We took the Christmas tree down this morning.
We had not intended to do this, because it is such a lot of faffing about, and there is always the danger of the fire brigade turning up to stop us from putting it on the stove. Also when I got up this morning I thought that probably I had already got quite enough to do, because we were having visitors.
Mark took Lucy to the station to go off for her Krav Maga course, and was going to go to Lancaster to put some new tyres on his taxi, but as it turned out the tyre man has not yet sufficiently recovered from Christmas to come in to work, and so we will have to wait.
When they had gone I realised that all the lights on the Christmas tree had gone out, and so reluctantly, rather than leave it becoming slowly desiccated for any longer, when Mark came back we dismantled it.
We discovered that the lights had gone out because a dog had eaten one of them.
This turned out to have been Roger Poopy. We knew this because as soon as we started looking at the Christmas tree he went very quiet, and sloped off to hide under the kitchen table. He has eaten a lot of Christmas decorations this year, which is sad, because so many of them have been favourites, but on the positive side it was a lot less to take down and they all fitted in the box without any troublesome rearranging.
They have also, we calculated, eaten fifty five Freddo Popping Chocolate bars, without any apparent peril to their general health and well-being, so I can reassure anybody who has read the instructions about not giving chocolate to dogs, not to worry too much. No doubt they would be healthier in the long term without it, but so would I, and to be quite honest I think it is worth it.
After that Mark went to work, and I got on with getting dinner ready. This was happily interrupted by occasional visitors. One of Oliver’s school friends turned up, and then the lodger came to visit. She is not the lodger any more, because she lives somewhere else. This made the whole process of anxiously flapping about go a lot more smoothly. She did not do anything helpful, but she did laugh, which I thought was reassuring.
LATER NOTE: The rest of the blog will be taken over by Lucy and Oliver because Sarah is too drunk to type.
The overall summery of the evening is that there where small children in the house, all boys under the age of five. While not as bouncy as Jake they were definitely still a hand full. Meanwhile, downstairs in the kitchen mummy and daddy where busy being irresponsible.
Now we have a big mess in the kitchen with a load of washing that none of the sober people know how to clean and the only somewhat capable people are stumbling over their own feet. I think they are downstairs now giving big emotional confessions to each other in a sort of confused set of repeated statements, so I think that is a good point to wrap this up in case mum starts singing.
We don’t know how to wrap up a blog so… here is picture of mum passed out on the stairs.
