Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before*

This is the sight that greeted me this morning when I got up.

Dirty dishes piled on every imaginable surface. Half eaten bowls of cereal, congealing icecream, mugs with a layer of coffee glazing the bottom, lunch containers growing stuff, and god knows what else.

In the other direction I was greeted with this. 

Three little girls in various stages of pyjama-dom, all spreadeagled in front of the TV, lounging around on little pink couches (or baby swings), staring mutely at the box, not interacting, barely human. Plus an overflowing rack of small clothes drying. For a week, now.

When I turned around, I got a glimpse of my husband doing a runner out the front door, escaping to the relative sanity of his workplace: a weetbix/Dora/nappy free zone.  Lucky bastard.

I was sorely tempted to go back to bed, but alas, duty called. I had slept in but it wasn’t a luxurious lie-in, it was a comatose, awake for three hours in the middle of the night feeding babies and attending to screaming toddlers sleep-in. My tardiness in bed was now going to cost me. I had half an hour to get four people dressed and fed, four pigtails, three sets of teeth, four bottoms, one school lunch, two water bottles, and three umbrellas. And somehow I had to drag them away from the TV without them killing each other.

Welcome to a typical morning in households across Australia, right?

I stood in the kitchen for a minute planning my attack. The dishes and washing could wait. I could probably get away with leaving the two year old and baby in their pyjamas, school lunch could be cold leftover ravioli, an unpeeled mandarin and an obnoxious but very convenient sugary snack from the cupboard. School lunch. Check.

I headed over to grab one of the kids. A sneak attack would be the only way to get them away from The Care Bears.

My stealth attack was thwarted by Cinderella’s plastic crown imbedding itself in my foot.

‘FFFFFFF…… Oh my god@!’ I muttered

‘Language, Mum!’, admonished the Bombshell.

My bad.

An advert came on, so the Curly Mop began looking for other ways to amuse herself.

‘Mum! She got her germs on me when she sucked on my jumper! Eww,’ shrieked the Bombshell flicking bits of her sister's drool across the room.

Seriously? Sucking jumpers? Don't I feed you enough.

Apparently not, because not long after I found her sucking toothpaste straight out of the tube, probably to get the taste of grubby jumper out of her mouth. Brushing teeth? Close enough.

I let the Mop choose her own outfit. She looked like a bag lady. Whatever.

Meanwhile, Baldy Baby thought this would be a judicious time to poop. Two minutes before we are due to leave for school.

'Mum, the baby's bottom is kinda stinky,' offered the Bombshell, her nose buried in the baby's crotch.

'She STINKS,' agreed the Mop.

Cleaning bottoms? Check.

I pulled beanies over their heads, disguising my half-arsed attempt at pigtails. Hair, done.

I threw the two littlies in the pram, handed the Bombshell my thermos of coffee and bounced them down the steps on four very flat tyres. 

The Bombshell ran ahead: not even my atrocious mood could ruin her pure joy as she balanced on garden walls, pointed out rainbows and... crap. Rainbows?

We were halfway to school when it bucketed down.

Naturally the umbrellas were at home, next to the door where I had left them. We sheltered under a tree while the Bombshell's school mates drove by in massive SUVs waving gleefully at us. 

We must have looked pretty pathetic. The grumpy mum standing under a tree with three sodden kids (I said sodden, not sodding!). 


*   *  *
I should have brought the dishes outside and left them in the rain.  Maybe then, they'd be clean by now.

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*Apologies to The Smiths for associating their uber cool brand of rock with a very cranky brand of domesticity.