Notebook
How the house runs, on the weeks it runs. Mostly routines — the ones that stuck, and a fair number that didn’t survive a fortnight.
My mum has said “don’t get me anything” every year since about 2011. For a decade I treated that as a politeness to be worked around, and bought her nice versions of things she already owned, and she thanked me properly every time.
We tried a laminated star chart, a shared app, and a rota with everyone’s initials on it. The thing that worked is a piece of paper with four jobs on it, and it took us three years and about £40 of failed systems to get there.
Between November and March we had two sickness bugs, one ear infection, hand foot and mouth, and a fortnight I have mostly deleted. This is what’s in the drawer now, and what I wish had been in it at three in the morning in January.
The washing was never finished, which I had accepted as a fact about life rather than a consequence of doing four loads on a Sunday. It is the second thing, and the fix took about a week to bed in.
A school letter came home in October about a trip in November, went into the pile on the side, and surfaced on the morning of. We paid on the day, in cash, in an envelope, and I have thought about it since.
Not because we’re minimalists — we are visibly not minimalists — but because a room with sixty things in it was a room where nobody played with anything, and the tidying took forty minutes a night.
Three of us, two parents, and a WhatsApp group that starts in early November and achieves nothing until the 19th. This is the year we stopped buying six adequate presents and bought one.
We were late four days out of five and I kept trying to fix it by getting up earlier, which is the one thing that doesn’t work. The fix was writing down what the door actually needs and moving all of it to the night before.