Taking a quick breather between dinner and bathing the little kids, and since I seem to have hit a plateau on Bejeweled, I figured I might as well do a little of that posting thing I’m doing so rarely these days.

Our days of leisure are coming to an end tomorrow morning, with Tage and Lydia going back to school and Olof starting back to work.  Petra isn’t scheduled for Mondays at her pre-school this year, so she has one day more of freedom, but it doesn’t feel like much of a treat to her.  I have a feeling that she’ll be voicing her displeasure quite forcefully in the morning, when everybody else heads off without her.  We’ve told her and told her and told her again that she’ll be starting on Tuesday, the day after Lydia and Tage start, but since she still has only a vague understanding of the way time works, the hard, hard truth won’t hit her until it’s actually upon us.

These past few weeks have left my house a complete and utter wreck.  It’s so bad that I’m honestly looking forward to having a little time on my own to get some cleaning done.  I have a fairly high tolerance for clutter and mess, but once it gets to a certain point, I start to feel so claustrophobic and anxiety-ridden that I turn into a neat freak for a couple of days.  I’m hoping this round of freakiness lasts me long enough that I can set some sort of order to this place.

The thing is, even once I’ve tidied up, it takes only fifteen minutes of relaxed vigilance for the whole thing to go to hell again.  I keep telling myself that one of these days all the kids will be grown enough to reliably pick up after themselves, but what minimal comfort I might take from that vanishes as soon as I look at their father and the state of his space.  I’m afraid I’m fighting a losing battle here.