Colour Me Happy!

Yesterday when I was on my hands and knees I discovered that Orla had been writing her name in biro on the door slat-thingy between the hall and the bathroom. (n.b. for those of you learning German, here's a question: do you ever find that you forget the names of things in English - not that I know the name for that in German...). Actually, it was less like writing and more that teenage habit of 'embedding' her name in the wood of the desk in Chemistry.

As you can imagine I wasn't too happy, but at least these days I am able to identify the culprit as Orla's signature is becoming recognisable. Lot's of big 'O's' and 'l's' and 'a's' that look more like 'q's'. The 'r's' look a lot like the 'l's', so it's hard to pick those out but none the less, since I didn't end up calling Hamish 'Arlo' there was only one person to blame. We had a little chat about it, and Orla said she would NEVER do it again. I thought I was being smart as well, because I remembered to add that we aren't allowed to draw ANYWHERE on the house, rather than being caught out with only saying you can't draw on this part of the house, and then living to regret it.

But I shouldn't have worried. Less than 24 hours later, I wander into Orla's bedroom to discover that she's in the process of marking our ages on the wall under the window in great big stripes of colour. As a result I have confiscated her crayons, pencils, and pens and her brand new scissors which I bought her yesterday after a fair amount of begging. She's gutted, but I can't think of any other way of stopping her from doing this. And it drives me to despair when it does happen (...this was not the first time sadly.)

Stevie is constantly telling me I need to do myself a favour and relax a bit with the kids and not be checking on them every 5 minutes to see what they are up to. He says it does my blood pressure no good and he's right because invariably I catch them just as they are about to do something I don't want them to - yesterday's list included nearly smashing the living room window by swinging the heavy metal curtain pull at it, and pullling their little IKEA chairs into the kitchen to climb up at the cooker (which was on) while I went to the toilet. But I would argue that it wouldn't do my blood pressure much good either if I walked into the living room after a loud crash and discovered Hamish surrounded and impaled by shards of glass from a 5 ft high window, or heard screaming from the kitchen and found the two of them burnt or scalded and had to spend the evening or longer at the hospital.

But today I decided to ease off for a little bit as they were only messing around in Orla's bedroom and I was busy trying to tidy up while listening to Stevie throw up. Why when you feel dreadful would you think that Orange & Pineapple juice would be a good thing? So that's what I get for taking my eye off the ball. The only good thing to come out of this is the fact that it says that I am only 6 to Stevie's wopping 8 years of age. So that's a bonus at least.