As the week has gone on, it’s been harder and harder to get the kids up in the mornings. They are understandably exhausted from their long days of sitting, eating, arguing and avoiding things.

My husband has started to bring the puppy in to say good morning, which wakes them up really quickly and which everybody loves, including the dog. Except for yesterday morning, when my husband was holding him and he turned his body at just the wrong moment. The result was that my youngest daughter yawned sleepily, opened her eyes and found herself staring not at a warm and furry face, but at the business end of a black Labrador. To be fair, what she saw was furry. And probably warm. It’s just that the dangling was a mild surprise, and there were a few less teeth.

Rude awakenings aside, the kids are finding new ways to keep themselves busy. My teenager has created a YouTube channel aimed at helping kids stay healthy during a lock-down. This is of course a wonderful idea, although I do have to take issue with a few things:

1) she is piously telling the world to eat healthily to boost the immune system, even though she took 45 minutes to eat her chicken casserole the night before, because she first had to pick out all the vegetables.

2) she is extolling the virtues of fresh air and exercise, when the closest she’s come to either of those things in a week is standing in the doorway last night clapping all the front-line workers.

3) thanks to autocorrect, she is now instructing everyone in times of heightened anxiety, to ‘breathe in slowly and deadly’.

Still at least it whiled away a few hours for her, and freed me up to help my youngest with her education. We watched a video on the internet on how sequencing works in Maths. It was such a helpful video because by the end of it, we both realised that neither of us will ever understand how sequencing works in Maths and are now free to find something else to do.

So I taught her how to write ‘boobs’ on the calculator. Their minds are like sponges you know.

Bring on Bedtime!