"Ready...Steady...Go Crazy!"

So picture this:  I'm late for an important school meeting this morning, creeping in with the Fat Baby in tow, whispering 'Excuse me!" to all the parents shuffling their legs to let us past, who are busy furtively scribbling away in their notepads, all the VITAL details needed to ensure their precious child gets into a decent Secondary School.

I have of course forgotten to bring a pen.  Or a notepad in fact. But worse, I've raced out of the house and forgotten to bring a snack or toy or any sort of distraction for Fat Baby - who judging by his increasingly powerful wriggling on my lap is about to burst forth any second.

"Me want croissant!" he yells.  I whisper that I'll get him one later.

"Me want milkshake!"  Again, I try and quietly placate him with not just promises of future flaky patisserie offerings, but milkshakes galore and sweeties the size of his head.

Then I have a thought.  Scrambling in bag ensues and I triumphantly pull out a giant roll of Haribo sweets.  This illicits gleeful clapping and whooping from Fat Baby who then proceeds to open them and pop several in his mouth, E-numbered artificial juices dripping down his grinning, dimpled chin...

The lady to my left glances over.  I ignore her.

The rest of the meeting continues on like you can well imagine.  An unmitigated disaster. However I notice that my mobile won't stop buzzing in my pocket and I finally read an urgent text from our estate agent saying that a woman absolutely must see our flat today.  Now in fact.  And can I ring her back asap?

I race out of the meeting, run home with the baby barely strapped in the pushchair, and attempt to tidy our home in twelve minutes flat. Bearing in mind our cleaner is due for her weekly (fairly pointless it must be said) 'damage control clean' this afternoon, our home is in its worst possible incarnation.  Seriously.  If the children had had a full on food fight, with the addition of apple juice and Actimel yoghurt drinks, it couldn't have been worse.  And come to think of it, something of the sort had actually happened last night during our weekly Chinese Stir Fry dinner and this morning during our typically chaotic breakfast time.

I chucked a bag of sweets at the baby, then figured I had exactly four minutes on each of the three levels before I had to scarper.  I pretended I was on telly and my family would die if I didn't complete my task (which actually, though dramatic, isn't far off in terms of how desperate our growing band of boys is making the necessity to move).

I was positively Marine Seal-esque in my zest.  I'd leap into a room, quickly assess in a matter of seconds what the worst offenders were (stain on carpet!....broken biscuit crumbs on sofa!...dirty fingered marked windows!....upended toybox!....whole tube of toothpaste smeared on bathmat!...the list went on) and then dive onto the floor and frantically wipe/scrub/scramble and shove as much stuff as I could in about four minutes flat.  (Whilst doing so, I started to lose it in panic, and imagined a racoon-eyed, mascara-smeared Claudia Winkleman cheering me on in front of a live stage audience...I swear)

When the doorbell finally rang in what felt like seconds, I raced downstairs with a huge, overflowing stinking bin liner in one hand, two pairs of muddy Dr. Marten's (from Glasto) in another, and a loudly protesting squirmy Fat Baby tucked somewhere in there as well.  It was no surprise to see the look of badly disguised pity on the face of both the estate agent and the Posh blonde coming to view the flat.

I was sweating profusely, looked manic in the eyes (I can always tell when I have that manic look on) and raced out the door, yelling back over my shoulder in what can only be described as pointlessly bizarre,

"We have a telly in the kitchen!  By the toaster!  It swings down! It's nice to watch when you're cooking!"

The estate agent poked her head back out of the kitchen quizzically, whilst the potential vendor smiled down and said, "That's nice dear" as I quickly backed out of the door and made my escape.

Disgrace.

If this house selling fiasco doesn't end soon I'm going to end up somewhere like 'Shady Pines' doing macrame, a bottle of Dettol and wet wipes looped permanently onto the belt buckle of my name tagged bum bag, muttering like a crazy pink-lipsticked-designer-clothes-wearing freak.

And you know what?  In my current state of mind that doesn't sound like such a bad thing.