I can't lay it on thick enough: looking after kids is major, major, major hassle.

You can't think coherent thoughts - they break your train of thought, they interrupt with demands, they cause imminent or actual disasters that make interrupts...

You can't work, of course. You can't read, you can't listen to the radio, obviously you can't watch television or videos.

You can't do anything but look after the kids.

We are talking 3 yrs and 5 years here. Nearly 4 and nearly 6.

They demand constant attention. You must be watching them all the time.

You must anticipate all the time. You can't do simple things like put a cup down. Like put a pan on the stove. Like leave a knife on the table.

Anything on the stove they might bring down on themselves. Note, like so many things, this is not something you just fix once and then it is done. It is something that needs doing over and over and over, eternally. It is a never-ending constraint. You must remain alert.

What it boils down to (excuse the metaphor) is that you don't leave hot pans on the stove and you don't leave the stove on when you are not there.

You don't put a cup of hot tea, hot coffee, hot anything anywhere that a child might be able to get it. A child ON A CHAIR. They climb like monkeys. Everything has to be out of reach. Definitely out of reach.

The only safe way is to be watching. You can't be watching all the time. So you develop a nervous sixth sense, you listen for silence or unusual sounds. You get a sense of where they are at all times. Any child in an unattended kitchen for any length of time needs checking up on.

They need checking up on at top speed, immediately, if there is silence while they are there. Silence indicates rapt attention to some holy (unholy?) grail they've just found. Like the sharpest knife in the kitchen. The switch to switch on the toaster while they've got a metal toy stuffed in the top. A handful of thin crystal wineglasses reached at full stretch from the top shelf and now poised to crash in a thousand shards around the child's naked feet. Naked feet on tiptoe on three inches of counter top with a fall of three or four feet onto unyielding floor beneath.

I got interrupted there for a couple of hours.

First by a cry from the elder child "George has got a knife!' which meant George had hold of the large butcher's knife we use for most knife cutting tasks in the kitchen. Not as dangerous as a slim boning knife but still dangerous enough. Danger amplified by George's belief that it was a great joke to have the knife and have mum or dad chasing him trying to get him to give it up. He'd then run helter skelter every which way, laughing to point of choking, barely able to keep his feet, barely knowing where he was going and in danger of tripping and putting the point of the knife through his eye or something equally horrific.

Yes. Heart stopping stuff. You've got to stay cool. Don't play the chasing game. Don't let panic or alarm, anger, anything get into your voice. Just ask him to please put it back on the kitchen table or wherever. For some reason, some inexplicable, wonderful, fortuitous reason, George will then - nine times from ten - walk slowly over, slowly and safely, and put the knife back.

That all happened. But then it was time to take the eldest to school. Which means taking both of them for there's no one to look after the youngest while I'm away with the eldest. So this means getting both ready for outside excursion. The youngest was ready. Divested of the knife he was ready. The eldest had only had one hour to put his shirt, socks and shoes on and so was not ready. He didn't have either socks or shirt or shoes. They had all been given to him one hour previously. Now they were gone. Search the house for them. Stand over him while he puts them on. Relax for a second and he puts the shirt on inside out.

Out to the car - the kids find something to fight about, this kid can't go without he has this, or that, then the other kid has to find something they can't go without......

And so on.

I weary of describing it. Do you weary of reading it? I'm not surprised.

But I will write more because it is therapeutic for me on the one hand and of historical value on the other and of present value, too, for there's not enough of this 'telling it as it is' regarding children and child care and child rearing.

As regards me and mine, I'll change that. Perhaps others will, too, for it is sorely needed.