Oh yay .. it's school holidays!

19 days of fun-filled, full-on, in-my-face time with the boys (I'll leave it up to you to determine whether I'm being sarcastic or not!) and it all started so well ...

I had, when in a state of mind most people call insanity, offered to have a friend's two boys over yesterday afternoon after work/school to entertain play with my three boys. Then a different friend rang and asked if I could have her daughter for the afternoon as she had an appointment. No worries said I breezily and made appropriate arrangements for food and drink, causing the lady behind me in the supermarket queue to ask if I was a scout leader or something. After assuring her that the quantity of snacks was only for six children, she launched into protracted praise of mothers with more than the standard 2.4 children and congratulated me on bucking the trend. It was quite sad to see her face when I informed her that only 3 of the children were mine and that the other 3 were 'blow-ins' for the day.

The mother of the two boys came and collected them at 5:30pm after only a few instances of raised voices and threats of bodily harm (which I stopped making when I realised the neighbours were listening!) and then settled in to enjoy a lovely chat with the second friend (we'll call her Debbie .. Hi Deb!) over an extremely healthy dinner.

During the afternoon/evening, there had been some conspiring amongst the children and after some cute puppy-dog-eye looks, Andrew ended up spending the night at Debbie's house. I arranged to collect him at around 9:30am and went off to bed at a relatively decent hour for a great night's sleep and sleep-in the next morning.

After a bit of a mad panic to get out of my clown pants pyjamas, I went on my way to collect Drew, leaving the other two at home with strict instructions to stack the dishwasher before I returned, knowing full well that it would probably still be sitting there emptier than my bank account at Christmas time when I finally deigned to re-appear. A girl has to have dreams, right?

Anyway, I collected Andrew and headed to Kmart to attempt to lay-by some items for Christmas (mission accomplished), checked out the clothes sale at Miller's (nothing caught my eye enough to make me buy it) and then headed for home to make the children work spend some quality time with the children outside in the backyard.

Alex managed to start the lawnmower and mow the lawn; Bradley and I swept the patio area and got rid of some things things that had just been hanging around and Andrew pulled some weeds and helped Alex with the emptying of the lawnmower catcher. Very productive effort with a lovely result .. the patio and backyard look much better. Everyone worked well together with very few arguments discussions as to the merits of particular methodologies.

After finishing up, I told the boys the rest of the afternoon was theirs and set them free. Of course they all immediately headed back inside (I think I'm raising vampires!) and to the comfort of their electronic entertainment.

Things then took a turn for the worse when Alex tripped over his laptop computer, which was on the floor in the TV room after being told repeatedly not to leave it there, and has now broken it beyond any sense of redemption I could offer. The only thing that would have kept him away from his brothers, yet still occupied, has now gone to laptop heaven.

He has spent the last half an hour crying and throwing himself very dramatically onto his bed (silent movie heroines have nothing on this kid and his over acting abilities!) but is now laughing maniacally at something his brothers are doing .. one extreme to the other in ten seconds flat .. welcome to my world!

So now, as I sit here listening to the replacement washing machine trying to remodel my house by knocking out a few walls, I am in a bit of a quandary:

Do I attempt to have his laptop fixed to save my sanity over the next 18 days or do I let him suffer this natural consequence?

Do I spend money on getting the laptop fixed or on Valium and other sedatives to get us all through the next 18 days?

Or do I just give up and go chocolate myself to death?

Hmmmmm? Which option people? Let me know what you think ... please??!!