Small child awake and bouncy at 4, fast asleep again by the time I needed to start the day.
By 7 AM one child awake, changed, dressed, and ready for feed and meds.
6.50AM I empty one litter tray from overnight poo
7AM I empty the next.
7.02AM a nameless kitten soils the clean litter tray. I empty this.
A smell of poo still clinging to the air, I search until I locate a furtive turd hiding under the settee, cunningly buried under an appointments letter. I extract the phone number from the letter, and scrape and scrub and remove the evidence.
7.08AM, a different nameless kitten soils the clean litter tray. I empty again.
7.15AM an older cat comes back inside and makes use of the nice clean litter tray.
7.30AM, the child who is dressed and changed, and by now fed and medded decides to produce another fragrant offering. I clean this.
7.45AM, the delicate scent of cat poo still hangs around the house, but sees to be everywhere, no longer concentrated in one spot. I attempt to coral the kittens in the sunroom in order to open windows and doors to air the place out. This whilst simultaneously waking, dressing, feeding and supervising forgotten homework for another child, and very thankful for the carer who is doing the same (minus the homework) for the 3rd.
Herding kittens is about as easy as catching jelly in a sieve. One cat in my arms, the other invisible. One cat in the sunroom I locate the second. Open door to insert second cat, the first flows through the three inch gap and disappears.
Giving up on this, I retreat to the bathroom so sort myself out for the day. And notice a brown smear under my chin, which, once wiped off, proves to have been the source of the all-pervasive arôme du chat. Cos life's just that good to me.
Finally we catch a break, and Mog's bus is a nice five minutes early, giving me time to round up the other two children and saunter down to school where, in a very sweet moment, I get to witness Little Fish finding her friends - or rather, I get to see Little Fish's friends finding her - a small queue of boys crowd around her, waiting their turn to rub her arm, kiss her cheek, envelop her in cuddles as she preens herself.
And then the school teacher comes out and informs me that LF's 1:1 classroom assistant is off sick, as is the SENCo, and many of the potential replacement staff. They have people who can feed her and cath her but no one to be in the classroom with her, do I want to leave her anyway or will I take her home? Deciding that she's school's responsibility really, and recalling that the SENCo did promise I'd never be asked to take her away simply because the staff aren't present, I opt to leave her, at which point the problem of getting her home at the end of the day arises. No 1:1 means no one to walk her back, which means I'll have to pick her up early anyway.
So now the TA kid and myself are watching the kittens chase a straw around the sitting room floor, waiting for a phonecall from school about some unexpected disaster. Only on a Monday...
Tia
7 comments:
"Cos life's just that good to me." You're a scream!
And I'd wondered if maybe it was in your slipper!
Only you could end up with pooh on your face and not realise!
hugs hope the day has gone well for school and LF but not so well the LEA decide the 1-1 is uneeded.
hugs
There's just no dignity in poo on the chin, is there? Hope LF had a good day.
can I make a suggestion.
in my experience cats are allways hungry.
Forget herding, ration the food.
Then at the moment you need them all out of the house move to the sun room making whatever noise you make to tell them it's food time.
Even Da Man is powerless to resist, he might just have eaten half a cow but he will still try and drag himself to where he thinks I am feeding the others.
of course he might have to run through all the paperwork I have just spent several hours sorting, leaving it in a billowing cloud in his wake.
Speaking from years and years of personal experience (with Bezzie Mate, not me, I didn't need one-to-one at school), never ever ever let them exclude Little Fish for reason of staffing screwup. I'm pretty sure it's illegal. It's also stupid, pointless and potentially very harmful to both her learning and (far more importantly) her budding relationships at school. And if you hit the right - wrong? - combination of bad luck, lack of ethics and incompetence there's a real danger that they'll make a habit of it.
Assuming minimal potential for catastrophe, paying a local teenager to walk LF home from school may be worth looking into - the aforementioned friend started this in year 7 (first year at secondary school) in order not to be the only one having her mum take her in and it worked a treat - that teenager rapidly became and has remained a close family friend and was later one of K's best PAs. Should've started it loads earlier, our walk to primary school was about 300m so above the age of 8ish mums were distinctly surplus to requirements. Never got shot of mine tho 'cos of little sisters. Littlest of whom at just 18 has moved out to Uganda to volunteer as a primary school teacher for a year. Eek.
(PA = Personal Assistant = Self-Directed Support Bod, they are what support me in my own place day in day out every hour of every day, without whom I'd be rotting in a nursing home).
Liking the idea of a teenager to walk LF home from school - at the moment her 1:1 does so but that falls apart when she's off sick. And there's a secondary school right next door to the primary school, and the pupils there finish five minutes earlier than LF, hmm...
Go for it! You might make some new friends too, always good to collect an extra ally or three.
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