Just me, Kate Rusby and a pair of flip flops

Just me at home today. Me and Kate Rusby for company. The girls are back at school and it's so quiet you could hear a pin drop. Very mixed feelings today, in a few days time I'll be relishing the quiet and the calm, but today, no. Today I'd rather be hearing the giggles and shrieks of my two girls filling the rooms. Hence Kate Rusby, it's impossible to be sad for too long with her voice in the room.
There have been times during the holidays when I've stared at this poster next to the kitchen sink and wanted today to come sooner. But, fortunately, those moments were not as frequent as anticipated. Thanks M and you beautiful, beautiful girls for a lovely summer.
Now I'm staring at this poster for different reasons. At the beginning of the holidays I made a conscious decision not to get bogged down with the housework. To let things ride, to turn a blind eye to the mess and not get sucked into the daily routine. And I'm glad I did - We all relaxed so much the more for it. That's not to say that there weren't days when the tripping over of Sylvanians or despair at the amount of clothes lying around the house just got too much!!


I'm paying the price for it today though! I apologise if you've experienced any power difficulties in your area today, I think my washing machine is responsible for power surges and severe depletion of the national grid this morning. My teenage daughter seemed to have kept to a regular timetable, set at hourly intervals, of changing clothes these past few weeks and for some reason, clothes that were merely removed from hangers and held in front of her, discarded and unworn, were deemed dirty and put in the laundry basket. Obviously the energy involved in re-hanging them would have caused severe depletion of her energy too!

So today our home is going back to its roots and resembling the laundry that it once was.


I don't enjoy housework. I derive satisfaction from having completed the tidying and cleaning but the bit in between, ie the sorting and putting away just gets in the way! This was the hall table this morning, a testimony of our summer. We don't really need a scrapbook or photos, all we did was on that table. Although I'm racking my brains as to what we needed the WD40 for! (Can you see the damp patch in the bottom corner? My next job is repainting the hall).


This is the table now, order restored. For the next hour or so this is how it'll look before it becomes submerged under bookbags, school newsletters, keys and mobile phones. Clean and tidy it is but part of me (the part of me that doesn't get niggled by all that mess) prefers the table pre-tidy up. It's a table that says - yes, we've had a good time.
Moving on to the flip flops that were on the hall table. I read ages ago that flip flops were great at removing cat/dog hair from furniture. So, wearing flip flops on each hand I've just emerged from the living room having wiped clean the sofas and it really does work. Listening to Kate, a flip flop on each hand, clean clothes and a tidy table - I'm happy now (ish).