Half-term is on the horizon… the shoulders of a million mothers slump. I don’t have children but I do know how you feel. We babysat a friend’s seven-year-old daughter a few years ago. It wasn’t as hard as trekking to the North Pole, naked, with a stone in one shoe and carrying Vanessa Feltz on your back… but at times it felt like it.
At one stage, my husband suggested they do some drawing. “What shall we draw?” said Libby. “Lets draw each other,” my husband replied. She thought for a minute and asked: “Shall I draw you tired?” They got down to the sketching but soon dear Libby was at the unintended insults again. “I just can’t fit on all your lines.” Hey, kid, you’re not Lucian Freud just do a smiley face on a stick body and shut up.
After that, I made sure I had the light behind me every time I spoke to her and I kept moving, never be a sitting target for a seven-year-old with x-ray vision. To keep up to speed these days, I could employ a little tactic that I picked up recently at the Oskia spa, above. My therapist told me that although reflexology is usually practised on the foot, it can also be applied to the hand. If you are over-tired and stressed from dealing with the kids full time or just so upset at being humiliated by a random seven-year-old that you can’t sleep, try pressing into the heel of your right hand with the thumb of your left. Quite hard, so that it hurts though not as much as those innocently barbed comments, of course. It does seem to have a relaxing effect. If that fails, try a chinese burn… on the seven-year-old, natch.
