The joys and frustrations of motherhood

So, you spend a great proportion of your life single, childhood (hopefully secure, joyous and generally sentimentally lovely) followed by irresponsible youth. Probably lots of fun, too much drinking, talking to strangers in bars, dancing and falling down. Then at some stage in your life you decide or accidentally have kids and suddenly you become this harried individual....
Of course I remember that I was once a child but I am not naturally a patient individual and so the endless demands of children can be quite a trial, especially when my 5 year old shouts loudly from the toilet ‘Finished’, which means that she wants me to wipe her bum after she’s finished her ‘poo’. We’re breaking this habit now that she is at school because she has the co-ordination to be able to wipe her own bum and her arms are long enough to reach...I still feel guilty sometimes though when she’s dressed in some elaborate puffy frock and she can’t co-ordinate her petticoat with the toilet bowl and the toilet paper all at the same time and she’s been shouting for 3 minutes and I’ve been ignoring her and when I arrive she is a flurry of petticoat and toilet paper and trying desperately not to get her dress wet...
Anyway, my children like to play when they’re sent upstairs to brush their teeth in the morning. This is fair enough because they’re kids after all. Playing dinosaurs or farms or battles is far more fun than brushing teeth. Nevertheless, I still would like them to keep to the ten minute deadline so that they can be ready to be picked up to get to school on time....
This morning, they spent 15 minutes ‘brushing their teeth’ until I arrived to be told that they hadn’t even started yet. The lift was about to arrive to take them to school and my daughter still needed to have her hair plaited (5 year old skills do not stretch to plaiting yet)...so I got a bit cross. I plaited daughter’s hair whilst my son tidied away the toys from the morning play. Some toys are designed for maximum childhood pleasure and maximum parent annoyance, three such toys are Mr. Potato Head, Lego and Playmobil because they have lots and lots of teeny tiny pieces that the children like to get out and leave stranded around the house for adult feet to stub painfully on or for the Hoover to loudly suck up. I have managed to artfully ‘lose’ Mr. Potato head in a recent house move, but I do enjoy the other two toys almost as much as the children (apart from the tidying up). This morning, the culprit was Playmobil, but my son is pretty good at understanding deadlines and lateness, so he scrabbled up all the teeny tiny pieces super quickly. Thankfully managed to get them all ready in the nick of time with only a few cross words from me.
I breathed a sigh of relief when they were off to school, leaving me to tidy the kitchen and find two little play figures left on the kitchen counter...a playmobile man embracing a giraffe...and they reminded me that in amongst feeling harried and busy and tired by children and Lego and Playmobil, we are also constantly delighted by their innocence and joy.