places, to go on road trips and when this isn't a priority none of us feels quite so alive as we should. For this family adventure time to happen by hook or by crook, sometimes other things have to get knocked further down the list of duties. This is ok. So if you come to my house and there are a few crumbs down the side of the sofa, I know they're there. It's just not important enough anymore for me to prioritise getting rid of them. It's taken a long time to reach this acceptance but boy, am I glad.

And breathe ...

At the moment I am waking up before I need to wake to remind myself that I have two more hours to go before I need to wake up. Then I wake up nearly exactly an hour before I need to get up to remind myself that I need to be out of bed in one hour. Sometimes, I give myself some time out and sleep straight through the following hour until I actually need to get up. At other times, I lie impatiently still, neither fully awake and definitely not asleep and check my phone intermittently. I don't like that this is taking place. It is emotionally exhausting and psychologically unhelpful. I don't like. Not one bit. Although I get it. We've had a lot going on and my mind is fussing with all of this information, my sub conscience poking its nose into places when it has no right to do so.

I am working full time for the first time in eleven years, since September. The first few months were adrenaline filled and since there was just so much change going on, somehow we all rode the wave. One child starting secondary school, the younger one entering the world of childcare for the first time with two different childminders, myself working in a new role and my husband taking on new plus additional domestic and childcare duties really for the first time. Now some months in, I think we're all feeling it in our different ways. My eldest shared with me a couple of nights ago during a strained exchange that he misses not having as much time to just relax with me. Whilst I know that he is extremely privileged to have had a stay at home mum for his entire life and I also know that our evenings and week-ends are spent together and very little time outside of school is spent apart, and that, like me he can be a little dramatic but nonetheless of course mother guilt entered my heart and pierced it a little. 

Normally when I experience a little overwhelm, it either has me scribbling words and thoughts uncontrollably or it's quite the opposite. The last few months I have scribbled away and tucked words in different places, some places almost already forgotten and other in other places, the words just sit waiting, waiting for me to remember them. Time slips away and things are forgotten and just like my ten year old self did, I worry. I worry that I won't remember it all correctly, perhaps that I won't remember it at all. I worry that the days and months and years will roll into a mass of half truths and fractured memories and worst of all, I worry that I won't remember the good days, the happy times, the funny things. So perhaps in the early hours of this morning which technically will be tomorrow, perhaps I'll have a slight reprieve from the list of to do's that knock on my door. Perhaps I'll feel like at least one box is ticked and not in a work kind of way but in a surviving kind of way, a breathing kind of way. Breathe. And breathe. And breathe.

Blow Gold All Over The Place

Christmas happened some time back and I am just surfacing from both the rest and the surge of busyness that followed all of the rest. We moved slowly over the festive period. Relieved to have reached the end of term. We listened to music. We enjoyed parties at good friends houses that were suitable for adults and kids and stayed up late drinking good wine and prosecco. We ate good food. We played games, uno and ludo and cluedo were our favourites. We made lots of coffee, fresh percolated coffee. We stayed in pyjamas all day long. We savoured the smell of homemade cookies and filled the old biscuit tin with cookie after cookie. We had long naps in the middle of the day. We took off for rainy walks and drives in our old car. We had our moments, both good and bad. We drank in us four. 

I'm never sure about this season, all the expectation, all of the spending, all of the chaos and family entanglements. Never sure. But this year, despite some stomach wrenching disappointment with family and said entanglements, this year I really enjoyed the christmas holidays. This year I felt like a grown up, able to make choices without any obligations, able to do as I please and it was a good feeling. As we headed into the holiday season, our family of four kept reminding one another, 'let's be patient and kind'. That was the best thing we could have done, of course we weren't always patient and kind but we gently reminded one another to be so and those words became actions.

We like spending time in the city as a family and we did so over the christmas period. I think I will always have happy memories of time spent in the city with these boys of mine. Like the afternoon that we headed into the centre and we each took one boy and split up so that they could buy a gift for one another. It was busy and buzzy. It got dark early and we had a fairly long walk back to the car which we'd parked in Digbeth, during this walk back that youngest boy of mine 'tiggered' his way through busy streets and puddles and sidewalks and curbs, jumping and kicking and splashing and thrashing and causing my hubby's wrists to ache. Of course, that ball of fire promptly fell asleep seconds after getting into his carseat. I even managed to transfer him from the car onto the sofa just like the old days. He slept there for a long time and I thought, 'hey, it's the holidays, let Tigger sleep!' That night, full to the brim with rest, Tigger couldn't sleep and so hubby and I played Ludo with him till stupid o'clock. I didn't really mind, plus I especially loved the way he made fake fart noises with his armpit every time he rolled a six on the dice. 

There were happy moments like on christmas day, when the youngest boy disppeared and I found him tucked up in bed, with a bowl of tortilla chips, reading an adventure time comic and loving life. It's the little things, always the little things. Like watching my husband most evenings, in the corner of our living room working on a drawing. When you live in a small house with children that have turned into giants overnight, you need a corner. I admire his discipline and dedication and ability to turn off everything else that is happening around 'his corner'. I love watching the boys watching their dad and knowing that this image of him will be one they keep with them always. Peeking through the crack in the door of the boys bedroom and seeing my boys curled up together on their top bunk. Then hearing my eldest boy reading Winnie the Poo to his little brother and feeling my lip quivering remembering when that big boy of mine was under two and covered in chicken pox and the only thing that would soothe him was watching Winnie the Poo, which we watched over and over and over again for a few days. 

The were moments too when the boys spoke words that will stay with me forever. Like when that youngest of mine told me 'Mum, keep this soft bit forever' whilst nestling into my wobbly belly and I could have cried rivers to swim in with that gesture of acceptance. Or when my ten year old sat alongside me whilst strumming his guitar and said 'I don't know what happens but when I play music, I just see a story' and continued talking with the sparkliest of eyes and I could just see all of the romance and angst and heartache and heartbreak ahead. 

Sometimes there's just happiness in the simplest of things, for instance that morning when I made cookies for a friend and there was the perfect amount of cookie dough left over to make a heart shaped cookie muffin for my hubby's breakfast. Also, when you decide at 10pm on Christmas Eve that you want something handmade to go in the children's stockings because you realise you don't really have 'little presents' to go in because you decided not to buy for the sake of buying and you figure that satsumas won't be adequate. So, milk and and white chocolate cookies it is, even if you don't have parchment paper to make it look pretty. You fill their stockings with handmade cookies and the next day they give you smiles and hugs of genuine gratitude and fill their bellies with something you made with love, something that you hoped they would understand as perfectly as they seem to. For these simple pleasures, I am grateful. 

Life isn't without the odd bruise, but words spoken from the heart and memories made together make up for those falls and the cries that come mostly from disappointment. We took joy in staying indoors and saving our pennies, we embraced the pouring rain and the fresh air, we valued family and laughter and we remembered that it's all about balance. It's all in knowing how to stay warm without getting burned.

A little of summer still left over

Country walks along the canal with a stop off along the way to pet and feed a horse and enjoy our home made sandwiches, flask of hot chocolate included. Hubby easing himself into the holidays with some territorial spraying in the form of re-arranging books, re-alphabetizing our cd's and changing the shelves that we keep our cereal boxes on (no photo proof of the cereal boxes re-arrangement here!) A visit to the town hall to watch the Gruffalo with my youngest just as I did with my eldest a few years back, except I didn't have to stand at the back or cajole this one into staying! This kid was loving the audience participation and didn't need asking twice to 'shout louder'. Our holiday staple, a trip to Oxford, lovely lovely Oxford. Lunch in a pretty university park, the pitt rivers museum, blackwells bookstore where the boys enjoyed spending some of their birthday money on a tin tin book and a star wars flickr book. A visit to museum of modern art with a great Jenny Saville show that included a nude self portrait that revealed both male and female genitalia much to the fascination and amusement of my seven year old boy 'boobs and a willy ... mmm ... interesting' (scuttles off to have a little giggle to himself, followed by 'seriously though mum, she's really good at drawing isn't she?'). More food enjoyed whilst watching rowers and punters along the river, with the occasional worry that Elliott was about to take an unscheduled swim. Discovering flying gliders once again and enjoying watching those boys of mine flying planes in our back garden, fixing and re-adjusting them after crash landings, all for sixty pence ... oh yeah, a real child of the seventies moment! And on that theme there was kazoo fun and swingball too, now if gliders, kazoo's and swingball don't spell out 'summer' I don't know what does! There were also thank you cards to make for all of the wonderful gifts that those, born 3 years and 2 days apart, summer birthday boys of mine ... lego put the fun into everything even thank you cards, all you need are some stickers and a 'thank you'! There are more summer snippets to come, more blog post drafts to complete,  it's time to catch up here on this old blog! 

(NB Apologies to Aunty Julie and Wayne & Pops and Lao Lao and a few other lovely folks, your cards are still sitting on the mantlepiece!!)

  

our week-end, this week-end

American pancakes flavoured with vanilla pod and served with maple syrup. Smiling and then really laughing at hearing that eldest boy of mine say to his dad 'the man from the Great British Bake Off would say that the vanilla doesn't come through'. Checking out my hubby's 'gunz'. A march for a worthy cause. An adventure in our local park that ended with one small boy executing an unplanned flip over his balance bike, minimal injury maximum humiliation. A great message of encouragement at church: Pray expectantly, Serve creatively, Love unconditionally. A walk in the city nearby. A hand hold and chat with my hubby in one of our family 'happy places' watching our kids run around like maniacs in an open space in the city, whilst reminiscing about watching their early steps in the same place. Pondering whether the art is bad or if we are 'misunderstanding' in a contemporary art gallery. Checking out beard rivals, him not me. Seeing my old boss from a bookshop I once worked at and not being certain if he had seen me or not or whether like me he hesitated to say hello and then the opportunity was gone. Thinking about our 17th wedding anniversary which is quickly approaching and telling my hubby about my movie drive-in idea.