Thank you for the (Sound of) Music

We've been harried all week, just about having girls ready by the time Mog's bus makes it appearance, just about squeaking into school as the whistle goes. So, naturally, this morning both girls were up and medded and ready for the day by 6.30AM. I don't like 6.30AM on a Saturday; it's unnatural.

We made porridge, we ate porridge, and the cats ate the bowl of porridge which somehow ended up on the floor. We watched the Sound of Music (again). One of us drank coffee.

Mog made use of her entirely deliberate stridor, starting it up whenever the music stopped, stopping it the instant there was singing again. I accept it's a little unreasonable to be annoyed by your child breathing (it is, after all, better than the alternative), but oh my - it's infuriating!

Little Fish meanwhile was in full-on "Why?" mode, combined with a desperate need to glue and stick and paste and cut and shred and mainly scatter.

It isn't murder if they drove me to it, is it?

By 9.21 AM Little Fish was requesting that we go to the chip shop. Back history; every night this week she's come home from school asking for chip shop chips and sausages. Every night I've told her we'll have some for lunch on Saturday. By 10, she had asked me so many times I set an alarm on my phone and told her we'd leave when it went off but not before. Peace.

And then the alarm went, and we coated up. And "I don't want chips, Mummy". OK, fine, take your coat off, come back inside, we'll have sandwiches. "I want chips, Mummy". Repeat ad nauseam. Screams in the house, refusal to move outside; eventually I overrode everything and loaded us all into the van (more screaming involved but with the girls tied down and me belted in I thought possibly safer all round). Pleas from Little Fish to be allowed to go to bed for a "Likkle rest". Giggles from Mog. And an acceptable compromise that even if she wasn't hungry, I was, and that I would be buying something for my lunch before coming home, at which point she could go to bed.

And suddenly happiness and no more tantrums and "I know, Mummy, you go to that shop on the roundabout, they give you food in the car you drive" (McDonald's). And a very polite request to get out of the car there and sit inside to eat. Suddenly a rational human being again, even when no space inside meant eating in the car after all. A fact only discovered after parking, unloading both girls, queueing...

She didn't eat the chips though.
Tia