A parenting failure!

Ok, so I'm not going to win mother of the year for this one...

Usually I try to prepare my kids for the real world: when they bring down their washing, they are expected to put it on, they make their own lunches, they iron all their own clothes, they cook, set tables, wash dishes and all the rest... So when Marcel sheepishly ran in at 10:50 one Sunday evening, saying he had an exam the next morning but had forgotten to wash his school shirts, I thought I'd cut him some slack and volunteer. I don't need to go to bed as early as he does, because I don't work at 6am like he does. So I put it on, realizing that it would be ready for the tumble drier around midnight. What could I do till midnight? Well, the kids had left Despicable Me 2 lying out and we hadn't seen it. So Thomas and I stuck it on, not a kid in sight, and enjoyed the little yellow minions' antics... in fact we enjoyed them so much, we forgot all about the washing and went off to bed and the first we knew about the wet shirt was Marcel, standing in the doorway of our bedroom ten minutes before his school bus with a mix of panic and disappointment on his face. Oops! (Nine minutes of ironing is almost enough to get a shirt dry, we found).

(And did we admit to having been watching Despicable me? Did we hell! We'd been distracted by an interesting documentary, of course ;-) )