A Day in the Life | March 2019

Thursday, March 7th, 2019

A couple of days ago, I put out a call for blog post suggestions over on Instagram Stories, and one of the requests was for a ‘Day In the Life’ post. Well, there’s no time like the present, so here’s a quick look at a random Thursday in March  – with the quick  *(And really quite bizarre, tbh)  disclaimer that this post starts off as just a super-boring account of my day, but quickly devolves into a weird story about me peeing in front of the window cleaner. It doesn’t really get better from there, so, you know: don’t say I didn’t warn you. Here we go, then…

7:45am

I’m woken in the usual fashion: by the baby monitor app on my phone bursting to life, and alerting me to the fact that Max is, once again, trying to rip the camera next to his cot off its bracket. (He can’t do it. Er, not any more, anyway…) I quickly throw a sweater on over my pyjamas, and go down to his room to commence the first nappy change of the day, while Terry heads to the kitchen to make a start on breakfast.

Breakfast is porridge and fruit, and we all huddle as best we can around the one corner of the kitchen table that isn’t currently covered with power tools and other random DIY equipment to eat it. (Since writing this post, the state of the house has only gotten worse. Pray for us…)

8:30 – whenever

After breakfast, we get out some of the toys we keep in the living room,  and Terry and I take it in turns to play with Max and clear up the breakfast things, while trying our our best to reduce the level of building mess in the kitchen. This proves unsuccessful, though, so, after a while, Terry takes Max upstairs to play in the nursery for a while, before putting him down for his morning nap (He still normally needs a nap a couple of hours after he gets up in the morning. I normally need one too by then, but hey: sucks to be an adult, doesn’t it?), while I hit the shower, and get ready for the day:

Just before I went upstairs, Terry pointed out that I was now wearing quite a bit of Max’s porridge, so I also take the opportunity to put on a load of laundry, and, honestly, I have no idea what else I did here. Probably one of these things, tbh. Anyway!

11am-ish

Max wakes up not long after I’ve finished getting ready / making the bed / tidying up etc, so I get him dressed, and we spend a bit of time playing in his room until it’s time for lunch:

12 noon

Lunch for Max is dumplings stuffed with sauerkraut, followed by some fruit:

By the time he’s finished eating, and I’ve cleared up, I’m already feeling like I’ve lived a thousand lives. Terry needs to crack on with the work on the stairs, and I can’t face being stuck in the house all afternoon, so I get Max into the car, and we head to our nearest play centre:

This place is fairly close to us, and it’s basically a giant warehouse filled with toys and other activities, including a row of little ‘rooms’ at the back, which are set up like a kitchen, a shop, etc. Max loves it, because there’s tons of stuff for him to see and explore, and I love it because, well, there’s not much he can break there, really, although give it time, and I’ll sure he’ll give it his best shot…

(He carried this little basket around with him for so long I thought I was going to have to offer to buy the thing for him…)

1:40-ish

Max plays for about an hour, before getting into a little playpen they have there and refusing to come out again until he’s opened and closed the door a certain number of times, which only he knows. Which is cute, given that we literally just sold his own playpen on Gumtree, because he refused to use the freaking thing. I take the opportunity afforded by his self-imposed incarceration to quickly check my email, and lo! There is a collaboration offer from a brand! A plus-size clothing brand! Who want to send me some of their larger-sized clothes, so I can style them as maternity wear! For the pregnancy I’m totally not having!

GAH.

I manage to type out a chirpy, “I’m not pregnant, actually, but thanks for asking!” email, before dying slowly inside, but, I’m not gonna lie, what I REALLY wanted to write back to them was, “WHY DO YOU THINK I’M PREGNANT? DO I LOOK PREGNANT? ARE YOU SAYING I’M FAT?!?!?”

(I also wanted to send them the link to this post. I want to send EVERYONE the link to this post, though.)

(I don’t, obviously. And I’ll just quickly add here that I’m not mentioning this to fish for compliments/reassurance, but just as a quick reminder that it’s always better to err on the side of caution before you go assuming someone is pregnant: a good rule of thumb here, in fact, is to wait until you can actually see the baby crowning, and then STILL DON’T ASK.)

By this point, I can tell Max is starting to get tired again, so I pack up my wounded pride and drive home, where I give him a quick snack and some milk, before popping him in bed for another nap. Then I head to the bathroom… where I’m sitting on the toilet, as you do, when all of a sudden I hear a weird kind of clanging noise, and glance up to see a MAN AT THE WINDOW.

A MAN.

AT THE WINDOW.

THE WINDOW OF MY BATHROOM.

THAT I AM USING AT THE TIME.

MY CAPS LOCK KEY IS STUCK NOW.

OMG.

Now, our bathroom is on the second floor of the house, so I’m a little bit relieved when the man starts cleaning the window, and I realise it is, in fact, my old nemesis, the window cleaner, and not, I dunno, some kind of crazed bathroom-window-peeping stalker or something. (I say “nemesis”: I mean, I’m sure our window cleaner is a lovely man, really, but I can’t be the only person who immediately runs and hides as soon as they hear his ladder, because it’s just too weird to be lounging around your house while someone stands watching you through the window, can I? CAN I?) I’m only a little bit relieved, though, because did I mention THE MAN? AT MY WINDOW? WHILE I’M ON THE TOILET? Because, yes, that’s a thing that’s happening, apparently: and, OK, sure, the bathroom window is frosted for privacy, but, well, I can see the window cleaner, so surely that means he can see me? Sitting on the toilet? Quietly dying?

Once I’ve processed the realisation that the very thing I have always feared would happen has actually come to pass, my first instinct is to jump up and run out of the room. That, however, would obviously leave me even more, er, exposed, so instead I just kind of crouch over, and remain there, frozen in horror, while the window cleaner takes a really quite extraordinarily long time to clean the bathroom window. (So… at least we know he’s being thorough? I guess?) THEN I jump up and run from the room.

First, I try to run upstairs to the bedroom: this, I know from previous window-cleaning encounters, is a safe place to hide from him, because his ladders don’t reach that high, so I could be up there peeing ALL OVER THE PLACE if I really wanted to, and the window cleaner would be none the wiser.

Which is how things really SHOULD be, no?

Anyway. I try to hide in the bedroom, but find my access blocked:

You can’t really tell from the photo, but the floor on the top landing was propped up on a … thing… so I couldn’t have stood on it without breaking it. I’d have had to jump up the stairs and over the landing, like a mountain goat – and I am no mountain goat, people, let me tell you.

Instead, then, the window cleaner and I begin an elaborate game of cat and mouse, in which I move to different rooms, only to instantly hear the tell-tale scraping of his ladder at the window. How is he moving so fast? Is he, in fact, messing with me? And why am I so bothered by all of this? I mean, it’s like, OH NOES, Amber, the window cleaner now knows you use the bathroom: so what? It’s not like he’s going to go home tonight and tell his wife about the weirdo at number XX, who has a bathroom and isn’t afraid to use it, is he? (OR IS HE?) In fact, I bet he’s seen much, much worse things through the various windows he cleans (I would like to know what those things are, actually…), so why so embarrassed? I mull this over as I run from room to room, before finally going to the middle of the stairs and hissing down to Terry to tell me when the window cleaner leaves, so I can come downstairs again.

“Just close the blinds if you don’t want to see him?” says Terry. “And anyway, he won’t have been able to see anything through that window. You could see him, but from the outside it would just have been all dark and blurred – he probably didn’t even know you were there.”

This reassures me somewhat, but I nevertheless insist we eat lunch with the blinds closed, and I also briefly consider putting the house on the market, just so I never have to see the window cleaner again. By the time we’ve finished our lunch, it’s …

3:40pm-ish

Max is now awake again, so I go upstairs and we read some books, while Terry makes him some dinner:

[SPOILER ALERT: The big ‘reveal’ in ‘It’s a Little Baby’ is… a little baby. Like, I know it’s aimed at toddlers and all, but COME ON, PEOPLE: at least TRY to make the content a surprise – you know, like I did by pretending this post was going to be about a day in the life, and then slyly sliding in all the peeing and stuff?]

Terry has been working so hard on the stairs that he’d totally lost track of time, so Max has an easy dinner of chicken and chips, quite a bit of which ends up on the floor. Once he’s done, I take him out of the highchair and start cleaning up: I’ve been at this task for less than a minute when I suddenly realise Max is suspiciously quiet. Only then do I remember the can of Coke I left on the coffee table earlier.

TOO LATE.

(Yeah, I totally stopped to take a photo before cleaning it up. I hate myself, too.)

What you can’t see here is that the Coke had also managed to make its way under the couch, so I strip Max, strip the cushion cover that had got soaked, and then start cleaning the couch and floor, stopping every so often to stop Max licking the couch. At one point I’m lying on my belly on the rug, with half of my body squeezed underneath the couch, when it occurs to me that I could just… stay there. Like, I could just close my eyes and keep lying on the floor, and maybe when I woke up, someone else would have magically dealt with all of this? Then Max comes over and sits on my head, so that’s the end of that dream. It was nice while it lasted, though.

5pm-ish

By this point, I’ve fully given up on life, and Terry’s given up on the stairs. There’s still a couple of hours to go until Max’s bedtime, though, so we decide to head out again, to pick up some stuff we need for our trip to the Highlands next week. And by “some stuff,” I mean, “This cute little jumper and shirt set I saw for Max, and maybe also some matching trousers.”

Max is not very impressed with our mission to buy him stuff:

So we take him to Zara to look at the… I’m going to call these ‘clothes’? Are these clothes?

I’m pretty sure I saw that green thing in the aquarium you go through at Siam Park one time. I could swear to it. Max is not impressed by this, either, so home we go…

7:30pm

Luckily for you guys, my camera battery died at this point, so there are no more grainy photos to bore you with as we embark on Max’s bedtime routine…. which is more or less the same as the last Day in the Life post I did, with the main difference being that he doesn’t have a bottle before bed now (Or AT ALL, actually). Instead, he gets some milk and a snack in the high chair, then we take him upstairs, where Terry runs the bath, while I get Max ready. Once he’s in the bath, Terry gives him a wash (Read: totally just splashes around and sings songs with him…) while I run around putting away his clothes, emptying the nappy pail, and other very glamorous and exciting things like that. Once that’s done, I go and join in with the bathtime fun, before Terry gets him out and hands him over to me, to dry him and get him into his PJs.

With that done, Terry goes downstairs to make us some coffee, while I read Max some stories (I say, “stories” – there’s honestly not much of a plot to, ‘That’s Not My Duck,’ tbh…), then put him in bed for the night.

AT LAST.

8pm

And then it’s time to work. Most nights, Terry and I just do a couple of hours work, before winding down by watching some TV, but right now we’re just too busy/spending too much time on DIY, and I also need to organise some stuff for our trip next week, so I’m currently finishing this post at 11:40pm, which means I’m going to go to bed late, and then probably lie awake worrying about how tired I’m going to be tomorrow.

Still: tomorrow is another day!

I bet you’re all glad I’m not going to write about it, though…