day in the life - monday 24th june 2013

7.30am - My alarm goes off and I get up and shower and dress.  Dulcie sleeps on in our bed.

7.50am - The cats are yowling for breakfast, but when I go to the cupboard, I realise there is no cat food left.  Looks like I will have to go to the corner shop for emergency supplies.

7.55am - Dulcie gets up, so the cats will have to wait.  I make her some rice crispies with raisins and bananas, a change from her usual porridge.

(This is what Dulcie does these days when we ask her to smile.)

8.05am - I head out for cat food.  Graham (who is sitting in a towel eating breakfast) requests that I hurry up. This is not well received!

8.20am - Cat food purchased and cats fed, I finally get to make my own breakfast.  I do this in a hurry, knowing I will need to eat fast to finish it before Dulcie starts wanting to escape her high chair.  This is toast and honey with a vitamin drink and a cup of tea in my favourite Moomin mug.  This is too much liquid (don't tell my consultant!) but in the end I don't manage to drink the tea, so it really doesn't matter.

I also take my morning tablets.

8.30am - This is a fairly typical level of mess post-eating for Dulcie.  You can see why I'm thinking we'll have to go with oil cloth for these seats...  I clear up the breakfast things and she runs around in her nappy, happy to be reunited with all her toys, until I have swept the floor etc.

9.00am - I've managed to get Dulcie dressed without too much fighting (for once) so she has a play with the toy mound behind the sofa and actually lets me check my emails and read a couple of blogs.  I see something on Nikki McWilliams' blog that I think would make a perfect present for someone I know and, in an uncharacteristic fit of organisation, I seek it out and order it, planning to keep it for their birthday/Christmas.

10.10am - Dulcie and I head out to Bounce and Rhyme at the local library, taking a minor detour via the charity shop to drop off a couple of bags of donations.

11.00am - Singing over, Dulcie reads a few books on the groovy library carpet before we head across the road to the supermarket.  I'm not organised enough to do a weekly shop today (as I have done for the last few Mondays) but I manage not to go too wild and just buy a few healthy bits for today's lunch and dinner.  Oh, actually, I went round a few charity shops too, but didn't find anything worth photogrpahing let alone buying.  I'm getting better at resisting these days!

11.45am - On the way home, we meet this friendly ginger cat, much to Dulcie's delight.  Other way, Dulcie!

We stay and stroke him for a while and he rubs his head on Dulcie's shoes a lot before we head home.

11.55am - We share a healthy snack of strawberries.  I'm a take-them-or-leave-them type when it comes to strawberries usually, but this year they are freakin' delicious!  Dulcie absolutely adores strawberries at the moment, so she polishes off most of this bowl before I manage to put my camera away.  I prepare another bowl, but she eats the majority of that one too.

1.00pm - After reading about a gazillion picture books, it's time for lunch.  Dulcie has hedgehog (my own "creation" of houmous with breadsticks and vegetables stuck in it) while I have tasty pitta breads stuffed with houmous and beetroot and salad.

 

1.45pm - Dulcie wants to draw.  I know this because she tells me.  "Daw!"

Dulcie's idea of drawing is to tell me to draw something, which she then scribbles over.  She used to always ask me to draw dogs, but these days it is always either "Daddy" or "apple" with just the occasional "doggie" for good measure.  I find this orange picture, which she insists is me.  I guess Graham must have created this flattering portrait for her at the weekend...

2.05pm - While playing with her toys, Dulcie discovers that she can operate this one with her bottom.  This keeps her entertained for a fair while.

2.15pm - We set off for the park.  When we arrive, Dulcie heads straight for the tunnel where she was attacked just a few days previously.  As you can see from this smiling face, she is not bearing any obvious mental scars from the incident.

As well as the tunnel, she spends lots of time playing on the swings, the slide and pretty much everything really.  There is a nursery outing in the park and I end up having to push almost all of them on the roundabout at once.  Dulcie makes lots of friends by shouting "Wheee!" whenever they go down the slide.  We stay at the park for most of the afternoon, until it is completely swamped by small school children who are a bit rough for Dulcie's taste.  Well, some of them are.  One group of girls gathers round to coo over Dulcie and tell me how cute she is.  This goes down very well with Dulcie, who adopts her best coy pose.

4.00pm - Before we head home, we buy an ice cream from the van in the park and share it.  Delicious.  Luckily for me, Dulcie is better at sharing ice cream than she is at sharing strawberries.

4.30pm - Back home, we read more books (and more books and more books) and play with some more toys.  I start getting dinner ready (we're having baked potato and salad tonight) and try to tidy up so Graham won't have so much to do later, just in case Dulcie decides to be a bed-refuser.

6.00pm - Graham gets in from work and we all have dinner together.

6.25pm - I grab a few things and run out the door to work.  The underground takes ages to arrive and I can't get a seat when it does.  I still manage to read a bit of my Alexander McCall Smith book, though.

7.00pm - I arrive at work just in the nick of time and have my annual appraisal, which is OK.  A few things make me pretty mad, but I bite my tongue.  My manager is lovely and would sort things out, I'm sure, but I don't want them to end up being turned into yet more appraisal objectives for me, so I figure for my own sake that I should just smile and nod as much as possible.

8.00pm - Despite not having done any work yet, I take my break early so that I can catch up with my friend Susan in the kitchen.

8.40pm - I write up my appraisal notes and then do some subtitling at last.  It's not too hard a night really.  I do a few proofs and then get lumbered with some motor racing, but it turns out not to be too bad as my part has a really long musical interlude that requires no subtitles.  Score!  I also have to do the weather, but this passes without major incident.

12.00 midnight - My taxi arrives and takes me home where I have a quick mini whisky with Graham before crawling into bed.  Yawn!

And so ends a fairly typical Monday really.  Well, we don't normally have ice cream, but other than that...  I'm not sure who else has taken part in Day In The Life this month, but there's at least one here and one here (with added puppy).