Wednesday 12 October 2011

Zombie House, and a quick getaway

A piece of advice - don't come and visit us at the moment. 
All three of us are suffering to different degrees with coughs; Olga has it by far the worst, she's been signed off work this week by her GP, she's had it for 2 weeks now, and despite 2 visits to the GP and numerous calls to the midwife, we're reassured that Junior isn't going to suffer because mama has a chest infection. Lara and I are spluttering, but it's not keeping us awake at night, unlike poor mama, who's not had a good night's sleep for weeks.

On a different note, I simply have to report on a personal best Lara and I set this morning... My alarm went off as usual at 6.50am, but the house was quiet so I opted for a lie-in, and was woken by Lara's usual wake-up call of "Papa, is it morning yet??!!!" at exactly 7.26am. Normally, this would mean a long, drawn out procedure of getting her dressed, washed and breakfasted, in order to leave the house once the rush hour traffic has died down around 9am. The general rule is, if we've not set off for nursery by 8am at the latest, she won't get there in time to have breakfast there, so she might as well have it with us without the hassle of sitting in rush-hour traffic.
Anyway, this morning Lara decided she was happy to be rushed, and I wondered if it would be possible to get her to nursery by 8am, despite being 36 minutes behind schedule already.
Getting her out of her jimjams and dressed was easy, she accepted my first offering of clothes, which is rare in itself. Face washing and toothbrushing happened equally quickly, and she helped me get dressed before we set off downstairs for the normally difficult job of getting her hair sorted out. By now it was 7.40am, and we'd already broken all sorts of records, but the hair has taken me more than 20 minutes sometimes to get three plaits sorted out. However, the secret today was that last night, Lara wanted to have her hair like Mama's, in some sort of high ponytail, so I had a practise before she went to bed, and Lara liked her new look. So this morning it was easy to get her to sit still long enough for me to put one new ponytail in, even I can do that in under 5 minutes, and after refitting her car seat (I took it out last night for some adjustments) when I checked the clock in the car as we pulled away from the house, it was 7.51am. 25 minutes from us getting out of bed to us driving off to nursery! Unheard of.
It might mean nothing to most people, but I felt Lara and I deserved a post dedicated almost solely to this near impossible feat...