Sunday - The Day of Rest?!

Sunday is the day of rest. Well so they say, and so the bible says, but obviously no one has ever been an observer in our house! To be fair, no one actually goes out to work, and we go to church as a family, but more often than not it’s down to me to cook the Sunday roast, initiate and do at least half of the washing up and then catch up on some sewing. Meanwhile the rest of the family are dotted around the house catching up on their own ‘me’ time, watching telly or playing games together.

Despite the fact that I’ve had an extremely long week catching up on all the housework that no one bothered with during all the time I was poorly, today is no exception to the usual Sunday routine. After church the children all disperse to their own rooms and the house is soon full of their laughter and giggles as the older girls enjoy some ‘big girl’ time together, our son is obviously playing on his DS with a friend online, and the little girls are going nutty in their room. Mike takes his computer into the living room to ‘catch up with a few things’, and is soon laughing at a programme he’s found on the television- leaving me, once again, with the dinner. Don't get me wrong- I love hearing the house full of laughter, and I love doing the cooking, but sometimes on a Sunday it just feels like a very lonely chore. Even if, like today, my biggest girls has already peeled the potatoes for me, before disappearing up to her bedroom!

Although last week was long and tiring, it was also extremely satisfying, and I did manage to get a fair bit of work for my business done as well as all the housework. The last pair of butterfly print pyjamas sold on Thursday evening, so I’ve now removed them from the website, and put the new fabric on as their replacement. Now I just need to find a spare five minutes to get a demo pair of them made up, and of course photographed! On Friday I managed to get the two pairs of trousers made up to complete the order I was working on during the week, and Mike took it into the post office for me yesterday morning.

Having noticed the date on Thursday and realised that I normally begin my End of Winter sale this weekend, I prepared yesterday by posting the details on the website’s homepage and the Facebook page. I then checked through all the item descriptions, and realised that I never quite completed the task of adding the Velcro option to all the outfits. Having already had a couple of people opt for this choice, I need to make sure that they all have it showing, so I went through and added it to those on which is was missing. Today I need to actually begin the sale, but not until dinner is cooked and cleared away and I’ve done about a zillion other chores first!

I’ve nearly managed to complete ‘operation tidy-up’, or perhaps more accurately I should call it ‘operation get-things-back-to-where-they-were-before-I-got-the-flu’!! On Friday I cleaned the main bathroom, including the ceiling around the window, which suffers terribly with the condensation caused by five people having daily showers, and two children having showers a couple of times a week. The mould and mildew was not only looking awful, but can’t have been very hygienic- it was a job high up on my list of tasks for after Christmas, but obviously other things have since over taken. Better late than never though, after a couple of hours of cleaning (and a bit of precarious balancing at the top of the step ladder!) the bathroom looked white and sparkling and much more ‘bathroom’ like!

Another task which was due for after Christmas was to clean the top of the younger girl’s bedroom wall. This too suffers from bad condensation as it’s on the outside corner of the house and gets terribly cold in the winter. When it gets cold, it gets wet inside and that then turns to mildew if you don’t keep on top of it, which over the last month or so I haven’t! I finally managed to get this job done yesterday morning, while the girls had a good tidy up of their room- by yesterday evening it was looking far more cosy in there and the two of them seemed to sleep much better last night as a result!

So that just leaves vacuuming upstairs as the last main task to go in order to get the housework back on track, not that there aren’t then a hundred other jobs left to do to get the house to the point where I’d actually like it to be! Having had such a good week of catching up, and anxious now to spend this next week trying to get fully up to date with Little Dolly Clothes Shop, I decide that I may as well end this one by completing my mission. So, after dinner and before I turn my attention to the online Tesco order that needs doing, or the uniforms that need ironing, and while everyone else’s attention goes back to their games or the television, I get the vacuum out and head upstairs. 

After all, it’s not like Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest, or anything…!