Slip-sliding away

Boy #2 has a cold. Everything is covered with a fine layer of the evidence of this; the house, the car, his brother, and me. Husband has wisely retreated to Mother Russia for the next couple of days to escape Ectoplasm Central (think Bill Murray in Ghostbusters just after he's been 'slimed', and you can imagine why that is), so it's just me, some Karvol, and a strategically placed box of Kleenex Balsam tissues in every room to cope with the snot.

Every time I sat down today, I discovered where Boy #2 had inadvertently left a sticky calling card as it attached itself to my skirt, t-shirt, or most memorably this evening, my arm. This was particularly unfortunate timing as this afternoon the charming man from Boy #1's second-hand school uniform shop called round to help kit him out ready for Big School. I spent the 45 minutes he was here frantically wiping surfaces and grabbing piles of pristinely laundered jumpers from him before they got contaminated by touching the wrong part of the sofa.

Matters were not helped by Boy #1 deciding that he was in fact a pirate, and initially checking each element of his new outfits for suitability in cutlass-carrying and mast-climbing. However, once he discovered the joy of racing off to the full-length mirror to check each new item of clothing as it went on, Pirate Jim (not his real name, obviously. Pirates never use their real names, I'm told) morphed into a small boy who really was quite excited about the whole uniform thing, even though he hadn't planned on showing it.