Blog – 20th October 2014
You’d have thought that living in a household with one adult – dubious (me), 5 children, two of which should have been classed as adults and one who at 16 was definitely more mature than the rest of us put together, along with a dog; her two puppies and two cats, I would have been pretty much used to chaos and mayhem? However, often the madness that was my life quite often seemed to take even me by surprise.
Monday seemed to have been going pretty well, under these circumstances, until a knock at the door from my neighbour asking for Mummy. On shooing all the children inside, she led me outside to speak to me. It transpired that one of the least adult, adults of the household, namely my eldest son, had managed to run one of the aforementioned cats over on the driveway, killing her instantly. This had been witnessed, blessedly, otherwise I’d have probably have tripped over her, and slipped on the blood in my haste to get to work the next morning, by my lovely next door neighbour. She wanted to make sure that the younger children didn’t witness the poor elderly cats unfortunate demise.
The poor creature had managed to survive for 17 years, living in our mad family, alongside a busy road and had tragically met her end under the wheels of a car on her own driveway. I’d better explain at this point that due to her advanced years she was totally deaf and spent an inordinate amount of time asleep and nothing seemed to wake her up apart from physically picking her up. I had, of late, taking to prodding her gently on occasions to make sure that she was actually still alive, or stood over her to see if she was still breathing.
I had to obviously break the news to my children and much sobbing naturally ensued and promises of new kittens made they finally went to sleep at about 11pm. This being a school night didn’t bode well for the next day.
21st October
I was doing battle with my hair, which as usual was refusing to comply with all coaxing when in bounced my 7 year old daughter, at around 7am, demanding to see the new kitten that she assumed I had obviously been able to source during the night. This is due to the well known fact that mothers do not, in fact, require any sleep and it is their sworn duty to be able to perform miracles on demand of various degrees of complexity.
Throwing out promises of kitten procuring procedures commencing as soon as possible I managed to escape to the car before the full onslaught of bad mother accusations reached me.
Much kitten searching was done by various people throughout the day by myself, various clients, staff and friends and a potential kitten was duly sourced and arranged to be collected the next day. I was unable to go immediately due to the puppies having to have their second injections that evening at the local vets.
Before we went to the vets however, the twice yearly descent on the dentists by the family had to be endured, as much by them as by us. Whilst myself and two of the children were sat patiently in the waiting room, my 7 year old daughter was to be seen kneeling on a chair looking out of the window with her head under the blind, palms and nose pressed firmly against the window, shouting loudly at passersby “Help Me! They have me trapped in here, I’m a prisoner”, much to the amusement of the other patients. When the dentist finally came to collect us, said daughter proudly announced that she only cleans her teeth twice a week! I was trying to sink into the floor from embarrassment by this time. What was even more irritating was that her teeth were in better condition that her 11 year old sisters who cleans hers religiously twice a day.
Unfortunately for me, my 7 year old is extremely wiley, and on learning that Mummy checks her toothbrush and knows that if it is dry, she cannot possibly have cleaned her teeth, now runs it under the tap. I have had to resort to seeing if her breath smells minty to know whether she is in fact telling me the truth when she says that she had cleaned her teeth. As soon as she starts getting pocket money no doubt I will need to think up another method of checking her daily dental habits, as she will probably be buying Polos or something else to render this method inadequate.
22nd October
After an extremely busy day starting with a breakfast networking meeting at the ungodly hour of 6.30am in Farnham followed by a board meeting in Basingstoke, where they had decided to dig up every road that I wanted to use like some personal conspiracy. I got to the office earlier than anticipated so decided that kitten accoutrement shopping needed to be done.
I grabbed one of my office kids to be official bag carrier and went in search of all things kitten. Three carrier bags later I was back in the office and spent a busy afternoon trying to knit with the fog of missing information that my clients like to test our patience with.
I phoned my son to tell him that I was on my way home and to ask him how long dinner would be, as we needed to leave at 6pm to go and collect the kitten. He informed me that it would be ready when I got home so everything seemed to be running smoothly.
Hmmm! 2 minutes later he was back on the phone asking me to ring the vet and the dog pound as the girls had let Bess the Border Collie out and she had run off. I pointed out that as I was driving, would it not be easier if he looked up the number of the pound and call them, as using Google whilst driving was not to be recommended. We compromised and I agreed to call the vet whilst he called the pound.
After the vets told me that they didn’t have our dog, I set off to look for her on the way home. My son then called me back to inform me that the errant dog was at the pound and that as they closed in 5 minutes we couldn’t go and get her until the morning. Bugger that I thought, I needed to be the other side of the county by 7am, so called them back when I got in and they agreed to let us collect her as long as we were there within 20 minutes.
Bidding farewell to dinner and telling my other son to mash the potatoes, and my 7 year old that she couldn’t eat an apple as her dinner was about to be dished up, we set off for the pound. Twenty five minutes and £71.70 later we were reunited with Bess. She was now also booked into the vets the next day to be microchipped as I think that she had single handedly kept them in business over the years. We then had to drive to Midhurst from Guildford to collect the kitten complete with the dog.
We hadn’t been in Midhurst long, probably about 5 minutes and were admiring the kittens, when my son calls me to ask how long we would be and whether they should have their dinner without us. I don’t know how I managed to restrain my language other than that I must have been struck speechless by the complete incomprehensibility of the question I had just heard. We’d left home about an hour and a half previously with dinner ready and he’d heard me tell his sister that dinner was about to be dished up. I’d asked him to mash the potatoes. However, as I had not actually given him the explicit instruction to dish up the dinner, he was waiting patiently for some magician to obviously appear to do this for him!! On top of that he hadn’t turned the oven off so the sausages were also burned. How on earth he is going to survive when he finally leaves home I have absolutely no idea. It scares me, it really does.
We duly took the kitten and proceeded to drive home. However, by this point, after such an early start, I was so tired, and my night vision being appalling, I ended up driving home at about 20 miles an hour on some stretches of the country roads as I just could not see a damn thing. By the time I got home I’d managed to pull a muscle in my neck and ended up getting indigestion from eating a cold sausage sandwich whilst trying to fold up the washing doing some sort of weird contortionist dance due to not being able to bend down properly because of the pain in my neck and shoulders. I hope that my neighbour was not looking into my kitchen window as I looked like a cross between Quasimodo and Mrs Bloody Tiggywinkle.
