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Saturday 20th March to today
On Saturday morning, Mum arrived very tired after having had no sleep on her overnight bus, which was sad. My pain levels were so severe I couldn't even go to the children's party both girls had been invited to, so Rob and the girls went out and had a wonderful time and Mum and I sat at home feeling too ill even to make tea or lunch or anything.
Oh, and the pope sent a letter which would have been disappointing if anyone had had any hopes of it. Luckily they didn't. But Rob and I got the last bed for sale listed on Ebay, so we were very pleased about that.
On Sunday we all did nothing all day and then watched a disappointing Brian Cox documentary in the evening. My full-length body-pillow was finally washed and dried at the launderette and I was able to arrange myself into complicated but comfortable sleep configurations.
Monday was mainly housework, then Lucy came in the evening and we all played Scrabble. And Linnea came down from her room in floods of tears because she's worried that all the electricity will be used up and there will be no more clean water, and we ended up looking at Wikipedia for windmills and hydroelectric turbines and solar panels and ended up with Sally Ride, an astronaut, because Linnea wants to be an astronaut and work on the International Space Station. I was pretty pleased that the first hit for "astronaut" in Google was a woman, actually.
Tuesday was Mum's dentist appointment, and the children and I washed a load of laundry - that's a 7kg load, since that's what the broken washing machine used to do. They found it amusing and I found it exhausting, and thought fond thoughts of the twin-tub we had on Aran when we were washing tablecloths and teatowels and things for the tearooms. I think the asterisk-shaped agitator probably wasn't very good but the spinner was excellent. Also, my children have never and quite likely will never handwash bedlinen, and stand in the garden one at each end twisting sheets in opposite directions to wring the water out before hanging them to dry. I wonder whether I'd remember laundry so clearly if we'd had a mangle back then?
We also ordered the new spare-room bed. So that will be here on time for the guests.
Oh - Tuesday was also the day I ended up explaining slavery to Linnea, after she asked me what I was singing about (picking cotton, and sweet chariots, and other songs from my childhood - why did an Irish childhood have so much of that in it?) and she found it almost totally incomprehensible, especially the skin-colour thing. "But no-one owns other people now," she said, "except parents."
So I had a go at explaining both halves of that, and I think it worked. Hard to say.
On Wednesday we all went to the launderette but because my mother was with me it was much easier; she did all the heavy lifting and we were able to spend intervals visiting nearby charity shops. I bought some more double-pointed needles and a new swimsuit for Linnea, and a couple of books (Milly Molly Mandy; I hated them as a child so I can't remember what they're like really, but my sister loved them - are they awful? I know they're supposedly classic...)
Rob and the children phoned his mother to wish her a happy birthday; Emer stayed talking for ages and Rob actually prepped the salad for dinner while she was still talking! Then we had dinner with my mother and she went away.
Also, I noticed that someone had linked to my home ed blog on Facebook and people were looking at it in remarkable numbers - remarkable for my blog, that is, not remarkable for the internet at large.
And I finished my book group book and realised it was incredibly unlikely I'd be able to go to the meeting at the end of a day.
Today, Thursday, I slept late while the children watched telly, and I woke in less pain than I've had for ages. Emer phoned Rob twice to talk cheerfully to him, and we had visitors in the afternoon. I talked to a friend about getting a chiropractor to put my pelvis back together, while I wait for my physiotherapist to come back from being off sick - I know I need to relearn standing, sitting etc but meanwhile I'd like respite from pain.
Other things we did today include looking at the owlcam, getting Chinese delivered for lunch (eventually), making numbers and letters with our bodies (I was I, but the children did bendy ones), and Emer attempting to strangle me, leading to the tweet Emer says "Grownups don't cry!" I say "We do if you hurt us."
Rob got home just after the skies collided - we had just counted the seconds and realised that the lightning was more or less overhead, and the sea all around the house and still falling, when he rang the bell. He only needed one towel.
The children went to bed after a bath, and I had a bath while they were going to bed, and we placed a Sainsburys order for delivery tomorrow evening, and all in all the day is ending well. I'm about to have a second cup of hot chocolate.
Is there any way to trim a child's fingernails before they're born? This one's scratchy.
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This would have been in the very early 1970s so I've no idea how they'd read now. I'd be interested to hear what you/the children think of them though.
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Next time I see one, I'll remember who did it.
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I also remember being scared of the laundrette and not realising you could pay the woman to do your washing for you, and washing my nurses' uniforms, undies, t-shirts, jeans etc by hand in my hand basin. My friends and I clubbed together to buy an elderly used spin-dryer, after which we didn't really rinse clothes any more, we poured a bowl of clean water over the clothes in the spinner and spun them, and repeated four or five times.
I heart washing machines.