The doctor who skips

Getting to a bank holiday weekend sometimes feels like winning a marathon. This week more than most. I have had a lot of work on over the last two weeks in my various guises. Everything seems to come to a head at the same time and almost invariably just before or during a holiday. Plus I had a dreadful cold to start the week and would dearly have liked to stay in bed for at least a month. Unfortunately, this is never going to be remotely possible. All the kids were saying they felt rotten too. On Wednesday my partner went to Spain so it was just me, the girls and the cat.

It wasn’t too bad. I had several girls’ nights in with goth girl, chatting and “chillaxing”, as she calls it. I am trying to get her to think that The Bangles were goth. I know they weren’t remotely goth, but she was not impressed by Sisters of Mercy and currently thinks Avril Lavigne is goth incarnate. She was, however, more impressed by the Chipmunks’ version of Manic Monday than the original. In fact, my Monday was fairly calm: it was Thursday that was manic.

I have a three-hour round trip commute to work and I had to get home by 7pm for a parents’ evening at toddler girl’s nursery. Plus I had promised KFC because I wouldn’t have time to cook and get to the nursery. There were sharp intakes of breath at work about the KFC option and I figured the same reaction was likely from the nursery parents so they had it in the car en route. But is one night going to condemn them to diabetes and premature death? The poor kids have got healthy options coming at them from every side – we now have to check the school menu days in advance so I can give them a warning when the butternut squash lasagne is coming up and they can stock up on breakfast.

Toddler girl is doing very well at nursery, but she needs to take time to understand rectangles apparently. On Friday, I had the whole day with toddler girl. We did a High School Musical jigsaw, painted a dolphin and, because we were out of glitter, decorated it with sprinkles [which bonkers daughter then ate], played mummies and babies, cycled to the corner shop [okay, she was on the tricycle and I pushed her the entire way, but she thinks she cycled] and did a few rectangles. We also watched In the Night Garden and she confessed that she watched it with Daddy on Fridays, but Daddy had siesta all the way through it. I was supposed to have the day off work, but had to make some phone calls in the afternoon.

Unfortunately, during one of these phone calls while goth girl was in charge the toddler one, who is potty training, did a massive poo. Luckily, she did it in the potty. Unluckily, she did not seem to be able to find the wet wipes to clean herself with. Instead, quite sensibly, she grabbed the kitchen towel that we use to dry the dishes. I’m not entirely sure how, but when I came off the phone she had got poo everywhere – on my partner’s bag, on the floor, on her foot, on her hand, on goth girl’s skateboard, on her sister’s foot…However, she was very pleased with herself as she had got the majority of the poo in the potty and had made the effort to clean herself.

She has been becoming very assertive recently. She was up quite late the other night and I spent ages trying to get her to go to sleep in our room, but when she didn’t I took her to her bed and lay down with her. I asked her if she had closed her eyes and she whispered back ‘Stop talking, mummy. I’m trying to sleep’! She was also caught one night smothering herself in moisturiser. She is able to climb virtually anywhere at the moment and can reach anything. Luckily she is not quite as crazy as bonkers daughter who at one point covered her entire body in sudocream…Today the bonkers one wanted to play doctors. She has been practising skipping and said she was going to be “the doctor who skips”. Would that all doctors had some interesting pastime that they did while writing prescriptions and asking if you feel tired [I cannot remember feeling untired…].

The bonkers one is very glad it is half term as she is going off school because it is too much like hard work. This is from the person who seems to memorise her reading books from one reading and then gets bored of reading them after five seconds and wants to read them in quirky ways, for instance, mumbling or singing the words so you have to try and make out if they are accurate or reading them backwards in the mirror while doing the bottom dance. I don’t quite know how to tackle this with her teacher who, for some strange reason, continues to regard her as “quiet and studious”…

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