22nd September, 2009 - A Man Called Horse

I did not have the most relaxing start to the day. For once I woke up before the kids. There were a few minutes of peaceful bliss. A few minutes, where it was like the old days. The days when, after you awoke, you had the luxury of a decision. A decision about whether to slip back off to sleep, or maybe read for an hour, or maybe slip out of bed, make a coffee and return to the cool sheets before getting up to face the day.

But that is not a decision that I have available to me any more. By 7.30 am, both children were in the bedroom. One of them had turned on the radio, de-tuned it, and turned the volume right up, so that we had an accompaniment of deafening white noise. One child was complaining bitterly about having lost her “blue and white princess dress” (she does not have a blue and white princess dress, but she dreams about it from time to time, and then complains bitterly when it cannot be found). The other child was sitting astride me, pretending to be a small, but remarkably heavy jocky.

I chose to get up.