Ah, how simple it once was. Wet, gloomy, dreary Bank Holiday weekend? Well, that put paid to your plans of throwing a frisbee round in the park. Instead, it would be a day of sitting on the sofa, watching *Star Wars*, drinking wine and reading weblogs. Or perhaps you’d spend the day hermitted away in your room, recording songs or writing your novel or painting surreal post-modernist art or working on interesting typesetting projects or whatever you do as your premier hobby. Maybe you’d even go into the office and get a headstart on the week’s work, if you are that way inclined.
But babies are incapable of sitting still and amusing themselves for such an extended period of time. One day, Bernard will be, but not yet. For now he needs supervision, assistance, transportation and someone to outsource certain issues of hygiene to. More to the point, you have to think of something interesting that you can do to pass the day, without losing your sanity.
I suggested dividing the day up into shifts, but Karen voted against this. What’s more, she stuck both of her hands in the air, which counts for two votes, so she won. The three of us spent most of the afternoon spring-cleaning Bernard’s bedroom. For the last few weeks I have been finding bullet holes in the walls where shots have been going astray in the war between the spiders and the dust bunnies. At first I didn’t know what they were, because spiders and dust bunnies use *tiny* guns that fire *tiny* bullets, but then one day I actually witnessed a line of them appearing, to the accompaniment of a very quiet, tinny *rat tat tat tat tat* and the *urk* sound of a dust bunny infantryrabbit breathing his last breath.
You know what I said earlier about not losing your sanity? Yeah, scratch that.
