Of course, this isn’t all awful. I have two amazing boys who make me laugh all the time and happily occupy themselves when I ask them to. They are healthy, gorgeous and kind. It could be worse. There could be three of them.

OK, until tomorrow …

Love Dawn x

19 March

Isolation Update – The head in the cupboard

Today was considerably better and I attribute this to two factors:

1. I didn’t bother getting my kids dressed, to avoid excess laundry.
2. I abandoned all efforts to educate them.

Turns out, if you totally give up on even attempting to nourish children intellectually, everyone is happier. What a revelation to come out of this strange and total shit-show of a time.

So … the day started well. I woke up at six something, but the kids didn’t wake until seven thirty. They’re going to bed late, and for this period that works fine by me; at that time in the morning, to sit and have a coffee before it all kicks off is nice. My favourite part of the day is by far the mornings. Everyone is generally quite happy to see each other after social distancing in our bedrooms throughout the night. Chris came up with the genius idea of putting a few chocolate cereal pieces into their regular healthy cereal, which means breakfast time is a dream. We don’t give our kids much sugar because Art acts like me in the early 2000s in dingy Liverpool clubs at just the sniff of anything refined, so when they get any, they go into a trance.

I did playdough with the kids for nearly an hour. As expected, they squashed all the new playdough together until it turned brown and then threw it around the room yelling, ‘I’m throwing poo-poo at you.’ At first I shouted at them to stop, but soon realised, as I scraped it out of my hair, that I will never win. So instead I asked Alexa to play a ‘Farty Party’, and I pretended to do playdough poos all over the living room. This is where I am at.

NEXT, I ordered the kids a really cheap tent, which I popped up in their bedroom. They thought it was the greatest thing ever to happen for about forty-five minutes. While they were in it, I did a face mask, and then applied full make-up. There is so little I can control right now, but my eye make-up is something that no one can take away from me. I also wore double denim and didn’t take my slippers off all day. If this is still going on when the weather cheers up, I’ll bang out some kaftan action. I really feel that kaftans should be the traditional dress of isolation.