Back in Dubai: 31 Months

12th July 2016

Even though I am not in gainful employment, all I seem to bloody well do each and every day is clean up after a very little person who makes a very big mess. All the time. And I don’t mean my old bosses or crappy subordinates (which I at least in the past used to be paid ample recompense to suffer through their corporate clean-ups).

From the moment of his waking till the moment he chucks down any toy held in hand before bedtime, the entire apartment looks hideous. If it’s not paint all over the balcony, it’s crayon on walls; nail polish seeps into tiles and grout when he decides to smash a bottle on the bathroom floor (‘accidentally dropped it’, he pleads in perfect Greek); cheese is smeared into soft furnishing; piss stains our luxurious rugs; dexterous fingers drive over ripe bananas between sofa cushions…

I held lofty ideas once upon a time ago of making our home a toxic-chemical-cleaner free environment, even going so far as buying from a friend a complete (and pricey) essential oils kit marketed at desperate and gullible mums like me. You know what I mean: three drops of this plus four drops of that diluted in X amount of water guaranteed to remove even the most stubborn stains, and freshen up the place.

We did dilute and scrub…but kiddie stains are oppositional and defiant. So it’s back to AJAX and Jif for us, albeit applied with a mask on. Oh, and that lavender essential oil? Makes the mess smell dreamy!

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Toys strewn everywhere rendering our once stylish apartment a plastic soft play nirvana

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Our sweet balcony useless to adults as it now is used for painting and messy play

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Nail varnish bottle smashed onto tiles and high absorbency grout. Great.