Mummy magnet

There is a strange phenomenon affecting my place of residence. I am not sure if it is linked to the phases of the moon or tidal patterns - probably not as it seems to be somewhat of a constant - but whatever room of the house I am standing in, there seems to be a gravitational pull that brings all my boys into it almost immediately. With the exception of my office which is locked tight against invaders, wherever else I am, soon there will be boys too.

If my husband sneaks away to fiddle with his computer or have a shower, the boys don't seem to feel the same attraction. He is, sometimes at least, left in peace for at least 10 minutes, before one of them asks "Where's daddy?" and beetles off to find him. With me there is no such respite, I can never have a shower without one small person bursting in to ask me to help do up buttons or referee a fight, and that's while two of them are held off by an inability to climb stairs. Although having said that, this weekend I stepped out of the shower to find that intrepid twin one had made it upstairs all by himself - time to fit that final stair gate methinks.

Yesterday evening I was holed up in my office having embarked on a mammoth clear out. I finally tackled the filing cabinet which has been lurking like some malevolent presence behind plastic crates full of its contents ever since we had the loft conversion done over a year ago. The boys had been on a day out with grandma, but as soon as they exploded through the door they dashed upstairs to locate me like rats up a drainpipe. All very sweet until they started undoing all my good work tidying by liberally scattering the contents of my shelves around the floor.

It is definitely some strange quirk of physics that my boys can't seem to help but congregate around the mummy magnet - although I am already getting an inkling that this may be a force that weakens with age, for while the babies will shuffle and crawl across the house to find me, wherever I may be, the older boys are finally beginning to prefer their own company, which I will admit can be a blessed relief.

During the Easter break they have happily amused themselves drawing in the playroom, watching movies together and playing the ubiquitous Lego Star Wars on the Xbox, which has had the upshot of giving their aged Ps a little more time to either run around after the babies or just pursue adult amusements, such as sitting, doing nothing or watching TV that doesn't have a PG rating.

I would like to say that I miss being a mummy magnet, but actually I do sometimes enjoy being free from my little iron filings, just so long as they never stray too far from my gravitational field.