The first day of the rest of my life

Cloudy with occasional, very occasional bursts of weak sunshine. Close and damp. Seventeen degrees at 8:30am.

The house is a disaster zone. The laundry reminds me of that part in Rumplestiltskin where the miller's daughter on her third day is facing a towering mountain of straw to spin into gold - a mountain so huge she can barely get in the door. The entrance hall is packed with three horses festooned with damp laundry and in the dressing room there are two baskets of clothes waiting patiently to be ironed. The toy boxes are empty and the playroom floor is so full there's no place to put your feet. The beds want changing and the bathroom wants cleaning. You can see how bad things are because I'm descending into regional grammar...starting to sound like my Grandma.

But on my face today there's a broad smile. In my heart a song. Why? Well, five years ago almost to this day, I became a housewife, and since then I have been on shiftwork - Mama shifts, i.e. 24/7. For five years. And today? Well today both AJ and B have started full-time kindergarten. And I have six whole hours today and - sickness, holidays or Italian-style organisational chaos aside - every day for the entire school year.

While they do total-immersion, baptism-by-fire, crash-course Italian, I'll be ironing, cleaning, de-cobwebbing, organising, shelving books, changing beds, managing carpenters and electricians, looking into breeding rabbits, buying some new clothes, building raised beds and staircases in the garden, reading Harry Potter in Italian, checking through the copy-editor's work on The Book, hanging pictures and curtains, buying lampshades, raising herbs from seed, listening to The Archers, hauling, splitting and stacking firewood...

Maybe I'll start by catching up on five years' sleep deprivation...