Generally speaking, the children all sleep for a solid twelve hour night, but sometimes one of them will wake. Occasionally two of them will stir. From time to time all three will summon my attendance. How I live for those nights; to be afforded an audience with the smallest members of the household, to break up the tedium of eight hours in bed.
This morning followed one such night, as I was awoken by the toddler pulling at my duvet; “am wake now mummy – stop making that noise”. This has become a common theme in recent weeks; I can only assume that he is referring to the gentle snuffles I have been known to make in my sleep. Ahem.
I dragged myself from the warm abyss of exhausted slumber and traipsed downstairs with him, flicking on CBeebies and handing him a banana in one practiced move. Getting the girls up is always a joy; the opening door is met with a squeal of delight from both corners of the room, and beams from ear to ear. Alas, the day inevitably goes downhill from that point…
After breakfast I took the bold decision to leave the three children in the playroom while I had a shower. I washed in record time, my head sticking out of the shower curtain to listen to ominous shrieks. But all was quiet. Too quiet… Back downstairs, at first glance everything appeared in order; the girls were rolling a ball back and forth, and the toddler was feeding something to his Lego sheep. He handed it to me; “look mummy, sheep hungry”, and I rolled it around my palm absent-mindedly. Too late, I detected a familiar aroma, and realised to my horror that the toddler had done the poo to end all poos. And handed me a bit of it. It was a poo affectionately referred to in our household as a ‘poo-nami’, although there is really nothing affectionate about a tidal wave of faeces.
This particular poo-nami had swept out of the side of his nappy, meandered down the inside of his trouser leg, and burst out into fresh air at the bottom. A large pile of it sat next to a plastic carrot and a stickle-brick, like a surreal still-life, and small pieces were dotted around the room. It looked as though we’d been visited by a colony of rabbits. I intervened just too late to stop one of the girls popping a piece of second hand sweetcorn in her mouth, and as I delved under the sink for the bucket and the scrubbing brush, I muttered under my breath the soothing mantra of every mother with small children; “gin and tonic, gin and tonic, gin and tonic…”
Emily Carlisle is a freelance writer living in the Cotswolds with her husband and three small children. You can read her take on extreme parenting at More Than Just a Mother.
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