Tag: Morning madness

Just another morning

You know how some mornings you find yourself standing in the kitchen with no idea what you are doing there?  You then find yourself wandering aimlessly around the house picking up your discarded bra from the couch where you gratefully took it off the night before, contemplate packing lunchboxes and oohhh twitter! And Facebook!

This morning was that kind of morning.

It felt disjointed from the start as Daniel and Isabel were in a race to see who would be done first, whilst Princess Mignon was huddled under the blankets, a little lump of sleepiness.  The minute all 3 of them are not doing the same thing at the same time the wheels come off.  Then it is inevitable that someone leaves the house without brushing their teeth or wearing socks.  Don’t ever mess with the system.

As I’m about to get ready we realise that Mignon’s dress has a hole.  It’s one of those dresses with a frill at the bottom and part of the frill had unravelled, so not a simple sewing job.  Add to that the mute refusal as per SOP to take the dress off for any love or money I did what any self-respecting Mother would do:  I sewed the damn dress whilst the child was wearing it.

Then I had a wardrobe (socks with holes), hair (too wet outside so hair won’t go straight for all the tea in China) and mascara fail (smeared all over my face when I changed tops).

And then, grabbing a favourite big scarf from the drawer I finally manage to open it up whilst driving to work and get hit by that stale too-often-worn smell I loathe. You know that smell. It’s the smell of old dorm rooms and linen that hasn’t been washed in weeks.  THAT smell.

So now I’m at work in clean socks without holes (that I had to take off halfway through the morning and put handcream on my feet because I hate dry feet and there was no time to put cream on my feet this morning), missing half the eye shadow on an eye and stinking of used linen.

How’s your day going?

Crossing over to the dark side and a very quick poll

I have crossed over to the dark side.

That person that picks her battles carefully went for a long walk this morning to a very happy place and left Super Bitch Mom to deal with the Monday morning blues.  (Even Etienne lost his cool today.  Normally he is so calm I have to check him for a pulse.)

The SB Mom that says Fuck This.  You WILL wear a long-sleeved vest AND stockings because I SAID so and then proceeds to yank on those offending items of clothing whilst punctuating her words with every yank.

No harmony at Casa Roux this morning, except for poor Daniel that thought it was hilarious and was copying all the crying/whining/shouting in fine form.  When I leaned into the car to kiss the girls I literally got the cold shoulder, and I was so pissed off at the time I didn’t actually care.  I literally dumped him at the school gate with a hasty kiss and a “Love you madly” and stomped off in a huff, desperate to get to work.

Etienne got to drop off The Sisters Grim.  He isn’t answering his office phone so I’m not sure how that went.  For all I know he is still at the school trying to detach them from his legs. Once again: don’t really care.  I’m sitting in peace and quiet in my own office, thank you very much.

Edit to add: Etienne did in fact have quite a battle to detach them from his legs in the end. Oh well.

But, moving right along, I have a life-or-death question to ask that I’ve been meaning to ask for a while.  We were at a party on Saturday night (Hello and happy birthday K!  Sorry we stayed so late!) and between the obligatory existential conversations about To Wax or Not To Wax I asked Tertia:

Do you wear a dressing gown?

I seem to have accumulated 2 dressing gowns, a winter and a summer number and lately I have actually been wearing them, especially the big white fluffy number my sister bought me ages ago at La Senza that was gathering dust in my cupboard.  I must be getting old, but I really like them these days, they are strangely comforting first thing in the morning.  Fancy that.

Do you wear dressing gown/s? Do you expect your kids to wear them?

Here’s a quick poll to help:

Mom: 1, Kids: 439 000

Each term there is a Montessori Matters meeting at our kids’ school and yesterday’s topic was about discipline in the Montessori Way.

Which was very apt as yesterday morning was a barmy of note in our house. It’s like the kids can smell when you are stressed and all you need to do get out of the house as soon as possible. Which means that everyone starts whining about EVERYTHING and suffer from memory loss when it comes to eating/dressing/brushing teeth/talking/walking and the girls are the main culprits. You get the picture.

At this point I might need to add that I am not an advocate of rushing children because I know it normally ends in tears (mine). The more you rush a child, the slower they move and the more you stress, which means you rush them more and they just move even slower. Completely counterproductive. I much prefer the ‘give the child space to dress themselves’ approach, which is great if you can afford to only leave the house at 08h30. Which I can’t at this point in time.

So on to plan B and the Montessori Matters meeting. I love these meetings because the parents that go are very honest about their challenges and I always come away with something valuable and feeling like I’m not alone. Yesterday I brought up the whole dressing issue and I got some great advice (some of which I had contemplated but was just too downright lazy to try). (See what I did there with the honesty thing?)

Someone suggested that we should wake them earlier and when I said that they are already woken quite early (06h00 – 06h15) we all had a slightly hysterical giggle. The one Mom suggested that we pick their outfits at night and another Mom said that they also pick outfits the night before after looking at the weather picture on her phone. They even pick out 2 outfits to account for the unpredictable Cape weather.

I went home full of hope.

When we arrived I did my little sales pitch (Girls, how about we pick out your clothes for tomorrow and Oh Look! There’s a little sun with clouds tomorrow which means it’s still winter blahblahblah) and they were very happy (read: bouncebouncebouncebouncebounce) to pick their outfits.

We picked the panties and skirts and got as far as stockings when they lost interest and ran off, but I put out their tops, left the little piles on the dresser, crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

Because I know Daniel isn’t really a problem I gave him the option of picking his clothes and he was very happy about it, but then trotted off to do something else and never came back.

This morning when they woke up they had breakfast and wanted to get dressed before brushing teeth which was fine and went without as much as even a little whine, except when we wanted to go brush their teeth Daniel was in the bathroom, dressed only in his vest.

Where he stayed for at least 45 minutes. Well it felt like it.

Bottom line: we left a whopping 15 minutes earlier this morning.

Rinse and repeat.