Minimum Standards

Today was a real Minimum Standards Day at my place. Mr de Elba left at 6:30am for three days away with work, and I've just kept my few small children alive since then. Alive, whinging and bickering.

My few attempts at Mothering Beyond The Minimum Standard included:

• • making a healthy breakfast of oats with no cane sugar, but with grated apple, sultanas and cinnamon instead
• • washing the backlog of dishes on the sink (but leaving all of today's. To rot, presumably)
• • taking the little cherubs to the shops (only to come home as soon as the photos were developed, leaving most of the things on my list ignored.)
• • watering the plants with Smoochy Girl in the afternoon.

That's not a lot. But I think that finally, this:

has turned into this:

and it hurts - a lot - to do things like stand, walk, sit still, and move. So you can imagine that shopping (with an impossibly GIANT crampy tummy, an armful of things to buy, one stroller and two small children who change their desire to sit in a stroller or NOT sit in a stroller according to whether or not there is a stroller to sit in) is pretty much out of the question for now.

The current problem for the de Elbas is that we need to EAT. And without my ability to buy -you know- FOOD, the de Elbas will not EAT. And they will waste away. This would provide a welcome reprieve from the whinging, but I am setting myself a goal of minimising the whinging while keeping small children alive.

As it is, if Sonny Ma-Jiminy suffers so much as 45 minutes of not-eating he begins to crawl around the house moaning that he is getting "so weak!" and that I need to feed him immediately. I of course recognise that as a symptom of boredom rather than of starvation, but I am physically incapable of becoming Mrs PlaySchool and setting up many exciting and messy activities for the children, and clean up after them.

(Aside: I can hardly bend down to pick up things off the floor at this stage. Putting my socks on and taking them off is a painful and difficult procedure, and I can no longer see my undies. If I don't feel my own bottom, I cannot be fully sure I have them on. I only discovered the lower half of my tummy has stretch marks by looking in a mirror one day. Hence I don't look in mirrors anymore.)

I plan to do better tomorrow. Tomorrow, I will Mother Beyond The Minimum Standard by doing the following:

• • getting good sleep tonight
• • taking the little cherubs to get some groceries early in the morning (though how I will clean my teeth without toothpaste tonight, I do not know. And don't come all bi-carb of soda with me, I'm a pregnant mother on the edge. Go suck a bar of soap.)
• • being very pleasant and good-natured all day
• • providing a variety of activities to small stir-crazy children who are largely caged-in by Winter
• • not sleeping during their rest times, working on the realisation that getting more rest is not helping the 17-day-long odyssey of sore/swollen throat and glands. Instead I shall be startlingly productive around the house
• • start writing that long-promised blog post on Smoochy's Otoscope Phobia. Which will be a let-down now, because you're expecting something hilarious.

That sounds so exhausting, I may just fall off the chair into a doze right here.

I fell short of promising to take my little cherubs to the town library to get books, because that sounds like it's way beyond me right now.