Total sucker

It’s amazing how quickly you forget how much work children can be.

My kids were only gone for 18 days, but I managed to completely blank out how busy my evenings and mornings are when they’re home.

For instance, this whole cooking dinner every night business is a bit of a drag. I made spag bol and Gordon Ramsay’s roast tomato soup for their return on Sunday, Monday night was sausages and mash with onion gravy (the gravy was for me, the kids won’t touch it; actually the eldest won’t touch mash, so I had to grab some bread rolls to make a snag roll for him); and last night was prawn and speck fried rice (speck is the only bacon or ham product I can find at Woolies that doesn’t contain sugar – the youngest meticulously checks all labels to make sure I’m not trying to put that evil stuff in her).

Another four dinners stretch before me until they’re back at their dad’s place.

And I’m back to making them salads for their lunches. I can hear you saying “get them to make their own lunch”, but how healthy would that be? They’d be lucky to take some chips and a bread roll … ooooh that takes me back, remember when it was totally fine to get a lunch order from the canteen of a buttered roll and a packet of Smiths Crisps and stick the two together … these days they’d probably report the canteen to DOCS.

The eldest has a chicken caesar salad for school lunch and the youngest has a haloumi and avocado salad. Fancy!

Yesterday morning was particularly hairy on the salad making front as I had to be at a work event at 6.15am.

So I was scrabbling around in the kitchen pre 6am putting the creations together. I considered making them the night before, but Princess Youngest thought that might make them brown and soggy, which is a fair call on the avocado.

The kids also quite enjoy a fruit salad for dessert, which again they wouldn’t lift a finger to make for themselves. So I chop, chop, chop to get the extra vitamins into them. Yep, I know, I know, I’m a sucker.

Oh, and then there are the two hungry dog mouths to feed. They prefer a few teaspoons of cooked mince with their dry food each meal.

Once you add up all that food prep, there’s not much time for anything else when I’m at home. Going to work almost feels like a holiday, as I just have to microwave leftovers for my lunch.

There was also an awful lot of dirty washing from the kids’ holiday … I’ve almost waded through all of that … bless DD for fixing the washing machine.

On the plus side, the kids brought me back a lovely necklace from MOMA in New York.