On Wednesday I am going with Nine on an overnight field trip with her class (God help me) on a tall ship so we can relive what it was like being a sailor in the 1830’s.
I already know it was bloody awful for the hapless salty dogs of yore, with rat infested ships, sadistic captains who ruled with an iron fist, horrible food and brutally hard work for little pay, but I think this trip might be quite fun in its way for us modern types especially as it’s only overnight and we won’t actually be leaving the harbor. Nine is thrilled that I’m coming along which is rather sweet.
I tried to pack the list of items we have been told to bring, including a change of clothes and a warm jacket, hat and gloves for each child but I was thwarted in this endeavour because it emerges that Nine has LOST her polartec fleece jacket AND her thinner fleece jumper. Both of them. I saw them a couple of weeks ago and washed them before I went to England thinking we would need them for this trip. It’s been an average of 80degrees farenheit since June so I doubt she’s really needed either item so WHERE THE &@(!@!!!! are they?
Similarly, while I was in the UK, a number of other things mysteriously went AWOL.
They are as follows:
Six’s (expensive) metal water bottle
All the tops to the reusable glass milk bottles. But not the milk bottles themselves*
Six’s shin guards
His electric toothbrush (how? HOW??)
A cat food bowl
Nine’s wellies. (it has not rained for literally months)
Perhaps the most vexing thing about all this is that when I ask where, perchance, any of these items might be, I am met with either blank or furious looks and defensive “I dunno”s followed by sulks, as if it were somehow rude to ask in the first place and certainly nobody else will be helping either to find or replace them.
Of course I could just let it all go and let them freeze/die of thirst/get bruises/get wet/have rotten teeth, but that is not in my remit as good mother.
So I’m going to replace them all (from the joint account which I shall not replenish) and comfort myself with the fact that if this really was the 1830’s and this house was my ship I would actually be the sadistic captain and, as I have been reading, I could tie them to the mast and flog them.
tempting..
*I am not the environmental purist in this house. If it were up to me I’d just buy the tetrapacks and be done with it but apparently that’s bad so the unwieldy plastic bottles that nobody except Superman can lift must be bought and decanted.
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