It’s been difficult over the last few weeks. The struggle is real – a head strong 18-month-old and a five-year-old testing the boundaries. This is how our day goes at the moment:

Get up (or wait for your husband to get up first and see how long extra you can stay in bed until you are called down, then feel guilty about it). Kids refuse nearly all offers of food and only drink hot chocolate and eat Pringles you forgot to hide.

Herbie refuses to get dressed until you are apoplectic with rage and threatening to take all the toys off his Christmas list. ‘Would you like to write a letter to Father Christmas?’ I say in a later moment of calm. ‘NO!’ he says. That’s the spirit!

At no point will he then let me brush his hair without dancing round the kitchen like the ex-leper in Life of Brian.

Gus then shits himself and tries to rub his hands in it – better than last week though when we celebrated Herbie wiping his own bum only to find that I’d forgotten to put toilet wipes in the loo and he used antibacterial ones and then dropped them on the floor for Gus to pick up and suck 😱

It’s then a mad rush to the car and Herbie will only get in and out by climbing over the driver’s seat and rubbing his muddy trotters all over the upholstery and gear stick. We’ve also had the added fascination of a dead fox decomposing at exactly the spot we park at school to much horror/delight as well as a skip on our drive, meaning we have to slide along the wall to get past it.

The skip has the added dimension of needing to park one car on the narrow country road outside our house where there is currently a massive pothole right at the entrance to our gate to fall into. Constantly switching car seats between cars depending on which of us is taking the boys around also means that on one occasion husband had to shut the door whilst mid switch to let cars past and then discovered the child lock was on so he couldn’t get back out. He was last seen clinging to the back seat like a spider as people slowed down to get a better look.

They make us scream and shout til we question our sanity but when we are away from them, we cry into the drinks that we promise ourselves we will give up until we fall into the pothole yet again and say, maybe tomorrow…

Image from Pixabay