Warnings!

I'm exhausted and I can pin point the reason, in fact there are two. (Technically speaking there are three).

To anyone who plans to have children I wish to issue two friendly warnings:

a) Never underestimate how much washing you will do once you have kids.
b) Never underestimate how much food your [male] children will eat.

You can mentally prepare for the onslaught of dirty washing by imagining how much you’ll get, and even plan ahead for it by investing in a fancy pants machine, but you will not fail to be surprised, astonished even, at the sheer volume of dirty washing a child generates (multiply by number of kids). You may think ‘Oh, it might mean that I go from washing 3 or 4 times a week to perhaps 7’. That’s a reasonable assumption to make. However, so far, I have just put on wash number 3 of the day. And there’s more left in the basket. And today is very average. Now I'm not one of these mums that washes stuff after one wear but nearly all boys will find mess/dirt (and some wet their bed for years) and almost every boy will leave towels to fester in a heap in their bedrooms (on top of their dirty pants and socks, obviously). And then there’s getting all this washing dried, ironed and put away but that’s just a whole different ball game. Be warned!

As for the endless eating, here’s my coping mechanism: Get home from school and fill the kids up on muffins/crumpets/heavy duty cereal (I'm talking Shreddies, no sugar, obviously, or muesli) and then cook a huge dinner, usually filled out with rice or pasta, as quickly as possible. Cereal is then usually requested for ‘pudding’. I keep the fruit bowl stocked and the boys are welcome to eat as much as they like – on an average day I get through 8 apples, a bunch of grapes and a few bananas. The boys also get through nearly a loaf of bread a day. Oh, you gotta be rich to have boys!