I’m a patient person in training. I’ve lived in Canada my entire life and have now seen thirty-six silver white winters melt into springs but this is not one of my favourite things.

For almost five days straight we’ve been stuck in the house. Yes it’s a house that love built but hugs alone can only keep me sane for so long. There are lots of activities, crafts and even electronic devices that get turned on from time to time when we run out of flour for baking, we’ve crafted until there was more paint than table, but the clang clang clanging of wooden spoons on metal mixing bowls that was endearing the first five hundred times has morphed into an exercise in torture the army should consider using on our enemies . Even the angry birds seem a little angrier, even infuriated these days and dare I say it, this constant rain is just freakin’ ridonkulous.

I miss our time riding bikes on the driveway. One little boy as recently as a week ago fell on his cross bar and groaned, “I just hit my petunia on the bar.” I’m not getting any adorable one-offs like that to get me through the day when I’m stuck inside.

I considered the dreaded, local playgroup which I have never taken our 18 month old to. I used to have my own parking space when Hanna was that age but I finally connected the instances of viral illnesses to playgroup frequency and once I killed the visits, the ear infections, mucus-filled coughs and scarlet fever made progress toward recovery. Other kids equal nasty germs, simple. No I’m not raising my kids in a bubble, there are plenty of germs in every corner of this house and when I think they’re a little too clean, I assign headless animal carcass clean-up to one of them or at the very least assistant-to-the-animal-carcass-cleaner-upper.

With the damp weather also comes spider season. I cracked the top of our treadmill this morning trying to balance and hit a spider on the ceiling that if I had a tape measure, I’m sure would have been equal to the size of the adult men’s gym shoe I was hitting him with….I mean, using to escort him safely back into nature. But I couldn’t because the wind knocked me back into the house so I really let him have it.

I got stuck inside and found myself reading some headlines, who has time for the whole article? Far too many about the Schwarzenneger scandal. This may seem obvious but has anyone looked at the ten year old child? I’m assuming he’s 6’5” with a huge gap in between his two front teeth. Sometimes those “tells” can confirm a paternity that was likely already in question.

We’ve also been running a bakery out of our kitchen. I guess because it smells good, the kids can participate (to an extent) and we can freeze the goodies. So to reiterate, rain equals fat arse.

Go play in the puddles? Sure. But most are too deep for the little ones not to have some sort of floatation device, oh and let’s not forget, a quick splash in a puddle is one thing, around here, the wet wind will hurricane you back into the house like a slingshot within seconds and then what? Now I’ve got another full load of laundry for a five minute wear? I’ll thank you to keep your ill-thought suggestions to yourself.

The sun did come out for about five minutes around 6pm last night. The timing was right. The rain people had just started to turn on each other.