Lindsay Woods: 'After booting the apples of my eye down the school drive, I returned home to that often revered yet rare sound of… silence'
The first day back to school after Easter break is a joyous one. For all parties. But, particularly for parents. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the levels of joy measure far greater on the ‘Joy-o-meter’ than the return after the Christmas break. Primarily because it’s brighter in the mornings/evenings, there is the promise of spring in the air (note the word, “promise”, as spring seems to have gotten herself a smidge lost at the arrivals gate this year) and you don’t carry as much excess load as directly after the festive season. The back to school post-Christmas is grim; it’s dark, dreary and warrants cajoling your offspring into umpteen layers of clothing to fend off the biting weather. I would persuade a seal into some bodycon with more ease than wrestling hats and gloves onto my children.
After booting the apples of my eye down the school drive, I returned home to that often revered yet rare sound of… silence. Ten minutes in and the eerie calm began to unnerve me. So, I made the executive decision to tackle the playroom. Of which, I immediately regretted upon opening the first drawer.
The day prior we had spent a total of three hours cobbling together new storage solutions to house all of their tat. Myself and my husband scoffed at the instructions: In particular the picture of the stick figure holding a drill.
“Drill?!” said we. “We are made of tougher stuff than that! The screwdriver will handle it!”
Less than 30 minutes later, our knees and the welts beginning to develop on our hands from the seventy million nails warranted to hold the units together, had softened our coughs considerably. My husband was in one room, I in another (our playroom has the dimensions of a budget panic room) grunting and swearing when, just after I had heard yet another number of nails, bolts and screws hit the floor my ears pricked at the sound of a beer being opened. I stuck my head around the door frame to be greeted with him skulling said beverage with all the gusto of a dehydrated buffalo. “What?!! It’s the only way I’m going to get through this.”
Persevere we did and after wasting an entire Sunday afternoon, hammering, swearing, sweating and imbibing (he managed to fit in three beers), they were finally done.
Yet, here I stood in front of the old storage solutions, whilst the new units sat smugly against the wall, pristine and full of promise, with a bin liner in hand, frozen.
“They don’t deserve nice things!” I said out loud to the cat, to whom I expressed my horror on my discovery of two used plasters and a mummified apple core in the first drawer. At least, I’m clinging to the notion that it was an apple core. I therefore took to Instagram for solace. Surely, I was not alone in my situation? Had others fallen foul to bad storage options?
I extolled the pitfalls of our naïve selection from the Swedish giants. Lured in by their glossy showrooms, nifty solutions to, well…everything: we had purchased the Trofast units with numerous buckets in varying sizes to house all of the lurid plastic our children played with. The DMs started immediately. Images of overflowing buckets similar to mine, floors covered in a carpet of crumbs, Lego and Sylvanian family bits all lit up on my screen. It appeared that many of us had fallen afoul of our own personal ‘Trofast Travesty’.
Curiously, the common denominator amongst us was, that we had all succumbed to this travesty with our first child. Which when you think about it, makes sense. We had all made the pilgrimage to that blue and yellow hued shed prior to having children or shortly after; when you could ensconce them in a buggy whilst they dozed peacefully as you mulled over the myriads of storage options available.
The softly lit playroom on display, with the just so nook for reading books, the miniature table for arts and crafts and the comfortable looking sofa to curl up on as a family whilst singing nursery rhymes…yes, we’ll take it all!
Word to the wise, take a good long look at that showroom. Because, it will never look like that once in situ in your home. They will smash the light, draw on the books/walls/units, they will coat that table in stickers and spill every available liquid on the sofa. It will never smell new again. It will continually smell musty.
As for our freshly organised playroom? I’ve told them not so much as to breathe within 10 paces of it.
After booting the apples of my eye down
the school drive, I returned home to that often revered yet rare sound of… silence
