Cor, I'm ace today!

That might have just been my most productive day, ever!  It was good, and now I am quite tired, but good tired.

Let me just quickly brag about all the things I've achieved today:

1. Getting up early enough to let the boys cycle to school (them cycling means me walking and pushing Matthew in the pram of course, as Matthew can't do the distance quickly enough - we think it's about a mile from our house to the school gate).
2. Walking all the way back home, without getting sweaty!
3. Cleaning our hellishly messy living room, which took four hours (the mess was a year's worth of Thomas's doodlings and writings - there were great piles of papers lying around - he's creative and that's wonderful, but I think it's about time I taught him to tidy up after himself).  Very hard work, I am great.
4. Cooking a healthy and nutritious hardly-any-fat-at-all toasted sandwich for me and Matthew, which we ate with salad, whilst sitting outside in the healthy fresh air.
5. Having much fun talking and talking with Matthew, as he pottered about and helped with the tidying or played with some freshly found lost toys that I had just rooted out of a mountainous pile of stuff.
6. Walking back to school to collect the big boys.  The sun had come out now, and it was too hot for walking to school in jeans - had I known the sun would come out, I would have put my shorts on.
7. Sitting down to do homework with Thomas (only bad thing today: lost patience with poor Thomas, because he's stubborn about maths homework; must remember that losing patience does not help Thomas to learn maths, and also that Thomas gets half of his stubbornness from me!) and did manage to teach him one or two useful things.  Thomas left the table smiling :)
8. Cooking very healthy and nutritious meal of tuna steaks, with very special olive oil and dill/chervil/parsley dressing with prawns, and jacket potatoes with sour cream, and crunchy mange tout.  Now that was very special.  Kev missed it because he had to go out with work people - poor Kev.  
9. Dancing with the boys, when some very funky sixties jazz tune came on the radio.  We danced like loonies, which is one of our favourite things to do.  We always like to leave the blinds open in the living room when we dance, just to make sure that the neighbours can see us and know that we are loonies.
10. Putting the boys to bed, and although starting to get rather tired, still persevering and doing the washing up!  How's about that for motivation?!  I usually leave it until the morning when I'm this tired :)
11. Being a very clever girl, and doing my second, very difficult, proofreading assignment from start to finish.  (I have just finished it now, and although it's very difficult to say, I think I have done quite well.  I'm sure I haven't spotted every mistake, and there will probably be things that I've marked up incorrectly, but I can't expect to get full marks.  But I do have a feeling that I've done quite well.  I seemed to spot a bit of everything that I've been asked to learn so far, and I believe that I have made sure that I have not made the same mistakes as in the first assignment.  But I've got a couple or three weeks to wait until I find out my marks.)
12. Oh, and another little achievement - writing a blog entry about my day :)

Here is a low quality picture of the high quality tuna that I cooked for tea this evening (which the boys loved, and devoured!):

Mmmm :)

Another cleaning post.

Yes, I know, it's not very interesting to write about cleaning, but this is what I've been doing, and what I am going to be doing for a while longer.

Yesterday I cleaned the car - well, it wasn't just me, it was also the fellas at the car cleaning place in town! But I cleaned the inside of the car. I used to see the cars of friends who had children, and feel rather alarmed at being expected to sit on a seat covered in crumbs of goodness-knew-what. I now hang my head in complete and total shame! Until yesterday afternoon our car has been a stinking mess, full of a year's worth of crumbs and grit and sand and sawdust, as well as books and toys and random bits of clothing - but in actual fact I thought it just really needed a bit of a hoover. I took two bin liners out to the car first of all, and did not expect to put much in them - imagine my shock, and absolute horror to find that both bin liners were full up to the top!!! One was filled with rubbish for the bin, and the other was filled with stuff and bits and things that are to be sorted out and put back in their proper places in the house. How did my children manage to sneak so much junk into the car without me noticing?? I thought I was a very vigilant parent, but obviously I am not. *Hangs head in shame*

So, anyway. Junk out of car, hoover into car. Yes, the hoover actually came into the car with me. It is a very big car, and I removed all of the seats, and thus was able to lift the entire Dyson into the car. It still took me three quarters of an hour to hoover the floor. That is disgusting, isn't it? I know. You may wonder why I am telling you something so shameful as this? Well, my hope is that I will be so ashamed that everyone knows how filthy we are to have such a dirty car that I will never let it get in such a state again. (We all know that this is a futile hope, but one must have hope nevertheless!)

Now the car is beautiful again :D Noomski was with me for the day - helping James and Matthew 'wash' the outside of the car, and keeping an eye on them for me. Noomski still thinks that the car is dirty, and I do agree that it needs another hoover already (I know that it's really 'vacuum', but I say 'hoover', so 'hoover' I will write!), but it's much better than it was. I will give it another going over next week. I took it into town to get washed properly on the outside - bless my two littlest boys, they tried their best, but it really was still a streaky mess of dried on bubbly dustiness. I didn't have enough time left to wash it myself before collecting young Thomas from school. But my, my: what a lovely job they do at the little car wash place - what a little gold mine it must be. It's always busy. And for a fiver I don't mind supporting local business and letting them wash my car once every so often.

Isn't it interesting that seeing something clean gives you the motivation to clean more things? I'm looking forward to doing a toy purge tomorrow now, *evil laugh*! I'm going into my boys' bedroom tomorrow morning and I'm not coming out until I've almost emptied it of useless toys!!!!! I've HAD IT! No-one else is going to empty the junk from my house - it's got to be me. And since I'm having a party a week on Saturday, I think the time is nigh for decluttering! The boys have been warned that they are about to lose many, many toys. They have lots of toys that they play with a lot, and that are their absolute favourites, so of course I will not get rid of those. But they know that it's a nice thing to do to donate toys to the hospital, so they're fine with it. We've done this two times now, and they know that the world doesn't end when I give away some bits of plastic that they've never really played with anyway. Unfortunately I will also need to take some things to the tip. I hate the thought of our things having to go in a landfill, but when it's all broken there isn't anything else I can do with it. I will recycle as much as I can though.

So, I suppose we're having a Spring Clean! I've never experienced such a thing in my own house before. I don't know whether that's important or not. I've had Big Tidies before, but never specifically in the Spring.

One more thing to write, completely unrelated to cleaning: my dad found my Premium Bond certificate! It was in his loft, as I thought it was, and I'm going to collect it later and check it on the website. What if my numbers won lots of money twenty five years ago?!!! That would be a nice surprise :) The bonds are still registered to our old, old address and I never updated them. It's not likely that I've won anything, but it's nice to dream while I'm still ignorant :)

Hey ho, another lovely rainy day. I'm sitting all snuggled up in the bay window in my bedroom, and am going to write half a chapter of my book now.