my day.

Do you ever have days that just seem to go from the sublime to the ridiculous? 

I am absolutely sure you do. Would you mind me telling you about my day today? On reflection, 'ridiculous' might not be totally accurate, but hey, I'm going to tell you anyway!

So, it all starts off normally with a bit of early morning internet shopping for wedding related items. Today, it was envelopes. Tomorrow, who knows? 

Having purchased roughly 140 envelopes, booked a train ticket to a wedding two weeks before my own and blogged about banana muffins, I headed off to childminding.

My morning's duties started off with learning about the mating rituals of Amazonian creatures - did you know that dung beetles roll a large ball of poo to impress their mates, and wire tailed manakin males show their tail feathers to their prospective female mate before shaking those tail feathers right in the female's face?

Next, Grace & I headed over to feed the neighbours fish & cats while they're away. This is where the fun of the day started to roll on in. I once heard that if a cat thinks you're not a very good hunter, they'll keep on bringing you dead animals until you prove your hunting prowess. Now, I am not sure whether it is normal practise for Sooty & Saffy (the cats we're looking after) to go hunting for their owners, or whether they see Grace & I as fresh, hopeless hunters, but either way, they feel the need to show us how good they are at hunting. Today, we went into their little cat lounge to find a dead bird, feathers & blood strewn across the floor. Oh how wonderful. Grace was highly traumatised & went and sat on the front step, refusing to feed the cats for doing such a disgraceful thing.

Upon our return to Grace's house, I was told by her Father that clearing up dead birds comes under the 'any other jobs' category in my job description. I was so thankful to have that clarification because I was wondering...

The rest of the morning was spent trying to figure out how to work the Match Attax game online. Remember how I feel about Match Attax? Well, yes, believe it or not, there is indeed a way to play this online as well as with cards. This is the new level of the Match Attax craze. Will is now becoming highly specific in terms of the cards that he deems worthy of owning. So much so that when his friend came round to play this afternoon, Will decided to give away his  entire, well, very nearly, collection of Match Attax cards. I hadn't quite realised the extent of Will's intended generosity until his friend's Mum came to collect him & told her son that he really couldn't take all of Will's cards  because Will might just have a re-think and wish he hadn't been so quick to give them all away, and then it'd be too late. 

Well, you'd think at times like this a child's response would be, 
'gosh, you are absolutely right! There I was, getting all giddy with excitement at the new-found possibilities of Match Attax online, that I thought giving away a hundred bajillion cards was a brilliant idea! I now see the error of my ways. Thankyou from saving me from untold disappointment.'

But no, our decision that Will should keep his cards was most definitely not met with approval. We had one disappointed boy sat on the stairs, head in hands refusing to move, and Will looking at me with his 'how could you?' look in his eyes. He then asked me, 'why is it that adults always have to spoil our fun? We have fun then you come along and spoil it?! always!'

After this little episode, baking seemed like the perfect consollation to me. I was wrong. Our batch of cookies was a total disaster. Actually, it could have been worse. I could have burnt the cookies. That was perhaps the only good thing about them, other than the delicious chocolate chips buried inside each one. While the cookies were baking in the oven, I decided to do a little bit of pantry tidying. It was perhaps the shortest lived tidying episode ever. Having moved one tray, I was incredibly successful in bringing a home made jar of blackcurrant jam to the floor - with no hands!!! They don't call them black currants for nothing, I assure you. The whole jar shattered and there on the camel coloured, textured carpet was a mountain of jam.

If you've ever wondered how to get out horrid, horrid blackcurrant stains from your carpet, I can tell you the first four pages of suggestions provided by google, ranging from lemon juice to vinegar to milk and cornflour. Take your pick. I chose nearly all of them and found the most successful one to be one that's not listed which consised of searching in the cleaning products cupboard for any kind of stain remover. Vanish oxi-action was my weapon of choice & it didn't let me down. So, although there is still a horrendous stain there, it is no longer purple.

My day of childminding ended with cooking dinner for children, knowing that one of them would complain endlessly about how he doesn't like jacket potato and asking how many mouthfuls he needed to eat. As it turned out, neither of them ate a bite of all I had cooked because their Mum rang and asked if they wanted to go out for dinner with her. I thought this to be a far better option than sitting through a mealtime of complaints and so calmly put all that I had prepared into separate bowls & into the fridge for another day.

{image: wire tailed manakin :: google images}