The secret diary of a demented mother aged 36.5.

Byline: By Jenny Lesley

Well, the holidays started with a bang. Actually, it was more a loud grinding noise as the washing machine broke down. Given the amount of washing this family generates, it was a crisis of epic proportions. I was already behind in my perpetual challenge of keeping up with the mountain of clothing my darling offspring can manage to put into the laundry basket in any given week. Mind you, it's always worth a quick sift through the basket to check that it is only laundry in there. The baskets seem to be a magnet for soft toys and one of the cats is likely to have a nasty shock if I scoop her up with a pile of sheets! Also, I have noticed that after ordering the children to clean up their bedrooms, a suspiciously large amount of clothing gets deposited in the baskets. A quick trawl reveals certain items I distinctly remember giving to them with the instruction to take them upstairs and put them away. I have long given up on ironing any of their clothes because they instantly get screwed up and shoved into a drawer. Ironing is now done on a need-to-impress basis. Of course, my washing would be greatly reduced if I could bring myself to put Fergus in disposable nappies. In fact, I attribute the breakdown of the machine entirely to the fact that I was smugly boasting last week that Fergus had never had a disposable on his bottom. Pride comes before a fall and ecological one-upwomanship comes before a washing machine breakdown! Sadly, I have had to put my lovely soft cotton nappies and their funky wraps away in a drawer and resort to horrible plastic, smelly, expensive disposables. I have also had to get tough on the children and their habit of getting through more than one change of clothing a day. I can forgive 10-week-old Fergus for needing a change of clothes halfway through the day. At eight years old, however, Kieran has still not learned how to eat without smearing food on himself. I have taken to threatening him with a plastic toddler bib if he can't improve. Emma, meanwhile, has a total inability to play without rolling around in mud or grass. And Carys simply decorates her clothes with paint. Until a nice engineer puts an end to my misery, I'm thinking of making them live in their swimsuits. Then I can just take them out into the garden to be hosed at regular intervals.