On the 11th of December things that went wrong for me

started with getting up late

On the 11th of December things that went wrong for me;
Tarly ate tree decorations
and I started with getting up late

On the 11th of December things that went wrong for me;
children wouldn’t get dressed
Tarly ate tree decorations
and I started with getting up late

etc.

One of those days today. I woke up late, Tarly had been eating the biscuits and candy canes off the tree 🙄 and I had a list of things I needed to do before leaving the house and on the way to Home Ed group. I managed to get a wash on, drape wet washing round the radiators (we are in danger of being either taken over by the dirty laundry pile or simply running out of clean clothes here – my usual laundry obsession abates totally in the winter, particularly now my tumble drier is broken – it’s the line dried freshness that gets me going during the warmer weather :lol:), bung a beef curry in the slow cooker, clingfilm cold pizza and mince pies to take along as our contribution, get hold of Ali, persuade the children to get dressed and then dig out a couple of small Christmas presents to wrap up for the children to be given to them at MM. I had a couple of small gifts in mind so having managed to find them from the various pressie stashes around the house and even managed to unearth some wrapping paper with robbins on from last year (not bought this years yet) I went looking for the sellotape. Now I had a brand new roll of sellotape in my hand last night, I’d found it in Tarly’s room when I was doing a post-houseguest mad weekend tidy up, put it inside an unturned footstool along with various other things that shouldn’t be in her room and bunged the footstool in the playroom ready for putting all the bits and pieces in their proper homes later. The footstool was still in the playroom, but the right way up and with no sign of the various bits and pieces from inside it. I rang Ady to check if he’d put the sellotape somewhere, checked with the children and drew blanks all round. Then I remembered that we did have a second roll of sellotape (sellotape and me have a funny old relationship, a bit like other people and busses. When I don’t need it then rolls of it seem to haunt me, falling off shelves, turning up in unexpected drawers and cupboards and generally making a nusiance of themselves. When I do have the urgent need to afix something using single sided tacky clear tape is there ever any to be found? Nope!) – I knew I had taken a roll to Tarly’s party, ready for sticking tiaras together, I even recall using it. Some of the last remaining bits from the party were still in the back of my car waiting to come back into the house so I went and rummaged through all of them looking for the sellotape. Nope, not there, clearly kidnapped by some evil sellotape baron and being held hostage. Maybe somewhere there is someone with a parallel problem except with scissors or drawing pins, maybe I have what they want and I’ll suddenly start to get small pieces of sellotape sent to me in the post along with ransom notes (made of letters torn from newspapers – they can’t cut them out, they have no scissors – and attached to paper with sellotape asking for unmarked scissors to be left in a briefcase in a phone box and my sellotape will be returned unharmed. Which leads me to wondering whether the only real purpose of phoneboxes now is for dropping off ransoms and teenagers doing sordid early sexual acts to each other, cos surely nowadays everyone has a mobile phone anyway and doesn’t need to use phoneboxes for actually making phone calls). I did find the smallest mini roll of parcel tape during all my rummaging though and sparingly used the last few centimentres of that left on the roll to wrap the Christmas presents.

Then we drove to Brighton, in the pouring rain, listening to Christmas carols played at top volume while I sang all the descant versions :lol:. That restored spirits somewhat and we had a lovely time at MM where we had a Christmas Party. Parachute play, lots of food and Christmas music, the hall decorated with the bits and pieces we made there last week and lots of general festiveness. Saying to people ‘see you in the new year’ when we said goodbye made me feel quite Christmassy too. 🙂

Things went back downhill again from there though really. 🙁 We drove home fine, listening to Stop The Cavalry on repeat because both the children love it (have to say it reminds us all far more of Newgale and the children marching round a table with the Price children in August than Christmas but never mind :lol:), once home I spent ages trying to track down various dvds I’d sold on ebay but the kids had nicked back from the ebay pile. Gathered them all together and started to try and pack them but of course I have no sellotape. I managed an ok job although at least one enveloped needed sticking closed but I hoped the nice lady at the local post office would notice it and stick it shut for me.

The children had strewn their pressies out across the lounge floor ready to be played with when we got home – Davies got a make a Christmas scene kit with various sticky bits and Tarly got a make Christmas jewellry kit with plenty more small pieces. Rather than bother with coats and shoes I carried them out to the car shoe-less and they planned to stay in the car outside the post office while I nipped in with my parcels. I stopped outside the cashpoint to get some money to pay for the postage but it was out of order. So drove to the next cashpoint and got money out there. Then to the post office, where customers were queueing out the door 😯 I sat in the car with the childern for a while but although the queue was moving more people were coming into the post office so in the end I decided I’d have to go and join the queue. I did so but hadn’t been in it for more than a couple of minutes before the children, who could see me through the window, had got out of their car seats, wound the car window down and were shouting at me, drawing loads of attention to us all. 😳 I abandoned the queue, went to find out what emergency it was that was prompting such behaviour only to discover there was no emergency other than they’d been squabbling and wanted to report each other :roll:. Lost my temper completely, in full view of all the queuing post office customers, threw all my parcels in the car and drove to the next post office yelling at the children all the way. 🙁

Arrived there to find the same thing – queue out of the door, but a shorter one cos it’s a smaller post office (the one at the end of my parents road where they have known me since I was four and we moved there and my mum used to go to every week to collect her family allowance with me in tow) – again left the kids in the car outside (no shoes, remember) in full view of the post office under very strict instructions to behave and went and joined the queue. By now the unstuck parcel was very unstuck indeed, particularly having been chucked around by me so I had to buy some sellotape to stick it down with. I asked why all the post offices were so busy and having gotten my lecture about supporting them rather than going to another post office first anyway (I don’t live at the end of the road anymore!) she said it is the busiest day of the year for the post offices – apparently there is one Monday every December which is always bedlam and this is that Monday. 🙄

Having now been out for well over an hour with various cashpoint and post office related incidences we were out of time for doing anything with the pressies other than tidying them up and I had no chance at all of making any food to bring along to the Badgers Christmas party. Ady arrived home, having made a special effort to be there to come along too but ended up having to stay behind doing some emails for work (which made me slam doors and stomp about even more). Me and the kids left the house about 10 minutes late, with Davies having labouriously written a Christmas Card to Lisa, the Badger leader (although he did ask if 2 the number after 1 was spelt the same as to as in ‘to Lisa’). We pulled up outside the hall and found it in complete darkness. 🙁 No idea whether we were the only ones and having been late they’d already given up on us or whether Lisa simply decided not to bother but there were no messages on my mobile or the home phone so I was pretty pissed off about that. Fortunately the kids were not too upset, having already been to one Christmas party today, I was relieved that I hadn’t had time to make a load of food and Ady was most surprised to see us back home again five minutes after I’d slammed the door on the way out.

In the end all was redeemed as I made their tea, Ady finished his work and did all the tidying up while I sat and IM chatted with Lucy and calmed down a bit. Really looking forward to not leaving the house at all tomorrow, we’ve got baking to do, making the christmassy bits, some other decoration making, a possible visit from Lucy, R & R and a generally peaceful day planned. I reckon we are all long overdue it.

Oh and that new roll of sellotape I bought at the post office? I’ve put it in a brand new dedicated sellotape designated area which only I know about. 😆