Grrr

I have lost my glasses. The children managed to turn the telly on this morning so Linnea is really cranky. They can get their own breakfasts but have inherited a desire to use so much milk on their cereal that the bowl is half-full when they finish; I find the waste infuriating. I have also scrubbed the damn toilet again which is always good for my temper.

If anyone can suggest where in the house I ought to look for my glasses before leaving to have blood drawn for half a dozen tests I'd be most grateful.

Still, at least I should get a lot of laundry dry today, it's lovely weather.

New wardrobe!

The children will finally have clothes storage which doesn't fall over. However, it's more than twice as heavy as the reviews on the website said it was! Ah well.

In other news, the pan velcrokitten told us about has now arrived and last night we cooked meat in it and today I put it in the oven with a casserole inside. Hurrah for multipurpose pans!

It's also another pan with no long handle, just two little D-shaped ones, which means it fits well in our confined cooking space.

Do It Ourselves

The most difficult part of DIY for us is the timing. We got it wrong twice - once in July 2008 and once in September 2009, IIRC - and had people bothered by the noise. I hate this, it makes me feel sick to my stomach. So now we plan things carefully; if we can't get them done between 10:30 and 18:30 on a weekday we ask neighbours when is convenient at a weekend.

Tonight we had to hammer the veneer back of a wardrobe into chipboard, so we assembled it with lightning speed and started hammering just after 6pm. It was fine.

But sometimes we have to ask the 7 independent occupants living either side of us when at a weekend will suit them. One woman gets up early on a Saturday and goes out so she'd like us finished by noon on Saturdays and not to do it on Sundays. Far more people lie in at weekends but then go out in the afternoons. What works best is the weekends when the people living on one side are all away and the people living on the other side all sleep late and then go out shopping.

But it doesn't happen very much.

Of course, ideally, we'd have enough money to get it done during normal working hours, when this is the only occupied house and so it's fair game to cut off the water, the electricity, the gas, or the peace-and-quiet while people hired to work in neighbouring houses get things done.

Still, we managed it tonight.

Someone next door is watching something with a lot of revving cars in it.

Phlebotomy (do doo do do do)

Today I brought the children to the surgery to witness my blood being drawn (we used our childcare favours up on Tuesday). We were late. We were ready to leave, and Emer wet herself, so I had to change her. Then we left, and partway there Linnea inexplicably turned around and started to walk back home. Then we arrived, and the nurse was running late anyway, so that was ok. I got my paperwork (the main blood tests are for hereditary clotting things which some of my family recently discovered they have) and sat down to wait. But Emer needed the loo again. The nurse called me while we were in there - I ran out, leaving poor Eem sitting on the loo alone, and popped my head into room ten to say "My three-year-old is on the toilet." So she called someone else, and Emer finished up, and we went back to wait some more, and it was AGES, and then they called us in.

I sat Emer in the buggy in the doorway and Linnea on the floor behind my chair, because there wasn't much space. Linnea put a book up in front of her face and ignored the whole thing studiously. Emer said...

"Is this the doctor? What her going to do? Why they need you blood? You don't have blood! What that? Why? Is that a needle? What the needle for? Why? People don't put needles in people! Why? No it don't hurt you. Is that blood? Why you blood? No needles go in people."

The (foreign origin, not mocking Emer's babytalk) nurse said "What a clever girl! The ones who ask why, they clever."

Both children were good as gold, and Emer's chatter seemed to amuse rather than irritate the nurse - she didn't repeat herself, because I answered very quickly every time. There's little as irritating as completely repeated unanswered questions.