LIVE IN/LIVE OUT CHILDREN

Having a child now living away at university for months at a time has taken a lot of adjustment (for example I must stop calling him a child) and is proving to be a massive learning curve for us all. Of course initially we all missed him massively and there was a very large gap in our family which we struggled with for ages – it’s never easy to be the ones left behind and my firstborn was off on a very exciting path so wouldn’t have given us much thought at first I guess. It is of course not the same without him and we still all miss him, but we have had to adapt to our new world order and so now, once he is back from university we are having to adapt again. He for example, can’t really understand why there are any house rules that he should be abiding by – like why it’s not very reasonable to be waking us all up at 4.30am any day of the week because some of us have work to do in the morning. But the problem is he’s annoying my daughter by simply breathing at the moment which is a little unfair….yesterday, all he did was open the fridge and go “YAAAAAAYYYYYYY FOOOOOOOOOD” really loudly for her to have a fit because she’s trying to work. What she doesn’t get, yet, is how exciting a full fridge is if you’re a student. Or more to the point, how exciting a full fridge is in my house as it’s not a given….

Equally, because he’s a boy and therefore a bit crap about phoning home – we generally only hear from him one a month when he needed some money (although he rather oddly hotly denies this) so as a result we haven’t been chatting about life in general and therefore he seems to be very put out that he’s missed out on various bits of family news (not major births deaths or marriages you understand). This too then will have to be readdressed when he goes back – I will have to promise to factor in a weekly call with a list of updates to give him and he will have to promise to a) answer his phone and b) to actually listen to what I’m saying.

Last night there was a small sign that things were getting better. He at least called me at midnight to ask if he could bring people back to the house and when the answer was no I didn’t want a party he didn’t push his luck too much – only brought the three boys back who were staying the night here and they were as quiet as mice until they stomped up the stairs at 3am. This morning there is only one broken glass outside and three empty bottles of alcohol that was in my fridge – oh but the good news is that they clearly attacked the chicken I made that nobody wanted to eat because my cat had taken a bite out of it so that’s good that it finally got eaten:-

What was the point of putting that back in the fridge?