Tractor on the main road

My partner has returned and just in time. The morning before he arrived was Monday. It did not get off to a good start. The baby had been up all night with a sore throat. At 6.30am I looked groggily at the clock and thought I'd just try and get him back to sleep and then get daughter one up. Disaster. I fell into a dream about trampolining [it's been much on my mind] and woke up to see the clock flashing 7.30am. Daughter one has to be at the bus stop by 7.40. Even for a person with highly developed skills at the last minute school run dash this was a step too far. Instead I got everyone up, breakfasted and dressed in 20 minutes flat, cursing the fact that this week is packed lunch week. There was the inevitable 10-minute delay for spillages and babies running off with the remote control and car keys at great speed, but by 8.10 everyone was in the car.

It was then that daughter two mentioned that her cherished One Direction drinking bottle had leaked all over her sandwiches. Arg. By 8.15 we had set off towards daughter one's school which is half an hour away down winding country lanes. Daughters two and three's school opens at 8.55. It was unlikely we would make both deadlines. Even less likely when we got onto the main road and found ourselves stuck behind a tractor full of soil. Double arg. By this time I was virtually apoplectic. "What kind of inconsiderate farmer goes on a busy main road in a tractor at rush hour?" I asked rhetorically. Everyone else was keeping very quiet in the back. They know that when mummy is apoplectic it is unwise to speak. All except the baby who was gesticulating wildly and appeared to be echoing my anger. He kept saying something that sounded remarkably like "oh shit". Indeed he has been saying this quite a lot recently. I am hoping that the nursery people can't quite distinguish it.

The tractor stayed on the road for the next 20 minutes before turning off down the exact same country lane we had to go down. Triple arg. Daughter three summoned up the courage to say very patiently that she knew someone in her class who came in at least half an hour late once. "It'll be alright, Mummy," she said, ever the voice of reason. I dropped daughter one off on time and headed back to the primary school. Would you believe that the very same tractor was heading back that way too? Eventually, 20 minutes late we arrived at school after making a brief stop to buy a sausage roll to replace the soggy chicken sandwiches in daughter two's dripping lunchbox. I dropped off the baby, who had calmed down and appeared to be groaning or singing [it's hard to know], and headed home to the relative calm of a day in the home office.