Glad to be Back

Hello.  Long time, no see.  What have you been up to?  Me?  Nothing much.  Busy, you know how it is.  Let me tell you a little bit about it.  

You'll remember that B and I have two children.  N, who is 4 and S, who is 18 months. Well, there is another on the way.  Due in August.  Which is both very exciting but also quite scary.  For one thing, once you have three children you've run out of arms, unless you're an octopus of course.  Not being an octopus, and only having the normal number of arms, I am concerned about what is going to happen once we have our third and I am left an arm short.  There have been a number of occasions when I have been grateful for the fact that I can tuck a child under each arm.  Usually when I have decided that enough is enough and some daddyesque authority needs to be meted out.  This is often because I have found myself submerged by children, one of whom is now old enough to know that if she can get her fingers inside my slippers I am guaranteed to shriek like an old woman and thrash wildly until the fingers come out.  The other one, thankfully, isn't old enough to know this yet, but he is old enough to know that if N is doing that then he can cause the most havoc by charging over and landing on my stomach.

Hence the need for three arms, I can still effectively wrestle them both off and pick them both up.  I have just enough arms for that.  What am I going to do when I have three?  And one of them is burrowing in one slipper, another is doing the same with my other foot, and the third has plonked themselves down on my abdomen in an attempt to render me immobile.  I am going to run out of arms pretty quickly at that point and I'm not sure I'm mature enough to be able to make a decision about which child I should be trying to fend off with my foot while under that sort of pressure.  

These are the sorts of questions that keep me up at night let me tell you.  That and how am I going to be able to cope if I ever have to take them shopping.  You won't recall because it is about 30 years ago that I last wrote on this blog, but my track record with shopping trips is not something that is going to inspire anyone with confidence.  When I am next asked at a job interview what my greatest weakness is it will be hard to stop myself from blurting out, "My inability to control one small human in a retail setting."  Although, thinking about it, unless I am going for a job as a personal shopper for a four year old, (and really, how likely do you think that is?  I'd be terrible), that might not be a bad weakness to have, it's unlikely to compromise my ability to manipulate complex data, or to communicate with stakeholders at all levels.  It might, however, lead to a discussion about that time I was outsmarted by my three year old daughter in a supermarket, which won't look so good really.  Perhaps I should steer clear of that.

So anyway.  I'm pleased to be back, I've missed you.  And if you happen to have any advice on how I could go about growing an extra limb that would be most appreciated.