What do you do all day?

For the many people who assume that since the girls are now both in fulltime school I must be sitting around doing nothing all day...

8.22 and the builders are here; they need to do some very last work to the concrete ramp, so the girls and I wrap up and head outside to wait for Mog's bus.

8.30 and Mog's bus is here; I post her in its general direction and Little Fish and I head off towards school.

8.33 one of the builders catches up with us at the traffic lights; I've left my handbag on Mog's chair and no one knows what to do with it. Setting aside the "You didn't bring it with you?" thought I suggest they take it off Mog's chair and put it on the kitchen table for me.

8.40, we arrive at school to find a large notice informing us all children need to use the main entrance rather than individual class entrances due to building works. Fun times.

I drop Little Fish off, and at 8.45 the phone rings. Mog's school. Instant panic mode; what's gone wrong on the bus for them to be calling now? But no, they're worried about my handbag and the bus company wants me to be told that the escort personally placed my bag on my table. I thank the school, ask them to thank the transport company, and walk home.

9AM and I am apologising to the builders; despite the fact the builders have a key to the front door and have been in and out of our house all week, the people on the bus felt they could not be trusted to touch my bag and so insisted on entering my house themselves to return the bag. This seems pointless; if the builders were that untrustworthy though could simply have riffled through the bag once the bus had left, surely? Given the usual state of the house when we leave for school, I am now awaiting a phonecall from social services after bad reports from the bus company.

But the girls are gone, and I can expect to have six hours without either of them. I put the kettle on.

The phone rings - a utilities company not selling anything honest gov but wanting to know why I don't switch to them.

And then a medical phone call.
And another.
And another.

A two minute chat with a friend, cut short so the builder could talk door handles.

Another medical phone call.
The post - two more medical appointments and one social services thing.

A visit from our cleaner, who managed to destroy my hoover, amazingly enough not in the way our hoovers generally die - overwork - but by deciding using a bag was optional. A discover that last week she had thrown out a small but essential part of the hoover - the bit which holds the bags in place. I asked her to stop using the hoover without bags.

A supermarket trip, returning to find cleaner still hoovering without using a hoover bag, despite me having told her she was damaging the hoover.

A phone call to the cleaning company.
And another.

I put the kettle on and made a pumpkin pie.

Lunch, interrupted by phonecalls from more professionals.

Phone battery died at this point.

And then Little Fish was back from school, the phone was still ringing off the hook, the pie was burning on the outside and soggy in the middle, the kittens were rolling around all over the floor biting each others' necks, the builders were saying they had completely finished but I was discovering the several things left very undone, and then LF needed to go to bed, and then Grannie came to babysit and was disappointed that LF was already asleep, Mog and I went to Brownies and then our carer was late and now it must be way past bedtime and I'm still not sure where the day went, although I dimly recall I had time to play Sudoku on my phone a couple of times inbtween calls.

And that's without medical appointments, visitors, anything out of the ordinary really.

So the question I have for those who work as well as raising children, "When do you do the all I do in my day?"