Feeling Exhausted at This Point

Good evening all! Here I finally sit at the small dinner table in our living room, completely exhausted from our busy yet fun weekend. John arrived home an hour ago from his gruelling journey that is the Sunday afternoon flight from Dublin to London Heathrow. Thank you Air Lingus (British Airways) for the fourth delayed flight home on this very popular route at this time in the day in succession.

We’ve just finished a roast dinner of our family favourite, roast leg of pork, home made pork scratching straws, Dadda’s apple jam, roast potatoes, garlic and butter fine green beans and petit pois with home made bisto gravy. Phew – and all that served up at the drop of a hat!

John now settled in front of the Antiques Roadshow (that I recorded earlier), I have a few moments to reflect on the weekend.

We had a busy time, what with children being children and just me to corral them and manage our time of arts, crafts and play. Lots of screams and laughs and plenty of debate with Thor and Aaliyah. Caleb is still using the power of pure scream to deliver himself, so Dadda did have to say that he was getting ‘one of his heads’ a couple of times, quickly followed by Thor agreeing that he was getting a headache also. He raises his tone and says’ please Caleb (or Aaliyah), you must be a little quieter as my head is hurting a little bit’. He does make me smile.

Aaliyah’s fingers in her mouth is something that I have held back on overly mentioning in the past as I believe that we all went through that stage in our earlier years. Of our crew, Tara spent some time managing the ‘wrinkly finger syndrome’. Though with regards Aaliyah, many of our family photos going back to her very early days show her with her right hands middle and index fingers firmly inserted! We’ve talked about it a lot in the past couple of weeks. She is aware that she has to try a bit harder to stop it in these weeks leading up to the start of ‘Big School’. Anyhow, today we came to a compromise. She knows that there is a lotion available from the chemist that helps to quell the habit, but we discussed the wearing of a single woollen glove. She was very good and kept it on for the majority of the day. All in all she did not deposit her fingers into her mouth. Well done Aaliyah. But I do have one thing to add! And that is that like me she shows the signs of being ambidextrous, so she was quite confident to plug her left hand in when she felt needy enough for the comfort of sucking fingers. As a matter of fact I always lay her spoon or fork on the left hand side every breakfast, lunch and dinner! Like me she mostly uses her right hand but has the capacity to use her left hand in just the same way. I do hope her new school do not try to make her choose when she starts in September. I can actually write with my left hand in reverse to what my right hand is writing if I practice for a few minutes. Perfect symmetry with reverse wording or shapes and patterns come to think of it. I remember that it used to come in handy when I worked in design before the onset of ‘Family Life’. I often found myself doing totally different jobs with either of my hands.

Okay, my last thoughts for today have been scuppered with my very snotty nose, excessive sneezing and coughing a plenty. I noted about six months back in a diary entry headed ‘The Three Year Old Cold’ that it has been a constant in my life ever since the girls started preschool. And when they left, the little ones started there and have been there these last two years. Well this disgusting cold has constantly prevailed. It’s not just the wiping of the children’s noses week in and week out, but I have caught every single cold that has been brought home! I wash my hands some 40 times a day, however with the children’s sharing of toys at preschool from mouth to hand to mouth – the viruses prevail. Funny however that the moment that Amritsar and Tara went to ‘Big School’, they have not brought home a single cold. Another amazing fact is that they have also not once ever picked up one of these new colds (clearly great immunity). I look forward to a future life without sneezing and coughing on a daily basis as the accepted norm. Some pics and video of the weekend tomorrow perhaps.