You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone

So the summer vacation is upon our household, the children are already driving me crazy and I feel slightly, um, unprepared. In fact the word unprepared could basically sum up my days at the moment. I cannot invite anyone around because of the mess, mostly in the kitchen. This is not because I am a lazy cow and can’t bring myself to wash the dishes but because my refrigerator door fell off. Because they do that after several years of small boys yanking them open in an attempt to assuage their ever-present hunger.

In fact the door fell off into my arms as I was getting out the apple juice to go down to school to give William his time-critical meds. All the shelves slid off and the glass jars of jam, curry paste and milk broke all over my feet. Faced with a fridge full of food, I had two minutes to botch a fix so that everything didn’t go off while I was out and I ran down to school leaving what looked surprisingly like the contents of someone’s stomach drying nicely all over the floor.

Later the door fell off again and this time it was terminal. The repair man was two days away. There were many expletives uttered.

Living without a fridge is fun. I pretend we are Victorian and place bottles of milk outside in the balmy summer nights hoping they will not have gone rancid by the morning. It hasn’t worked, and as nothing even remotely ‘off’ can be offered to my heavily immunosuppressed little boy I end up scrounging around for non-refridgerated breakfasts like croissants (or ice-cream, sshh don’t tell – desperate times). I’m thinking of buying a cow which will help me in two ways: milk for breakfast and no more need to cut the grass which currently resembles a meadow given the last few weeks of rain combined with the fact that Matthew is not returning from the US today as planned and another week will pass before the mower is re-introduced to the grass like an old lover who can barely recognise you for the change in appearance over the years. Plus William continues to expess a wish to have a pet so he can have ‘something to look after’. I can present him with the cow, show him her udders and say here you are, you can look after that. So in fact, three objectives killed with one cow.

Yesterday the repair man came and without a hint of apology informed me that it would be another week before the parts would be in stock. I thought I might gas myself by putting my head in the fridge at that news because who the hell can live like this for another week. I looked at my watch – 2.41. I have 9 minutes to buy another fridge, arrange for someone else to pick it up because I have missed the deadline for next day delivery and get the little ones ready for a school run in torrential rain. Time management!

This morning I am looking at my cheap little back-up fridge and kissing it because you never realise how much you love something until it is gone.

And now perhaps is the time to sort out some holiday clubs or preferably even summer camps for my children because, again, you never realise how much you love something until it’s gone (in this case to summer camp).