Unfit mum

Date: 7:39am, 14 Oct 2011

I think I am not fit enough to be a mother of four. It seems to require a lot of heavy lifting work and running [up and down stairs and on the school RUN! as I have dubbed it as we are always around three minutes late]. Yesterday we had to get daughter one's new glasses after school. The beauty of working flexibly means I can forgo lunch and then call the 4.30pm dash to the shops my lunch break. We got to the opticians on time after a sprint across the shopping centre, but the baby was squirming and wanting to trot all over the shop. An opticians is not perhaps the best place to let a baby loose...

I had, of course, put the receipt for the glasses in my bag which is like some sort of cavernous black hole. The opticians lady looked a bit worried when she saw me peering in past a layer of other receipts, odd socks and biscuit crumbs. I emerged triumphant though with the required bit of paper.

Daughter two then dragged me into Clintons Cards to look at something called blue noses, some sort of small furry animal which apparently is all the rage at school. "Everyone has one, Mummy," she assured me, "and my teacher is going to do a play using them." I am never quite sure how much of what daughter two says is wish fulfillment and how much is fact. The other day, for instance, she said that her best friend was thinking of leaving school because she was being bullied. "Who by?" I asked. Apparently, according to daugther two, she is being bullied by her teacher because he is not listening to her. "He doesn't listen to me either," she said, indignantly. "I put my hand up the other day and I gave the right answer about a maths question and he asked someone else, Mummy. Yes, Mummy, it was a maths question and I got it right."

Anyhow, I coughed up the fiver for the blue nose on the grounds that she is now in £5 debt to me, which apparently she is paying back when some more teeth fall out. We were then forced to go and look at shoes in Primark by daughter one [obviously narked about the blue nose purchase] but on the condition that we were just looking. The baby wanted to get down. Primark is another place where it is not good to let a baby on the loose. I put him down after he kicked me in the face. He ran off at high speed. I followed. We ran into Poundland.

The entire child contingent expressed a sudden and absolute hunger and thirst. We emerged with some bargain drinks and ran back to the car to escape the rush hour. The petrol was on zero. Back home, I caught up on emails, made the dinner, stopped the baby burying his head in the kittens, cleaned the kitten poop, did the washing and cleaned up. My partner sauntered in. He always says hello at the end of the day in a kind of cautious tone as he never quite knows how near the edge I might be. I was dangling over it with both feet. Some time around 10pm after bath, homework and generally goading people into bed I sat down.

View Mum on the Run's other Blog Entries

Related tags: Fitness