As parents my husband and I, at this very moment, are fielding everything from dry nights for our eldest to potty training for our youngest, making the mammoth decision on selecting a primary school and answering the endless stream of mind-numbing questions. This is our favourite from the weekend: Can a lions eat rocks?
Then there's the endless stream of instructions, cautions, requests, beratings and, yes, commands, raising of voices, shouting and more recently patient discussions on why you can't eat Niknaks for breakfast, why you shouldn't blast your sister with the hosepipe and why we don't drink bath water.
In all this it would be quite nice to have an hour to yourself. I'm very clear on that: "This is mommy's weekend too." Of course daddy has to pick up the extra slack then but it's that or mommy goes to mad.
As an aside both my children have come up with songs that repeat the word mommy an astonishing number of times. One is simply: "mommy, mommy, mommy." to the tune of nah, nah-nah, nah, nah.
Yes, by the end of the day you wish you were hearing impaired and yes, I often go to bed at night saying sternly to myself: "I will not smack the children tomorrow." And I wake up begging for patience as they fight, over me, first thing in the morning, jostling for territory on the bed.
Oh and we both have jobs, you know, to earn a living to pay for that incredible primary school and the luxury I have of being a mom from midday onward.
This is daily parenthood. Hovering like an ominous cloud over all this, that we try our best to ignore, are the BIGGIES: peer pressure, bullying, drugs, teenage sex ...
But I absolutely love all of it. Every single moment and I would not trade a single refrain of "mommy, mommy, mommy" for anything in the world. My heart bursts with love and pride and absolute amazement every time I look at them.
So when faced with the decision on whether or not to include a family member for Christmas who has days before returned from administering to the Ebola-infected masses in West Africa how is it that we, having obviously said no, stole Christmas?
A better plan would be to offer your medical services in a refugee hospital in Syria or Iraq, that way you either come back, or you don't. Sniper bullets have no incubation period.
Humans are inherently afraid of what we do not know or understand.
Insanely, a return from a European city stricken by a flu epidemic would have precluded our Grinch-like behaviour. But then we know flu, don't we: it is the single biggest annual killer.
Go figure.
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