You try to get your children looking smart for a trip and look what happens

REMEMBER when you’re children were small and going away for a weekend required extensive planning and military precision? And you thought to yourself, ‘God I cannot wait till they’re old enough to be able to sort their own stuff out so I’m not running around like a headless chicken?’ Well I’ve got news for you – that never happens.

We were supposed to go away to Berlin for a weekend a few weeks ago but the flights were cancelled because of the snow. I had spent the entire week washing, ironing and packing everyone’s best gear for the trip and had packed them all into various bags.

Then the snow came and the trip was cancelled. We rebooked for this weekend and dire warnings were issued that they were not to even think about touching their ‘Good Gear’ bundles but were to save them for Berlin so they wouldn’t look like hobos and make a holy show of me.

Now don’t get me wrong. I love

WHEN I WENT INTO THEIR ROOMS TO CHECK ON THEIR GOOD GEAR THE NIGHT BEFORE, I FOUND IT THROWN ALL AROUND THE PLACE

my children. I even like them some of the time. But they are right little feckers when it comes to doing what they’re told. As in – they don’t. So when I went into their rooms to check on their bundles of good gear one night before we went away, I found the good gear thrown around their rooms, under their beds, put back into drawers DIRTY. They hadn’t a clean decent stitch between them.

And you may wonder how did I not notice they were wearing their good gear. Well because my children wear hoodies over everything so the decent clobber was hidden underneath the requisite hoodie and I am pretty damn sure the only reason they were wearing the good stuff was because they just couldn’t be a***d to look for an alternative.

Needless to say I lost the plot…… completely. I charged around the kitchen F-ing and Blinding, telling them how selfish they were, how thoughtless, how lazy until I ran out of adjectives to describe them. There wasn’t a bother off either of them.

Himself decided as suitable punishment they had to pack their own bags without any help whatsoever. This made me very anxious I can tell you and I pleaded with him to let me oversee said packing but he refused. They needed to take responsibility for their own belongings, he said.

He wasn’t saying that when the two of them appeared at breakfast the first morning of our trip with the youngest clad in a pink sparkly number with Babe written on the front that could only have come from Penneys and three sizes too small and and the teenager in shiny tracksuit bottoms up to his ankles, odd socks and a Liverpool jersey with the name of the fella who bit the other fella, on the back.

‘Sweet Jesus! Pretend you don’t know them,’ he said, telling them to sit at another table. That’s what you call good parenting!