Stupid stuff I beat myself up about on a daily basis

I think we all have this, don’t we? Us parents, anyway. Things we promise ourselves we’ll do better, or at all, and then we don’t prioritise it and it just becomes a niggling worry eating away at our sanity until it keeps us awake until 3am fretting over whether anything is actually going mouldy in the bottom of the washing basket, only to go back to sleep promising you’ll definitely, 100%, absolutely do something about it tomorrow, but you spend all night dreaming you’re trying to do it whilst endless obstacles prevent you until you wake, three hours later, too exhausted to do other than the very bare minimum to keep everything ticking over.

Or is that just me?

1- The laundry basket having, um, well, laundry in it. With a family of four, including a pukey, newly-weaning baby in cloth nappies, a three-year who magnetises mud and has had a slight continence regression and a husband who cycles to work and spends his spare time tinkering with car engines, the laundry is plentiful, varied and never-ending. The only way I could ever possibly get to the bottom of it would be to make them all move out. Families make washing. If I can ever learn to accept this my life would be infinitely less stressful.

2- My son’s ’show and tell diary’. This is a handy journal to help join up what’s going on at home with what’s going on at preschool, but I never remember to write in the damn thing. I do, however, collar the supervisor or The Boy’s keyworker at the door most mornings and have an intense Q&A session with them about the latest biting incident or the fact he’s learnt to, I dunno, write his own name or whatever. I will not get social services knocking at the door because I haven’t stuck in his latest piece of ‘art’ work.

Enjoying this? READ 5 things not to do or say to your co-parent (unless you want a slap)

3- The fact I didn’t cook broccoli with dinner last night. I did, however, feed them shepherd’s pie with grated courgette in – and chopped carrot, too, for that matter. The fact there’s no vegetable also on the side of the plate does NOT mean my kids will get scurvy. Even if they got scrmabled eggs on toast for dinner for a week they would still not get scurvy, rickets, or any other kind of malutrition-related illness. As long as I don’t feed them generic fast-food and milkshakes week in, week out, they will grow up strong and healthy.

4- That I have a friend coming and haven’t cleaned up yet. She’s known me for 21 years now. She knows I favour the chaos-theory style of living. She will be fed and entertained (if you can call being sent to retrieve a rogue three year old from t’other side of the park and forced to critique Strictly with me ‘entertained’) and will not judge me if I haven’t hoovered. Plus we all know I’ll run around cleaning like a blue-arsed fly on Saturday morning whilst the baby is asleep and The Boy is zombified in front of a DVD.

5- That I still don’t have a job lined up for when The Girl starts school (four years hence I might add), or any work experience to switch into broadcasting like I want to, or a life plan in general other than ‘keep myself and my children alive until they’re old enough to do it for themselves’.

So there you go – five of my current brain farts. What kind of stupid stuff keeps you awake at night?