An underestimate of life's difficulties!

Thomas decided to nip over to Denmark for five days to let Léon, Anna and Amaia visit their grandparents while I stayed home with just Marcel and Lots.When you are used to looking after five kids, you can fool yourself into thinking that being a single parent to two teenagers for five days is so close to a holiday, you won't know what to do with yourself. I did have a full-time job on for four of the five, and I knew I needed to tutor Marcel a bit for his Higher prelim on Wednesday so I figured that would probably leave me enough time to work my way through the following to-do list . Now, my many single-parent-to-two-teenagers friends will probably fall off their seats at magnitude of my naivety here, but here goes:

• Do 30 hours of translating (books and teaching materials - Danish -> English)
• Tutor Marcel five hours
• Tutor my friend's son for his INT2 French prelim two-three hours
• Wash Thomas's car, valet the inside
• Weed the garden
• Take garden rubbish to the dump
• Read the three novels by my bed (2 English, 1 German)
• See my sister-in-law for coffee
• Meet up with an old friend I haven't seen for twenty years for coffee too
• Wash 7 washing baskets of clothes/dry them/put them away
• Spring clean the small kids' room and take all broken toys to the dump
• Gut TV room, living room, dining room, kitchen, porch, front hall and downstairs bathroom
• Prepare a birthday dinner and cake for Thomas coming home
• Visit mum for dinner
• Do a 1000 piece jigsaw with Charlotte
• Blog every day
• Print out new photos for the frame the kids bought me last week on my birthday
• Take up my trousers
• Wash all the floors
• Do something to keep fit - maybe cycle every day

Ok, let's analyse my achievements to date:

• Danish - tick
• Marcel - 4 hours still to do
• Friend's child - done half an hour
• Thomas's car - nope
• Weeding - nope
• Garden rubbish - nope
• Novels - Half way through the German one
• Sister-in-law - on tomorrow's potential list
• Old friend - tick
• 7 washings - 2 done, 5 to go, nothing put away
• Kids' room - toy boxes emptied on the floor, looks like Armageddon
• Room-gutting - Does the downstairs bathroom count? I even washed the box of bath toys out?!
• Cake making - On Weds' to-do list
• Visit mum - on tomorrow's to-do list
• Jigsaw - nope 
• Blog - no more than usual
• Photo printing - I've done 5/9
• Trousers - nope
• Floors - nope
• Keep-fit - nope

Which makes me ask myself - how do I usually fit in my life, if I can't do twice as much when half of us are missing?