Winding down for the weekend

I am attempting to get my children to tidy their bedrooms, a failing battle. There have been many campaigns, many seasons. To compare it to the siege of Leningrad would be to severely underestimate quite how entrenched we are at this point. The most basic issue is that the girls, once home from school, dress up in their entire wardrobes in the space of about an hour, and when they can no longer move for the clothes explosion, spill out onto the landing. This places them in the vicinity of the Dressing Up Drawer. Oooh look, more clothes! Once that's over with, including at the moment some bizarre semi-Victorian amusement where they address each other as Miss this and Lady that and then run up and down the stairs at full tilt screaming demure sweet nothings. No, I don't know either. Time for some food, usually a trail of tangerine peel will lead to a child, although it's entirely possible you will simply find an apple core gently leaking into a sofa cushion instead. 

Clearly we do not live in a museum. We're still just about able to keep our heads over the clutter, and a weekly visit from someone with a lot more cleaning expertise than anyone that lives here is a godsend, but of course is highly temporary. When we packed off the kids to Scotland for Easter the difference was amazin when measured in visible floor space. And bread! It's getting to the stage where they are starting to eat us out of house and home. I timed the survival of a lone loaf of bread at under three minutes the other day - it was like time lapse photography, but in real time. And of course the best place for an empty bread packet is still the bread bin, in much the same way as empty cereal boxes simply go back in the cupboard, which confuses the hell out of the shopping fairy.

But of course we would rather have them than not, and the happy sounds of a full-house, punctuated by the occasional yell, is very heart-warming. This weekend, just like last, we have no firm plans, and what we do will be largely be dictated by the weather. And of course it's another three-dayer, which has huge potential. I've not looked at the charts, but I've been so slack that I've not even seen a Swift yet, and my contribution to the patch this year has been precisely nil, so perhaps I'll give it a quick thrash for old time's sake? I believe the saying is "didn't bother the scorers". But realistically what am I going to see here? It's probably a better use of my time to chill out at home, and continue the pleading with the children to please not completely trash every single room until at least Sunday. Simple pleasures.