boring busyness.. and leo

I have long described myself as a failure of a housewife.  Usually when I am home alone with McBean (and FenFox after school mostly) while LB does her marathon work days, very little gets done apart from the taking care of the kids part.

Today while home with McB I have swept all the floors, cleaned the bathroom, vacuumed up the hair off the dirty dog bed and sewed up the holes in it ready for washing, washed a load of mcb’s nappies and another of his clothes and hung them out, kept all the dishes up to date after feeding us both, pooper scooped and weeded the newly empty back yard (my brother came to ‘borrow’ dad’s car that has been living in it for months last night), swept up all the leaves and other debris (and topped up the compost), set up the outdoor furniture and tidied up mcb’s toys and books at least 7 times.

today i feel like a success as a housewife.

In other news, yesterday I picked up two spare Leos.  Leo is McB’s comfort toy (a soft tan leopard with blue spots and a belly button) that he cannot sleep without.  We’ve run into trouble a few times when Leo has needed to be washed during sleep times and McB remained awake and somewhat hysterical until Leo has been returned to him.  We wondered if a switch would be possible given the smell of the sucked tail of the Leo seeing somewhat important to McBean, but when I gave the new one to him, he seemed to settle just fine.  But then the little guy decided about 6 was a good time to wake up this morning and not go back to sleep.  And he only slept for an hour at nap time today despite having fallen asleep during morning tea and woke up extremely distressed.  It was then I noticed that the new Leo (I shall dub him Clean Leo or maybe Cleo for short) still has a completely dry and untouched tail.  It has not been sucked.  So it appears that Cleo provides some comfort to the boy, but not the optimal comfort of a limp cheesy smelling wet tail of the original Leo.  Ew. Hopefully having washed him will not have spoiled that, as gross as it is.

McBean with Cleo today, stolen from the cot when I wasn’t looking:

McBean with Leo a while ago, also  stolen from the cot when we weren’t looking: