Tomorrow, (Friday) I’ll be 40 and a bit. What are my plans for this most prestigious of days? Well I’ll go to work, come home, pick up the kids from school, take H10 to her tennis windup, then crack open the Strawberry Daquiri mix that I got for my birthday last year.

When I recover (sometime on Saturday) I need to start getting ready to go on “The Holiday”. Our destination? That’s for me to know and you to find out.

Life was a bit hard this morning. I have been up most of the night trying to cough up a lung without success, so I wasn’t functioning all that well. C6 was also pretty distracted this morning and seemed to think that “Hurry up and eat your breakfast” sounded a lot like “Go and play with your Batman toy” and that “Go and get dressed” sounded a lot like “Time to play with your racing cars”. I tried to help by packing his bag, and then we had this conversation:

Me: C6, where is your water bottle?
C6: What water bottle?
Me: The water bottle you take to school.
C6: Dunno.
Me: Did you leave it at school?
C6: Leave what at school?
Me: YOUR WATER BOTTLE!
C6: I told you, I don’t know where my water bottle is!
(I just happen to look down)
Me: What’s that by your feet?
C6: What feet?
Me: YOUR FEET!! THE ONES AT THE END OF YOUR LEGS!!!
C6: I don’t see anything
(Grabs childs head and points it in the direction of waterbottle)
C6: Hey! It’s my water bottle! Did you put that there?
Me: JUST GET DRESSED, OKAY!!!

No wonder so many mothers have nervous breakdowns. Pass the valium, would you. I’m going to have a good lie down.

Your toast pops up and it’s not quite done yet, so you put it back down for what you think will be 10 seconds and then you get distracted by something shiny and you forget about the toast and then when it pops up all on its own, it’s burnt.

You cook another piece of toast, and when you are halfway through eating it, you discover a little bit of mould on the crust and you wonder how much mould you have eaten without noticing. So you give up on the idea of eating breakfast.

For the sake of your health, you eat plain boring popcorn (which, face it, is really just cellulose – one step away from paper) and for the next 72 hours you end up having to pick bits of husk out from between your teeth and no amount of water and “ack”ing will move the last little bit from the back of your throat. Meanwhile, the rest of the family eat popcorn that is covered in butterscotch. They might still have to deal with the wayward husk situation, but at least they got butterscotch sauce.

There’s one wayward hair, that keeps flying from it’s proper place, despite a large amount of “product” and it keeps tickling your nose and you keep trying to move it but it evades your fingers, and you try to blow it out of the way and it just falls back into place, and you look for it in a mirror and you don’t see (or feel) it and as soon as you turn away – there it is again.

All the food is either eaten up or burnt or has mould on it, so you have to go grocery shopping and that means that you have to get out of your flanny jammies and slippers and put real clothes and shoes on and go buy food.

On the way to the car to buy said groceries you walk through a spider web and it tickles worse than the wayward hair and you can never find all the bits and OMG WHERE IS THE SPIDER?? so you go back inside to change.

You head back out to the car and your realise that you have left your keys inside and you have to walk all the way back to the house and get the car keys.

You get to the store and realise that you must have put your purse down on the kitchen table when you were looking for your car keys and you have to go home again.

So in the end you just give up, eat a handful of leftover butterscotch popcorn for breakfast, put the jammies back on and head back to bed. Which is where you deserve to be.