Mumlympics

I was lying in bed this morning listening to my children shuffling in their beds. I’m sure you know that feeling, you know that you probably have another five minutes maximum under the warm duvet but you would really love another hour or so. So I’m there thinking about the Olympics as it is very popular in our house and quite right too, and I was thinking about how us mum’s deserve a medal for the extreme efforts that we make in the name of parenting and so these are the events that I came up with for the ‘Mumlympics’.

Firstly there would be the several hundred metre pooh and wee sprint.  You know that feeling when you have a young child who is freshly out of nappies or just too lazy to tell you that they need to go; until the absolute last minute.  They wait until the most inappropriate place / furthest possible point from a toilet to inform you that they are desperate.  I have been in that situation a few times recently with my friend’s little girl and my god I can run when that happens, faster than I have ever run, with A under my arm like a rugby ball and the other one being dragged in the other hand.  That is an event I would definitely win a gold medal in as I really hate dealing with ‘accidents’.

My next event would be dead weightlifting.  When I say ‘dead’ I am of course referring to the sleeping or very tired child, who isn’t able to hold on and really is too heavy to carry.  R had to be lifted to do a wee in the middle of the night for quite a while and if my husband was away or ill, I had to try and half lift, half drag him out of bed and cajole him into weeing without waking him or anyone else up.  Thankfully, those days are gone as now I really couldn’t do it.  I have officially retired from lifting any of the boys as they are all so heavy.  I do carry A a lot, but she is still quite light, but at a recent nursery farm visit, where we were accompanied by the very friendly farm dog, I had to carry her around for two hours.  For most of those two hours, she was screaming and quite literally pulling my hair out as she is so scared of dogs!

Another medal winning event for mums would be the obstacle course.  Our house is a constant one at the moment with an assortment of toys, games, Lego models and balls adorning the available floor space.  I do quite literally feel like an Olympic hurdler.  A is going through a spilling and knocking things over phase and I see drinks that are just about to spill and plates that are on the verge of tipping their contents everywhere and it is like slow motion as I hurdle over the dolls prams, footballs and other objects to dive in and catch it.  The reality is that I don’t ever catch it and not only do the contents spill everywhere, but I end up with Peppa Pig or a piece of Lego firmly embedded in the bottom of my toe.

And let’s not forget the gymnastics.  We are all naturals at that!  These little waifs that balance on narrow beams and swing cartwheel around the floor are nothing compared to the multi-tasking mum in full swing.  Baby in one hand, hot pan cooking tea in the other, leaping from one household chore to the next with at least one child attached somewhere and a pile of things that need to be taken as we are going that way and it would be a shame to waste the trip.  Then there is the high speed ironing and cleaning that we squeeze in at every available opportunity.

If the stair relay were an event, I would be a world leader.  I have never been blessed with the ‘sleep all night’ breed of children and this involves endless trips up and down the stairs taking one or all of them back to bed.  L at the moment has reverted to having ‘nightmares’ even before his head touched the pillow.  It is a ‘nightmare’ for me.  As I am writing this post at ten o’clock at night, he is still awake and keeps running down stairs and I keep walking back up stairs, putting him back to bed, walking down stairs and then I hear the creak of his floorboards and back up I go.  I must have walked the length of a marathon this evening alone up and down the stairs.  I do occasionally pass the relay baton to my husband, but he is way too soft and makes things worse, so it is better to go solo.

My final event would be basketball, which is something that I have perfected over my years as a parent.  Again, due to lack of time and my general rushing around from place to place is that I don’t tidy and put things away, I chuck them.  Toys; thrown in multiples at high speed across the room, as I don’t have time to pick everything up individually, I would be there for a year.  Towels and clothes; they too get thrown, with a little more precision into the cupboards in their allotted slots.  The boys think it is brilliant that my aim is so good. I can be a little heavy handed with the crockery from time to time, but that doesn’t end well, so I try to only throw perishables in times of dire need.

So those would be some of the events in the ‘Mumlympics’, but I have no doubt that there are many more.  What would you add to the list?  Anyway, that floor board is creaking, so off I go for another lap of the stair relay again…