Sunday Morning Slut

It's Sunday morning and the children are playing happily together. I seize the moment and disappear upstairs with my husband...

There is a knock at the door and I grab my dressing gown. "Leave it", my husband says. "They'll think we're out".

The knocking continues and I hear my three year old shouting through the letterbox;

"Mummy and Daddy are in bed, so I can't answer the door".

I have no idea which of my friends, neighbours or colleagues now knows me to be a Sunday Morning Slut.

Chicken Run

I am astounded by my multi-tasking abilities. I bask in anticipation of the praise sure to fall from my husband when he returns from his week away to find I have not only finished painting the chicken house, but have built an entire run from scratch. I am a veritable land girl, green-fingered, tousle-haired and worthy of a remake of The Good Life (without the dungarees, which are only really a good look in Australian womens' prisons).

Part of my new Operation Work/Life Balance is the Acquisition of Poultry, guaranteed to provoke an all-pervading feeling of well-being. I close my eyes and see a long summer stretching before me, ice clinking in my Pimms as I lean back onto my lounger and listen to the hens pecking at their... what do chickens eat anyway? Bread perhaps. Corn probably. I'll find out before I get them, obviously.

Having it all - or doing it all?

We working girls are fond of rather smugly claiming that we have it all. The four bed detached, the Boden-clad children, the successful career... but I'm beginning to wonder what exactly it is that I have in such abundance. Indigestion, mostly, it seems.

Today I was late home for the nanny for the second time this week. It's only Tuesday. At 5pm, when I should have been walking in the door and wrapping myself around my children, I was sitting in a meeting that clearly wasn't even half-way through. I sent a surreptitious text and tried to appear as though I was checking something vital on the Blackberry instead of resolving my childcare issues. We may pride ourselves on our approach to flexible working, but the reality is a room full of middle-aged men with adult children and stay-at-home wives.

Mary Poppins is no match for Miss Marple

She's late. The final short-listed candidate in our quest to replace Mary Poppins. We interviewed the others last weekend, and have refrained from making a decision until we could meet K, whose CV positively oozes experience from every line.

My husband's primary criterion is that K isn't any larger than the others. It's not that he's fattist (not really) but it's true to say the other three nannies have been rather on the large side; each bigger than the last, like reverse Russian dolls. Perhaps it's all to do with the wording of the advert; maybe I shouldn't have italicised the two meals a day included in the package... Appearance does have its place of course; I need to be confident that our nanny is not so unattractive as to be an eye-sore around the place, but not so attractive in a Swedish-size-eight sort of way that I'll be concerned about going to work and leaving her with my pyjama'd husband.