First week back....

Back into the fray I go….

There’s something very strange about being back at work this time that I can’t quite put my finger on. It could just be being at work, which has got to make anyone feel a little strange – if only they could pay me to stay at home with the family, I’d get so much more done. It could be the constant state of not-there-ed-ness, perhaps - or maybe that I now make up words instead of thinking of real ones. Or it could be that I saw Little Mango 3 lying on the lounge late last night and I thought, who the hell is that? I realised suddenly that it had probably been a full day and a half since I had seen him properly. I couldn’t remember picking him up last and don’t think I’d changed a nappy in days. I suddenly had this awful moment of dawning – I had been too caught up in organising the other kids and going to work that I hadn’t had time. I imagined arriving home in five years and looking at this boy on the couch watching afternoon TV and having no idea who he was. The fact that he already looks like a five year old, with a tiny body and a massive head, doesn’t help things much.

See the good and bad part about the third child, so far anyway, is that there’s no great change to the ways things run. I know when Little Miss Mango came along, the entire game changed because the routine we had in place just got a whole lot more complicated. She was a much different baby to Little Mango 1, and brought a new level of noise and disruption to our house (I’m saying this with a smile on my face of course). But the third, he just has to fit into the routine that’s there already. He doesn’t yet have, and I can’t really imagine this quiet mannered baby having a big enough voice to take on the Queen (that’s Little Miss Mango), and so he’s obviously just going to have to go along with the flow. I think he sort of knows it too – he most likely got the drift when she was poking him in the forehead this morning. It’s not that she doesn’t like him – she likes him a bit too much I think and to quote the Simpsons, too much of her love can be… well scary. No, I don’t see any issue with the middle child thing at all.

In fact, I was a bit worried going into this week, how she would go without me there. During my time off, any time Mrs Mango got a bit too much of her love, I took her away. This obviously can’t happen anymore. At the moment, I have enough time to feed her, dress her and put her to bed (though not in that order) and the rest of the time, she’s all my wife’s. In fact, the only time I get to see all of them is in the morning cyclone rush, and the warzone that is dinnertime. Seriously, it is like a warzone – there’s people flying everywhere, lots of shouting going on, innocent people getting hurt for no good reason, a few minutes to sit and eat and then game on again.

Which is probably why that moment, coming out of the room as both the older kids had gone to bed, after an hour of straight story-reading, and that cyclone had settled down, when I saw my newest son on the lounge, the beauty and sadness of this process of families became suddenly apparent.