And today's plus one event is...

I have just dropped both of the kids off at daycare. It's one o'clock and for a while there I didn't think we were going to make it at all. They were ready at ten but it quickly became obvious that James was thoroughly out of sorts and needed his morning sleep before he went anywhere (especially important since he is continuing to protest against his placement in daycare by refusing to sleep there). It is only my second day at home without either of them. I feel like someone has cut off a limb and I keep having mini panic attacks where my brain says, "Oh my God, where's the baby?!" and I get halfway to the toilet (where, my irrational brain presumes, he has drowned) before I remember that he's safe at daycare.

So what to do with my precious time? Yesterday the plus one in my "essentials plus one" domestic management plan consisted of Charlotte and I putting together the flat pack outdoor love seat/swing thing my Dad gave me for Christmas. This had reached the top of the list over and above dealing with the huge mound of kiddy clothes I need to parcel up for Jenny purely because I couldn't handle celebrating Yule in June knowing that a December Christmas present was languishing in its box in the backyard. You might think that's bad, but I assure it's got nothing on today's "plus one". Cleaning my car.

We have two X-Trails. One is white. It's mine because it has car seats for the kids and a steering wheel cover featuring pink and cow skulls complete with horns (you can take the girl out of the country...) The other is silver and is Charles' only because I made the mistake of referring to it on purchase as our "Silvertail", the nic name of Charles' beloved Manly Sea Eagles. Since the kids are largely my domain and my car has the car seats for them, my car also carries all their crap. I make an effort to clean it out every month or two and it usually takes me a couple of hours. I sort, I clean, I vacuum and then somehow within a week it's all back again.

This time is worse than most. It's coming up to two months now since the last frenzy and the contents of the car are starting to spill out when doors are opened. The boot is hard to close and stuff I don't recognise is floating to the surface of the mass which fills the footspace where the kids sit. The nature of the stuff involved is also getting weirder and weirder. I knew we were in real trouble when Pippa asked me why there was a plastic Christmas tree in the back seat of our car. I've checked. She wasn't making a poor joke. There is a three foot high plastic Christmas tree in the back seat of my car and I don't know how it got there.

This blog post is obviously an exercise in work avoidance as much as it is a confession. I'm scared that there will be something lurking in the car that will eat me. It might even wind up being the plastic Christmas tree which has taken on a kind of benign-sinister-lurking-presence in my head because I really don't know where it came from. I have a theory that the sheer volume and variety of stuff in the car, coupled with my emotional focus on it, has opened a weird "stuff portal" into a parallel dimension. Somewhere through time and space another mother is scratching her head at the appearance of a stainless steel sippy cup and the absence of her Christmas tree. This would also go a long way to explaining the column heater that has just appeared in the boot.

Pray for me people - I'm going in.