Today was one of those days when, if you were suffering a bit in the confidence stakes, you’d think you were just not making it as a parent. It started when I forgot to ask Cassie to go to the toilet before we left the house. Usually that is not a catastrophe because she is pretty good at letting me know when she needs to go to the toilet. And usually I take a change of clothes just in case. Today I didn’t and she didn’t…..until she’d peed all over her track pants. We had met a friend of mine and her 3 year old daughter for coffee and it wasn’t inappropriate for Cassie to play in her underpants so this is what we did even though they were fairly soggy with pee - it seemed the least of a number of evils. Cassie was entirely unselfconscious about her attire which was a miracle considering her usual attention to detail when it comes to how she looks. But no, she managed to play happily and interact with several complete strangers as if she were wearing her best dress!
On our way home, I let her wind down her window. The next thing I know, she has dropped a set of toy keys out the window onto the road. Maybe I should just have told her that the keys were gone but instead I decided to try to find them so we did a lap around the block and looked for somewhere to park. The closest option (and that was still at least 200m away from the most likely key trajectory) was the public carpark for the local cemetery. So here we are, amongst a group of sombre, well-dressed people and my daughter climbs out of the car wearing a long-sleeved tshirt and her underpants….and a pair of sparkly lurid pink shoes! As if that’s not enough, I had let her eat chocolate on our way out and a part of her knickers had obviously connected with some chocolate that had fallen onto the seat and, well, need I say more? I looked as dignified as I possibly could as I walked along the side of the road, carrying a baby and leading a 3 year old who was wearing not much more than knickers, looking for a set of keys. We did eventually find them and headed back to the car.
By the time we made it home, lunch was long overdue and I had 2 tired, hungry children in varying stages of meltdown as I tried to get lunch together. Ah the joys of being a parent!
