The Day After Beach Day
I’ve tried the handle several times, but it’s locked. It’s definitely locked. I’ve been locked in the garage. This hasn’t happened before.
“Girls. Girls? Girls come on, unlock this please.”
The garage is only lockable door in the house. Any junk food I buy goes in there, or it disappears within hours of being bought. Whole packets of biscuits, entire multipacks of crisps. Even when I think I’m surrounded by the girls, somehow snacks are snuck, and devoured. The wrappers bubble to the surface of the daily house detritus some time later, before I realise the crime has been committed. We could stop buying them, yes, but sometimes after a good day, I think - hell, what’s a crisp/chocolate roll or two??! Then I’ll buy them, they will vanish, and no one will eat anything resembling good food for days, too full from salty, chocolaty, pre-packaged, predictable fodder.
On this occasion, nipping into the garage has provided my elder two with the opportunity for the perfect crime - to lock me in the garage, open the car where the ipads are, and play on them. To say their screens are like crack is an understatement. They will happily lock their own helpless mother in the garage to get their fix.
I hear nervous giggles outside the garage door by the car.
“Come on, unlock the door please. If you don’t I’m going to get cross, this is dangerous. If there was a fire I would be burned alive in here”. I have a habit of over dramatising situations as it only seems to be the really shocking stuff that gets through to them.
My middle child sheepishly unlocks the door and makes a good case for how she did it by mistake. I don’t believe a word of it, but I’m free and I have bigger fish to fry today.
It’s come to my attention that despite having what feels like a PHD in parental controls, my eldest has managed to watch videos on YouTube under search terms such as ‘man sucked into jet engine’ and ‘Momo is back’. Both are so terrifying, and make me, as an adult, feel so sick, and by extension worried, that I have vowed this morning I’m am going to tackle this situation and install software to stop this it in its tracks.
I have tried before. But for some reason tech companies make it nearly impossible to block their content. Funny that…
3 hours, 5123 interruptions and 3 meltdowns later, one nearly being mine, I think I have done what I need to do. Oh, apart from the fact that said software doesn’t seem to work on child profiles on Kindle. Awesome. Will someone tell me why I can’t just toggle ‘child device’ on settings somewhere???
The rest of the day is spent refereeing the girls’ fights, calming meltdowns, and getting tired to our bones. I unhelpfully work out that if each child calls me because they need me at least once every ten minutes, that’s 18 times per hour, and 270 times in a 15 hour period that I’m responding IMMEDIATELY (any later is not acceptable) to their needs. No wonder I’m knackered.
I’m horrified to remember that it’s a ‘non-melatonin’ day, as we have to take a break for 2 days out of every 7, and we have decided that Friday and Saturday should be those days. It works in term time when they need sleep for school but it’s a real kicker in the holidays.
Days out are wonderful, but flipping hell do we pay for them the next day.
