Hello from last week. I’m writing this in advance because, quite frankly, I’m melting. I thought I’d put my feelings into words. I could sing instead. I’m fairly sure we’d all welcome the rain.
Anyway – I have serious regrets sitting on a leather sofa right now.
I mean, what is with this weather the last week or so?!
All I would like is pleasant sunny weather in the mid-20s. Instead we seem to shift between 20°C thunderous rainfall, or excruciating heat in the mid-30s. Somewhere in the middle would be lovely. Is that really too much to ask?
At the beginning of the week I was staying at Mrs OddFather’s nan’s house. Let me be honest – the mattress in the spare room is not great. Imagine sleeping on paving slabs and you’ll be somewhere close. My solution to this? I found the OddDaughter’s old cot mattress and stuck it on the bed so it softened the strain on my hips. Needless to say – I am much too big for the cot mattress. One roll and I find myself slipping off and onto my ass on the concrete mattress once again. I could just buy her a new mattress, but after telling her I slept brilliantly the first time, it feels a bit late to admit I’ve actually been recreating military survival training every visit since.
Anyway – I digress. When I stayed earlier in the week I was woken by intense thunder and lightning. Being a spritely 21* years old, it’s fair to say this wasn’t my first experience with thunder and lightning. But this was certainly the first time I was woken up by lightning so strong it literally lit up the room. I would have been convinced I was dreaming, or that my time had finally come to follow the light, were it not for everyone at work talking about exactly the same thing the next morning.
Unless we all died and are now in some state of purgatory? Wow. This blog just got heavy.
Ok, this weather is really doing a number on me.
Do you know what doesn’t help? Schools and nurseries deciding they’re shutting because of the heat. I get it. Health and safety matters. But do they think the rest of us are sitting in air-conditioned mansions drinking mojitos while someone else watches the kids?
So, I’m hot, I’m bothered, and now I have kids to keep cool at home too. And you can bet your ass the nurseries will still charge us, whilst I end up losing extra money at work by having to take unpaid leave.
Make. It. Make. Sense.
Parenting in a heatwave is strange. You spend all day trying to stop the kids overheating while simultaneously wondering whether it’s acceptable for an adult to lie spread-eagled on the kitchen tiles for twenty minutes. For the record, it is.
Here’s a little trick – you can cool a room faster with a fan if you stick a bowl of ice in front of the fan. A genius move suggested by Mrs OddFather me. Like the advice? Feel free to send thanks in the form of monies!
I ended up taking the kids to watch Toy Story 5 in the cinema this week. Mainly to make use of the cinema AC. I thought it was a genius move until I realised the OddSon can’t sit still for two hours. He ended up attempting to make friends with the child next to him by repeatedly climbing on him. That was after he decided to drop all the nacho and salsa serving on the floor. The best way round this was to give him chocolates to keep him quiet. Let’s just say – lots of Fredos were inhaled. And then I wonder why he didn’t sleep until after 10pm.
Then there was the night I sat down to watch the football after the kids were finally asleep. The heatwave really hit me hard that evening. I couldn’t understand why the room just wasn’t cooling down. Then it hit me. During his latest game of “press every switch in the house”, the OddSon had turned on the electric heater in the TV room.
Fair to say that moved me from over-heating to burning.
The OddSon Strikes again.
I actually wrote an entire guide a few years ago on how to survive a British heatwave. Turns out none of my own advice included checking whether your toddler has secretly switched the heater on. Rookie mistake.
