A blessèd state

After three days of glorious sunshine and temperatures in the high 20s, today is overcast and threatening a little rain. 

Good. I won't have to water the garden. But there is everything else. 

Only two days into the 10-week summer holiday and my clean and tidy ideal home is a thing of memory. I'm drowning in cardboard-box tanks that fall apart when you move them, plastic-bottle contraptions that prove Boyle's Law, but soak everything in the process, and stuffed animals at all stages of mutilation spilling their innards from bedroom to study to churchyard and back. I'm up to my ankles in super-scratchable boxless DVDs, and up to my eyes in indecipherable swap cards. 

The cats have colonised the bedrooms, the dog is a dark vortex of insanity in the entrance, and the chicks have developed a suicidal desire to fly the coop through any gap in the wire and offer themselves to the waiting fox. Or buzzard.

And under cover of last night's darkness my beloved husband has returned from his many wanderings. How do I know? Every drawer and cupboard door is open. The place is strewn with shoe polish, toothbrushes, dirty shirts and revolting conference baggies. And every time I try to cross the entrance I trip over the booby-trap boots.

A blessèd state, wife-and-motherhood. And now I know why my grandmother always used the word 'blessèd' to mean !*@?#!!!!