Packing

It’s very exciting. The girls are booked in for an overnight stay with
the grandparents and me and the other half are off to paint the town
red, or whatever it is people with a social life do these days.
Well this grand occasion is not actually for two weeks yet, but the
preparations have already begun as I have to make sure that the
children have everything with them they could need for any
eventuality.
Part of the challenge is that my mum and dad will expect me to forget
something, mainly because I usually do. But this time I am determined
to prove them wrong and that I am a competent mother-of-two not their
irresponsible daughter.
Of course they mean well but they seem to forget that for the vast
amount of time in between visits I do manage to feed and clothe my
offspring all by myself, every day.
Whenever they arrive my mum will turn up with her own supply of food,
nappies, wipes and clothes. For example, before we set off got a trip
out she will ask, have you brought them a drink? “Of course I have,” I
snap like a moody teenager, while then trying to distract them while sneaking off
to the kitchen to fill up their drinks bottles.
There is another reason I am slightly hesitant about the sleep over as
last time Charlotte aged two at the time, ended up in hospital.
We were just about to drive home from Liverpool when my dad called me.
I panicked straight away, as my dad never rings me, preferring to pass
on instructions through my mum. “Don’t worry, everything’s fine,” he
said. “But Charlotte is in hospital.”
Apparently she had started screaming and they couldn’t stop her.
They’d got a neighbour round who was a GP and he could’t stop her
either and so she’d ended up in A&E.
Basically it turned out it was the first time they had witnessed a tantrum. They saw
the second one when we tried to drag her out of the toy-laden
children’s ward.
Another potential hazard of the overnight stay is leaving something or
someone behind. Wherever we travel at the moment , accompanying us are
three-year-old Charlotte’s band of pals, and it is getting to the
point where I have to do a headcount before we leave to make sure we
have the relevant teddies, dolls, dogs, rabbits. One favourite, is
currently somewhere on an adventure in the Lake District.
So after the packing, the inventory, the hour car journey down, the
forgetting something and then the wondering if one of my children is
going to be checked into hospital makes me wonder if it is all
worthwhile?
And what will I get out of it? Probably a hangover.