Her: I have as many spots as there are stars in the sky.
Me: That’s a lot of spots.
Him: Though it’s daytime now and there aren’t any stars in the sky.
Me: Yes there are, you just can’t see them.
Him: That’s what YOU say, Columbus.
Mr. Waffle
The sound of elastic snapping
It’s 38 degrees today. No air conditioning in our sunny flat. No air conditioning in my sunny office. And I am busy, busy, busy. Mr. Waffle isn’t exactly idle at work either but he’s been picking up a lot of the slack at home, while I hunch over a hot computer post 9.30 when our children finally go to bed. Need I say that both of us are up regularly during the night?
Yesterday the creche rang me to say that they would replace the cover of our car seat which got dirtied in their building works.
Me: Sorry, I didn’t see it, my husband collected the boys.
Them: But later when you saw it at home, how was it?
Me: My husband had put it in the wash. And he hung it out to dry and he dropped the boys to the creche this morning because I left the house at 7.30 for an 8.00 am meeting, so I have no idea what the damage is, but I’d say it washed out alright or he would have mentioned it.
Them: Silence.
Me: See, in our household, my husband looks after that kind of thing.
I feel that I am a cliché, running all day at work and running at home and only just managing to catch some of the balls that are in the air. At work, if I don’t write something down, I have no chance of remembering it and even then, some of my notes from the previous day can be baffling (is that somebody’s name, a new policy initiative, what?). As well as having a lot of the kind of competing deadlines that interviewers love to ask about we have a new trainee who is keen as mustard and entirely ignorant about what we do. This combination is proving a little difficult in the short term.
Yesterday, the boys were the last kiddies in the creche and the Princess was the last one waiting to be picked up from her course, the second last little soul having been picked up by her mother 50 minutes previously. The Princess was sitting on her own in a big room at a little table colouring conscientiously under the, slightly dour, supervision of a middle aged man (I suppose, it was hot and he wanted to go home). It was depressing.
Last night Michael woke up with a temperature and was up for a couple of hours. Being Michael, he was cheerful but he was hot. Since it was 30 degrees in the boys’ room anyway, I suspect that didn’t help. The Princess woke up with a temperature. Mr. Waffle took the morning off to tend to her but poor old Michael recovered so well that he was escorted to the creche along with our only healthy child and a message to them to call me, if he seemed unhappy (I called them, he was described as being as happy as someone could be with a temperature of 39 when it’s 39 degrees outside – I will have to rescue him when the Princess wakes from her nap). During the morning Mr. Waffle called to say that the Princess was very cheerful but he had taken her to the pharmacy to get something for her heat rash and they said “that’s no heat rash, that’s chicken poxâ€. What do you think might be wrong with Michael, people?
Rest cure
I am away for work. Mr. Waffle is, with the aid of his parents, holding the fort. Last night he was up with the boys 5 times between 11 and 4 and then up with the Princess who had wet her bed. I think he misses me.
Keeping up with the post-millenial Joneses
The Observer had a cartoon a while back where these guys in a coffee shop are chatting and one says to the other “So, half way through dinner she googled me on her blackberry and found my ex-girlfriend’s blog so that was pretty much thatâ€. His friend replies “do you know that three of those terms didn’t even exist five years ago?â€
So, I was playing with the computer and I saw this post from Fluid Pudding and I said to my loving spouse “guess what Jeff gave Angela?â€. And he said “eh, who, what?†because he is not as up on my computer stalkees as I would like. “A ticket to the blogHer thingy†I said. And he said “eh, who, what?†and I explained that it was this conference that everyone was going to and I would like to go too and he looked at me blankly. “Off you go then, nobody’s stopping youâ€.  There are times when this whole independent woman thing palls. Somehow, I feel that I will not be going to California at the end of July.
Infrastructure
Since my sister moved to India, Mr. Waffle has developed an interest in matters Indian and he keeps plying me with information. Apparently it takes 8 days to get something by road from Bombay to Calcutta. This is, as I pointed out to him, 6 days less than the time it takes Aubert to get a buggy from its depot in Brussels to its shop in Brussels.You may rejoice, should you so wish, our swish new buggy has finally arrived.
On the home front
Mr. Waffle is playing a blinder or else he’s putting up a brave front. It’s hard to tell. He had 5 consecutive hours of  sleep last night having stashed the boys in strategic locations about the house so that they wouldn’t wake each other up. I’m not sure that it will be feasible to keep a cot in the kitchen in the medium term, but we can think about that.
Mr. Waffle is much more upset than I am by the fact that our infants continue, at 8 months, to sleep like newborns. I wasn’t quite sure why that was until he said to me “you made a deal with God, didn’t you, they could wake as often as they liked, provided that they didn’t have CMV” and I realised straight away that he was right. In fact, I think I promised never to complain about anything ever again, if I remember rightly. And though I have not, perhaps, held true to that, I think I have become much better at resigning myself to everyday problems that arise. I may have to cede my place on the “whinge for Ireland” team to a new contestant.  Beth knows what I mean.