Here's a tip

in case there is anyone else out there as utterly misguided as me. Don’t try to go shopping and for a haircut with two small children, not when the shopping and haircut are kind of time critical. 🙁

It’s been a long day. Started this morning with Big deciding that today, the day we had an hour to get out of the house with an extra child, would be the day she refused to go downstairs. Marvellous. Then I somehow contrived to trip myself up and crash headlong into a door, ripping a toenail and giving myself an almighty headache. Although I might have had the headache anyway – Small did not sleep well last night, and when Small doesn’t sleep well, he likes to share.

Dropped him off with Barbara – asked him if he wanted to play with B and got a very happy and emphatic head nod, so was quite pleased with that. Made it into Sheffield to the museum only about 5 mins late, which is some kind of record for me. Big took a while to come round despite Janet’s best efforts – it was nice to catch up with several of the Sheffield crowd that I haven’t seen for a while, since starting to attend Chesterfield more regularly. Once E and Big warmed up they had a great time – the museum is wonderful and the caretaker very laid back about the children getting involved and roleplaying in the various little shops. Then she led a washday activity complete with poshers and dollies, mangle and (not) hot flat irons.

And then we had lunch 😉

Barbara met me outside the museum to do a child exchange – much to E’s disgust – she wanted to take Big home with her, but I thought 48 hours together was probably enough. I probably should have let her go – as mentioned above the rest of the trip out was remarkably unsuccessful, and I’m going to have to nip out to TKMaxx in the morning and hope they have some clothes there. I did manage to buy myself a book on Java Web Services for £5 though – do I really think I can read and absorb it tonight? Maybe not.