I usually find if I spend too many days not at home I get very stressed and things get a bit out of control at home. However last week didn’t feel like that despite the fact that we were out everyday and the one day we were at home we had friends over. I attribute that to the fact that I have two weeks off work and so I feel more relaxed and also that everything fitted together well last week without feeling like we are needing to shoehorn things in – it could also have to do with that fact that no one was premenstrual for a change!

So to counteract the stresses I usually feel when we are out too often I try and make Monday a quiet at home day, I always sort the washing and then it just gives me space to get things in order in my head ready for the rest of the week.

So today is a typical Monday.

Girls paper rounding – managed not to wake either of them up in the middle of the night!

I’m up early and listening to Pray As You Go then getting banana fritters for those of us who are awake or about to be. Pot of tea on the table and fritters hot from the pan in front of Martin as he gets up – think I deserve mega wifely brownie points (or at least an I Love You Because text).

Martin goes to work, girls go back to bed – Rebekah nursing a toothache – I get on with the sorting of dry washing – one of my least favourite jobs and probably the reason why I have had to allocate a specific day for it to be done.

Jonathan surfaces and I manage to persuade Ruth – who appears not to have gone back to sleep after all – to make him fritter while I carry on with the washing maintaining my sanity only with my wifi speaker and radio4 iplayer programs!

My heart sinks as my first words of conversation with Jonathan are “can I do my mega bloks dragons?” “Yes but you’ll need to wait until I finish the washing” is what my mouth says, “not those flipping dragons !” (well I say flipping because after all it is a family blog!) is what my head says.

If you have never struggled with Megabloks creations (I think in this case a ruined castle and a pirate ship) It’s like dealing with IKEA flat pack furniture but without the benefit of any of the pieces fitting together! The parts fit together like Lego does but the pieces don’t all stay attached so when you get one bit in somewhere else something falls off. This means that when Jonathan wants to play with them I have to actually build them!

Today however Jonathan put together quite a few bits (if the local authority is reading this please note evidence of progress – the ability to read plans, put together fiddly bit and not throw a tantrum when they don’t stay together – things that were not developed last time we did this) and we all succeeded to produce the buildings without tantrums.

While we were doing this Ruth was alternating between reading Facebook and more on water borne diseases. Rebekah opted for cooking Delia’s veggie sausage rolls and mince pies (we have some mincemeat left over from Christmas) and then a look at water borne diseases and mosquitoes – the debate of the morning is is malaria water borne or water based disease – more internal thoughts “I don’t know – ask your dad he is the one doing this course with you!”

Lunch – luckily there is left over rice for lunch so we have egg fried rice . Even this isn’t straight forward – Jonathan wants rice and peas no eggs, Ruth wants everything except onion , only Rebekah and I want everything – I manage this without using every pan in the kitchen and disappear to blog about yesterday while they clean up and then lounge about in our laundry decorated living room playing Mario carts or reading.

Ruth heads out to pass the mantle of the paper round bag and try and buy a pepper and some mushrooms with the few pence we’ve all scrabbled about in old purses and pots to find! Due to a bit of a miscalculation on my part we’ve spent almost all the food budget already this month – hence the scrabbling – we have a full freezer and cupboards so I’m planning on more scrabbling and using up my stock luncheon voucher (the only problem with them is that the shops don’t like taking too many of them so I need to do that in dribs and drabs).

Time for a second lunch, sausage rolls and mince pies and a cuppa and some reading time.

Then Jonathan’s back on the mega bloks dragons – I have now had to fix the castle 3 times (the ship holds together better so hasn’t needed any repairs yet), Ruth has disappeared upstairs again and Rebekah is also mooching in her room.

So definitely a much lower key start to the week than last monday – but also fairly typical in the mix of our lives.

Jonathan helped with making some pizza dough. While it was rising we started the potatoes chitting.

And then onto one of the never ending delights for a parent with youngish children – nit combing! To make this less boring we watch the next Human Planet program on the iplayer.

By the time we’ve done this the dough has risen and we have pizza for tea!