Summertime and the living is easy

As I sit and type, I feel something I haven't felt for quite some time. It's the warm, slightly taut, prickly sensation you get on your skin when it's caught the sun. And it's lovely. Much like today was, because SHOCK! HORROR! ALERT THE MEDIA!, the sun actually shone. Admittedly it was what weatherman calls 'sunny spells' so hardly consistent and when the sun went behind the clouds, I was tempted to reach for a jumper. But still, the spells that were sunny definitely constituted a summer's day. I think that makes it three so far this year.

To celebrate, the boys and I spent most of it lying on a picnic blanket in the garden. Well I lay on it, they hurled themselves at me, wasted most of the sunblock on 'painting' each other and shouted at bugs that deigned to crawl on the rug (which I didn't mind).

I also had a moment of complete nostalgia. I set up the garden sprinkler thing that waves backwards and forward spraying water out in a fan shape. The two of them charged through it stark naked, shrieking in delight. It took me straight back to my childhood. Particularly the part when they decided to bring the sprinkler over to mummy , which resulted in more shrieking, only there was a bit less delight involved.

As husband hopped on a plane to enjoy a week of sleeping late in a hotel and long boozy dinners in the evenings, obviously interspersed with 'work', I decided to prove that I can be thoroughly self sufficient as a single mother and managed to rustle up a lunchtime BBQ. That's not quite as taxing as it sounds as I didn't have to rub two twigs together to get a fire started or even use firelighters and charcoal. I simply had to turn the knob on the gas grill, but still, that's normally husband's job so I got a small moment of omnipotence as I stood manfully turning sausages. (It also reinforced what I already secretly knew - that BBQing meat is easy yet men make it out to be A VERY IMPORTANT JOB THAT ONLY MEN CAN DO - so that women get to prepare everything else with all the credit going to the man with the tongs.)

I'd also spent much of the morning manually vacumming our swimming pool. Let me stop right here in case you think we're landed gentry with a butler called Jeeves. We're not. We just happened to buy a house that has a swimming pool. It was built in the early 80s and hasn't been updated since. I'd ignore it or add fish to it, except that having two small boys who might appreciate it once they progress out of armbands, means that I spend many, many hours trying to figure out how to make it blue. In the last month we've had to change the filter sand and pay £500 for a new pool pump. Now our automatic pool cleaner has died and the pool guy thinks its because an impeller has gone in the cleaner pump (I'll bet that sounds as though I know what I'm talking about. I don't.)

Which means that I have to manually vacuum it. Like vacumming a house that has two very mucky boys isn't enough. It is a somewhat therapeutic pastime, if only I wasn't constantly yelling at the boys to get their hands out of the pool chemicals or to stop leaning precariously over the deep end.

(I'll interrupt this pool story to tell you another one. Last week when Andy the pool guy was here, he helped me fish a dead mouse out of the pool. Chuckling at my squeamishness he said: 'That's nothing mate. I've just come from a pool with a dead cow in it.' Apparently the people who owned the pool had been away for a week. Their pool lies next to a field, home to several cows. One cow, in a bid for freedom or just bovine stupidity, managed to escape, charge across the pool cover before sinking into its watery grave. It's now spent a week getting nice and bloated. Andy was about to go join the fire brigade to try and remove the cow while trying not to burst it. Because if it burst, the pool owners would have a terrific cleaning job on their hands, making my paltry efforts pale in comparison. I can only imagine the poor pool owners popping out for a morning dip, rolling back the cover to find a bloated haunch of beef bobbing in the pool. Must have put them right off their breakfast.)

Anyway, back to why I've blathered on about the pool. Because having finally gotten it to a point where it is mostly clean, mostly blue and mostly warm, I thought it was time we actually swam in it. And so we did. Well I did. The children sat on the edge and wailed until I pulled one of them in, which resulted in even more tremendous wails until he realised that is was actually quite pleasant.

So a combination of sun, swimming, sun tanning, sprinkler running throughing, BBQing, crazy dancing to my new '101 sounds of summer' compilation CD - earmarked for use at our summer party taking place in two weeks time - including doing the Macarena much to the boys bemusement, it was all a rather lovely day.

There was only one real blight on the whole thing (well besides the odd lurking cloud and a two year old who got overtired and whingey mid afternoon). Me...in...a...bikini.

It's official. I am vile. I knew things had gone a bit pear shaped (literally) of late due to lack of exercise from sprained ankle. But looking at me in the bright sunshine today, I realised that I cannot blame my ankle on the state of my flab-tastic body. There is not one bit that is toned. This is years of abuse I feel, coupled with carrying two children in my belly. I look like a rather plump uncooked pork sausage. It's not pretty. Something has to be done. What, I'm not sure. But I am sliding into middle age hitting every cellulite bump on the way through.

Although, come to think of it, realistically it's not really too much of a train smash. I mean it's only 3 days a year that I'm going to be seen in public with very little clothing on anyway. If we move to the tropics, I might have take the self improvement venture a bit more seriously. But for now, I think I'll eat another left over chicken goujon from the kids supper and wash it down with a glass of wine. We've had summer now. Bring on the winter pies.

Toodle pip.

P.S. A footnote. Just finished bathing children and getting them into bed. I was told that they want to move house. I asked why. They said they would like to leave this house to the bugs. Again I asked why. 'Because, the bugs keep coming into our house through a hole somewhere and we don't like bugs. Specially beetles and spiders. So they can have this house and we'll get a new one.' I'm not sure anyone has mentioned the economic downturn to them...

Juggling it

Yesterday was Wednesday. Hence the lack of a blog post. As I might have mentioned before, Wednesdays are not good days. It is the one day in the week that I have no childcare. It's my day for spending with my children. It's my day for going to toddler groups and seeing friends, playing snakes and ladders and bouncing on the trampoline. It should be a good thing. But it also just happens to be the busiest day of the working week.

I'm in PR. For some reason, Wednesday is the day that media decide that they need stuff. Now. This minute. Immediately. That's what I love about the press. They can hang onto a story for months and months doing nothing with it while clients want to know where their coverage is. And then, bam. They decide that they have to run it and need a whole bunch of supporting information nano-seconds before going to print.

So here's a summary of yesterday:

We started out with the normal fights about toast, had a reasonably successful track record of keeping underpants dry until mid morning and managed to get laundry folded. We then headed off to the post office to return the unsuccessful anniversary present I'd bought for lovely husband (see Sunday's post).

The post office one village over has shut (village gossip says it's because the post master was crooking the lotto machine or something - how I love twitchy curtain syndrome). So we drove several villages over to the next closest PO. Except they had a technical fault and were shut too. So we drove half way across Britain and finally found a post office that was open. Sadly it was run by someone who'd obviously never worked in a post office before and who wasn't quite sure what a stamp was, much less a large package.

All of this incredible lack of speed left me feeling a little fraught as I had left the children in the car outside. I know it's not a clever thing to do but I had a choice - leave them in the car where they are highly unlikely to be abducted in teeny tiny local village OR bring them into the shop where they could destroy every display, scream for sweets/comics/other and have a tantrum when we left with nothing. So I opted for the former. But I would have preferred to get in and out with a dash of speed.

Anyway, after finally managing to get rid of the obnoxious clock gift, we trundled back across the country to toddler group. For anyone who has never been to a toddler group, let me explain what it is. Take one dusty village hall. Add about 20 children who all seem to have been injected with red bull. Put in an array of fairly tired plastic toys which become of the objects of greatest desire so that a lot of fighting ensues about who's going to carry the cow with no head. Scatter a handful of knackered looking mothers who sip on cups of tea but would far rather be drinking neat gin. Throw in some nursery rhyme singing to the ear-splitting sounds of musical instruments being 'played' and you start to realise the relaxing atmosphere.

And through all of this, I am tapping away on my handheld palm thingy responding to emails from a range of journalists wanting things NOW and clients asking where things are. And because I can never get the shift or control key to work on the blasted thing, my replies always look like this: iLll respond soon>

I'm sure all the other mothers think I'm an unfriendly cow who ignores her children and them while tapping away.

We then raced to a friend's house for lunch and an afternoon of play. Which might have been fun had my email inbox not kept filling up with ultra urgent requests.

We finally got home and I resorted to the tried and trusted bad mother's buying-some-time-technique of video and chocolate. I estimated I had about 30 minutes to catch up on a full day's work before the video got boring and the sugar had kicked in fuelling violent fights.

I then had to race downstairs to feed the starving beasties, raced back up to complete more work, raced back down to frog march beasties off into the bath, raced around their bedroom remaking peed on bed from night before, tidying up toy explosion and piles of dirty clothes, all the while child number 2 emptied the bath of its contents by pouring cupful after cupful of water on the floor. He was instructed to either wipe it up, say sorry or not get a bedtime story. Obviously he chose the latter which meant a full blown tantrum come story time - which resulted in a stint in the spare bedroom while I read story to child number 1. When I retrieved screaming beastie, I was so busy trying to avoid getting my ear drum burst that I failed to notice the low hanging beam in the passage and smacked my head. Hard.

The rest of bedtime wasn't particularly pleasant.

Then had to rush to finish last bits of work before planting a quick kiss on husband's cheek as he walked in the door, before rushing off to the pre-school committee meeting. Which meant I missed the final episode of The Apprentice.

And that was Wednesday. Am hoping Thursday is slightly less fraught.