Boo, hiss. James was back at work. And in true first-day-back fashion, I slammed my hand over that alarm and slept right on through when I was supposed to head out for my run. Oh yes - can you smell the commitment?
When I woke it was to a house devoid of James and Ted's enthusiastic clambouring after Eddie, his new robot. Left in Sydney during our Perth holiday he was cleanly forgotten about because, frankly, an unused, non-programmed robot leaves little to the imagination. Once re-discovered, this robot has become quite the star. Ted is yet to explore all fo the options available and the opportunity for Lego expansion has yet to be delved into but once that happens I'm ordering in food and grabbing a good book because I doubt we'll leave the house for a while.
Determined to demonstrate my solo parenting skills were still up to scratch I delivered a stone fruit, yoghurt, seed and incaberry fruit salad to the starving hordes. It was devoured. Mental note to self: save enough fruit for self.
The problem with the newly visible games shelf is that Ted remembered about Harry Potter Cluedo. Now for some, as yet unexplained reason, this game always (and I mean ALWAYS) ends in tears, a tantrum and some sort of violence. Seriously. However under strict guidelines were set down I walked into where there be tygers and ventured to enjoy myself. And it happened. An entire game without teras. Sure, Harriet had a little tantrum about something or other but after encouraging her to walk to the door and back to calm down, we managed to continue until the game was won (by Teddy) and no blood had been spilled or personality schism revealed.
I decided that to honour the experience of it being just the three of us, we would endeavour to actually get something done. From our long list of 'things', I chose school shoe shopping and stationery acquisition. Of course there were tears. Ted chose the single pair of sport shoes that the store was on its last pair of. The pair he chose had fluoro edging. FLUORO. And damn it, nothing else was quite as (pardon the pun) edgy.
And then in spectacular Ted-like fashion it turned out that they had a single pair left. In his size. This photo was taken about ten seconds after this information was conveyed to him.
And perhaps it is best for all if the experience of standing around aimlessly in Smiggle, followed by standing around aimlessly in Target, followed by standing around aimlessly in Kmart, followed by a reprisal of the standing around in Smiggle was all but forgotten by us mere mortals. You do remember that post from the other day where I described how much I despise shopping, right? RIGHT?
Thank goodness our regular Monday crew were up and ready to go earlier than usual. We headed over to Caperdown Park, where the vagaries of re-socialisation amongst the pre-teens were ironed out and we traipsed down to hug the sangria jug as only a trio of exhausted, overheated Mamas really can.
As you can see, the socialisation process ended up completing itself with minimal intervention.
And there was much important discussion to be had.
The three sets of parents lamented the intrusion of a regular work schedule into the heat of January, chatted about cruises and family and then...well...Bowie.
In the car on the way home Harriet and Teddy sang along to the impromptu David Bowie songlist on the radio and James and I realised it was too late for The Leftovers. Ha! Just joking.
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