Overrun

One day last week I had four children in the house, and just me looking after them. This was a new situation for me. I think it showed why I do not have four children of my own, nor any intention thereof.

I suppose it was a milestone, of sorts, because it was the first time we've had a drop-off playdate, rather than a playdate that was set up because I wanted to get together with the mother for coffee/lunch/gossip and she had a handily aged child to bring along as an excuse. In this case, I don't really know the mum at all, but her son is in Monkey's class, she has a daughter a year older than Miss, and it turns out they're having somewhat of a family emergency and people were asked to pitch in and offer to take the kids off her hands every now and then. As we now have plenty of room and my children are equivalent in age and sex - not to mention the there-but-for-the-grace bit - I felt I should ante up.

They were fine, really. Perfectly well-behaved children. But four at once, galloping all over the house as Monkey was his over-exuberant showing-off-his-new-bedroom self (on a previous playdate he gave the tour to a shy, bemused friend and his mother, mentioning such thrilling features as "This is the glass I use to rinse when I wash my teeth") and then all charging outside equipped with vehicles (bike, scooter, tricycle, dolly stroller respectively) and expecting me to keep up with four different children going in four different directions - at least, I kept them to two and two and employed a lot of long-distance yelling to corral the half I wasn't with - and then being herded back into the back garden where the visitors were clearly bored but Monkey wasn't done showing all the amazing blades of grass and threads of ivy that were just waiting to be pulled up... it was a bit tiring. (There was also the nice moment where he leaned over the deck, where I had pulled up some impressively huge interlopers the day before and asked me to get him some weed. Hope the neighbours were listening to that one.)

Finally I got sense and shunned healthy fresh air for the gated-off family room, where I could at least be sure nobody was about to be run over or fall down the basement steps or barge into some heretofore-unseen poison ivy. The elder visitor tried to coax Monkey into putting on a rock concert with his (plastic) guitar and Sid-The-Science-Kid microphone, while the girls pootled around with their own self-appointed tasks, sorting out game pieces and planning a tea party. Peace (almost) reigned and I sighed a deep sigh, afraid to move lest I break the spell, wishing their mother would pull up outside right now and see how good I am at this.

She came a little later, when things were falling apart just a little bit again. But they waved goodbye enthusiastically and we're doing it all again next week. Maybe I need to plan some activities or something, but I'm not a day camp, you know.

I'm also pretty sure that while the little girl was in a car seat, the four-year-old didn't appear to have a booster seat or even to have his seatbelt on as they drove away. I can't say anything - they're having a family crisis at the moment, and maybe it's a cultural thing, or maybe she was just totally distracted and forgot to buckle him in for the first time ever... Maybe. I don't know whether we're just inveterate rule-followers, but whenever I see a family with kids not in carseats, I just can't understand how they can prioritise so differently. (I know, I've done this before. But those people were strangers. These are kids I know.)


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On a completely unrelated note, we have a new sofa. It's beige. It's still in packaging and various pieces, so I can't tell you yet how it looks in the green room. But I'm pretty happy with it. We went to one of those enormous furniture places and hated all the huge and ugly things there, and then merrily took our modest European sensibilites back to IKEA and bought the one we'd wanted all along. (At least, we were reasonably merry about our decision. The kids, somehow, didn't enjoy a day of sofa shopping as much as one might have liked. There was chocolate milk in IKEA, followed by inevitable sugar rush and craziness and screaming and prompt but unpopular removal from the vicinity.)