Octomummy

They say that time passes quickly when you have children, so treasure every moment.  Well, I can tell ‘them’ that on a two and a half hour drive from Cumbria, every single second of every single minute felt like an hour and there wasn’t a lot of ‘treasuring’ being done.

As the passenger I fast became ‘Octomummy’, bending and stretching into all sorts of unnatural positions to tend to the needs of demanding children.  I’m sure I must have created some new yoga stance, let’s call it the ‘elastic crab’, as I arched backwards and then sideways, with every muscle straining in protest, to retrieve our youngest’s shoes and socks from the rear footwell and manoeuvre them back on his feet without removing my seatbelt.

I would have stared in disbelief if someone in a gym told me to stretch as far forward as I could with one hand and then simultaneously stretch the other arm as far behind me as I could, but this is what I found myself doing as I scrabbled with my fingertips to grab a drink from the bag at my feet whilst reaching backwards at the same time to receive the empty packet of crisps kindly being offered to me.

Tickling the kids to relieve the boredom seemed like a good idea at the time, but like all games you play with young children, I tired of it long before they did, especially when my arms started to lose feeling and I noted that my elbows aren’t designed to bend that way.

I also realised on this journey that I’ve been conditioned like one of Pavlov’s dogs to jump each time our youngest screeches, ‘Meh!’ in that endearing way he has.  He uses this version of ‘Mummy’ to encompass everything from wanting a drink or something to eat, to have his hands or nose wiped or sometimes just because he doesn’t want my attention to stray from him, even for a moment.

I humoured him for about an hour but as the crick in my neck intensified, I began to think that I may stuck permanently looking over my right shoulder so I distributed more Mini Cheddars like you might throw a steak to distract a predatory lion’s attention and tried to avoid eye contact as I slowly turned away.

I attempted to listen to the radio, just for five minutes, but our three year old wanted to tell us a story; ‘Mummy, this monkey, right, fell over a tree, then fell over an elephant, then trumped, then weed on the elephant’s head, then banged his head on the wall, then fell over a dinosaur!’.  I tried to brush over his obsession with bodily functions enough to say enthusiastically, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of falling!’.

After another three versions of this, with different animals and obstacles but always with wee, poo, burps or trumps, the radio was turned up again to block out the electronic pings and beeps of our eldest’s DS and then the subsequent argument about the DS that ensued, with our youngest’s ‘Meh!’ complimenting the harmony.

When we finally arrived home, I gratefully got out of the car.  I would have performed a Sun Salutation, not because I’m into yoga, but because I’d made it home without throttling any of my children.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember the exact sequence…so I had a glass of wine instead 🙂