Someone's impressed by Grit's parenting skills

Here's Grit, passing on the news and great drama of her day spent home-educating her kids, finding OFSTED has donkey's ears, and cleaning that lovely kitchen sink, when she has to stop everything.

She receives this in her inbox. And this mail, which you will probably receive very shortly, if you have not already done so, is so very wonderfully good.

We are looking for someone to get the children ready in the morning, prepare and clear up the family's breakfast, make the beds, and take the children to school, which is about a 1.5km walk away. The au pair would then need to pick them up at 3.20 and look after them until we get home. We will ask the au pair to babysit 1-2 evenings a week. We have a really great cleaner, so there wouldn't be any heavy housework. There is a bit of light cleaning and laundry which would take about 90 minutes a day in total. There would be plenty of time free in the day to go to language school, and there are a lot of good ones in the area.

If you agree to take the position you shall be paid 2500 (Two Thousand Five Hundred Pounds Monthly) and shall be given a weekly pocket money of 500 pounds. Your residence shall be comfortably furnished within the Company housing estate. We are comfortable here as Shell pays us well however we cannot work effectively and take care of our kids hence our solicitation to you to come and Nanny for us.

Look at that pay! And all for taking the kids to school! I might make a few demands round here regarding my salary.

But as I am sadly otherwise engaged and cannot take up this wonderful offer, possibly located by sending all my bank details somewhere in Nigeria, I could nominate a couple of other worthy candidates.

Divorce? Never.

Dig is taking advantage of this Easter holiday to scrutinise his diary. I have to listen to 'Sweden is on, Spain is on, Canada is maybe, Portugal is off, South Africa is off, India is maybe...'

This goes on all day, relentlessly. Chuck a lead brick in a reservoir and watch Grit's spirits sink. She imagines Dig chatting till 3am in a low-lit Scandinavian hotel bar and then places herself, entering the front room at midnight on another lonely no-help day. In her mind is running 'Heathrow is on, cardiac arrest is on, sex is off, the chippy is on, someone to complain to is off, caravan holiday in Skegness is maybe...'

Then Dig says, 'And what about a summer au pair?'

Grit thinks she might pick up her leaden spirit dead on the ground and throw it fatally in his direction.

Sasha has left

About 9.30 this morning, actually. Without a word to the children or to me, Sasha knocks on Dig's office door, says 'I'm going' and promptly exits the front door. Well that's the first bit of initiative she's shown in all the miserable days she's been here.

So Sasha, in your absence, here are the best bits.

We're at Verulamium. It's time to get in the car. I give Sasha the keys and say the car's in the car park Sasha, you can't miss it. Open the doors while we gather the kids and follow you. We get to the car, locked, and spot Sasha, head down, off at a trot, well past the car park, marching off up the road, high on the hill now, disappearing on the A-road probably, off into St Albans. Where are you going to Sasha with the car keys? Are you on drugs?

It's lunch. Sasha's been here for a week now. She sets the table for five people then sits down in mummy Grit's place. Sasha, have you noticed there are six of us? Six! Have you noticed that? Never mind Sasha, I'll pretend I'm working anyway and eat lunch in the office.

When we asked you to teach the children German we did not have in mind 'Scheisse'.

Looking at the vacuum cleaner and asking 'How does it work?'

Saying 'I have never done THAT before!' and pulling a face when you're asked to do something that's really weird. Hmmm. Now what was it that I asked you to do? Oh yes, I remember. The washing up.

Locking yourself in your room.

Abandoning Shark to walk home alone.

Telling off the children at the table for eating in the wrong way.

Mummy Grit's face when she discovers you are actually aged twenty and not seventeen.

If only I'd had chance to say goodbye.

Not working

Sasha has added not eating, not drinking, and not coming out of her room to her list of not speaking and not going to the toilet.

Dig says he hasn't seen Sasha at all today. Has she died? Or gone? I say that I saw her this morning about 10am when she came into the kitchen while I'm trying to get the kids ready for tennis. She said nothing to me, just stood like normal, not moving. I said nothing to her. Back to her room she went.

The next time I saw her was about 1pm when I asked her if she'd like some soup for lunch. She said 'I'm not hungry' despite the fact that she said that last night. Then off she went downstairs again. And that's it. I haven't seen her since.

Quite frankly Sasha, I've had enough.

Actually, we're beginning to suspect that her parents have sent her over to us, probably in despair, and to give us a taste of what it's going to be like to give house room to a teenage Shark, Squirrel and Tiger.

Sasha is a disaster

Sasha has excelled herself today. After moping about the house doing not much, I ask her if she could do a project on Germany with the children.

Sasha puts on a startled expression, like when she saw the vacuum cleaner. Raised eyebrows, sidesweeping eyes, head tilt to one shoulder, mouth open to speak but no words come out. That expression says, 'That's the weirdest thing! No-one's ever asked me to do anything like this before!'

Well Sasha, doing a project on Germany with the children basically means find Germany on a map, get the kids to say 'Bitte', cook the recipe from the Usborne Round the World Cook Book and do a spot of colouring in. Hey, don't expect us to do it in one day, either Sasha, try this lot for the week!

After the 'That's weird!' look, Sasha sweeps her hair forward to cover her face and mumbles a slow and hesitant 'OK', like it might all be a disaster. How right she is.

Shark, who wants to be a chef, jumps up to grab the recipe book and we all find a recipe for potato cakes and apple sauce. Sasha says she's never heard of it. I say well it's for kids, and most importantly, it's for Shark, so cook it anyway. We'll photograph it, eat it, and stick the picture in the German project book with a coloured in German flag. Quite frankly, I think, I don't want a philosophical argument about European cuisine right now, basically I want a bit of interaction between you and the children. So I say, Could you help Shark organise it and cook it. Go down to Tesco with the purse, a shopping bag and Shark, and buy some cooking apples. That mumbled 'OK' should have warned me.

Forty minutes later, Shark buzzes on the front door to be let in. Squirrel opens the door and in comes Shark, looking a bit bedraggled with drizzle and clutching a bag of eating apples.

'Where's Sasha?' I ask.
'Dunno', says Shark.
'How do you mean you don't know?' I say.
'She disappeared', says Shark, slapping the apples down on the table.
'What? Where did she go? Taken up by aliens?'
'Dunno.'
'Well did she say anything to you?'
'Yes.'
'What?'
'Hurry up.'

Clearly there's something a bit amiss here. Interrogating Shark is the only way we're going to get a lead, so I continue, and ask, 'Where did you last see her?'
'On the corner', says Shark, waving her arms. 'She went round by the cars and I didn't see her again.'
'What corner?'
'The corner out there.' Shark points vaguely at the wall.
'Did she come to the front door?'
'No.'
'Well where's Sasha gone?'
'I don't know!' wails Shark. 'She was there and then she wasn't and last time I saw her was at the cars.'

We wait fifteen minutes. No Sasha. And while we're waiting, I quiz Shark some more.
'Did she say anything else to you?'
'She said she wasn't making potatoes with me'.

Now I know what a nuisance a foot-dragging Shark can be. But where cooking's concerned, there's usually no problem. Quite the opposite. We have to curb the enthusiasm otherwise it'll be 54 fruit cakes all over again. So I try a different approach and say, gently, 'Do you think you have anything to apologise to Sasha about?'
'No', says Shark. And this time she adds, 'I think Sasha should say sorry to me. She was going too fast and I couldn't keep up and it's my normal pace!'

Well Sasha, between you and Shark, I think I'll believe Shark. So later, when you declare that you abandoned my 7-year old to make her own way home because she 'started to scream' I don't believe you.

And Grit's had enough. Quite frankly I do not care if Sasha has been abducted by aliens. The meaner the better. In fact, I hope they suck out her brain and use her intestines as shoelaces.

'Well I'm bloody well cooking potato cakes and apple sauce' says Grit to Shark, slapping the apples on the table again. 'That's our tea.'

Sasha makes it back some half hour later and heads straight off to her bedroom. She tells Squirrel on the way that she went for a walk. She doesn't come up for potato cakes and apple sauce. Squirrel's stuck a home-made German flag in them so they can be properly photographed. When Shark, Squirrel and Tiger have gone to bed I drag Sasha out of her room to explain and ask her if she'd like to go home.

We're all giving it 24 hours.

Moth night

It's Moth Night, so the Grit and Dig family is off to hunt wildlife in the jungly darkness. We're joining a moth and bat walk led by Guide Mothman, who works for the parks department, and even though he knows a million and one things about moths, doesn't mind saying 'I don't know that!'

Fortunately, there isn't room in the car to take Sasha, so we can leave her behind to sink further and further into a depressive state in the cellar. I'm not sure she's enjoying this stay with us and all the little junior Grits. Perhaps if she spoke, or showed any interest in the children or her surroundings, things would improve.

In fact, we are so desperate to get out the house and away from the miserable Sasha in the cellar that Grit forgets all the torches. This means that we very quickly become dangerous when being led around small paths in the forest, spending the last part of the evening falling over, squealing 'Ouch!' and being attacked by invisible brambles. And I get worried that all the other moth walkers will probably wonder why no moths seem to be coming down tonight. It is because Grit has a phobia about being bitten by mosquitoes and catching nile fever, and has bathed the entire family in 100% concentration of Deet. To the delicate nose of a moth we are probably stinking like a manure pit situated on top of a tannery. I'm keeping quiet about the Deet, and hope no-one sniffs us out.

Mothman saves the evening, anyhow. Apart from forgetting to charge the £2 for the walk, so it's free, he equips a delighted Shark and Squirrel with bat detectors. Tiger doesn't want one in case it attracts bats that might try and eat her ears.

Mothman's also wise about anyone dressed for jungle warfare in a bottle of insect repellant and has pegged out bright white sheets lit by super-strong lights powered by a generator linked by his car to attract moths without noses. Because it's a wood in darkness, he's worried that the local dodger will nick the generator, so he's chained it to a tree. If we had a torch, the Grit family could stop tripping over the wires and pegs as they try to avoid the brambles.

All in all, and despite the leg wounds, the night is declared tip top, and we learn a lot about moths and bats. Squirrel makes a list of moths without noses, which she wants to show Sasha, who I suspect has retired early in the cellar. And everyone else goes to bed happy.

On duty

Off to one of the excellent and, quite frankly, wonderful parks department events.

Today we are pretending to be pirates in a field. It looks like a home ed meeting. Kids of all ages are running about flapping bits of paper on string (Jolly Roger flags); getting told off for eating the silver ball cake decorations buried in sand (pirate treasure); wailing over how to staple paper plates together when the stapler's got no staples in it (portholes on a sunken Spanish galleon); making boxes from junk and brown paper (treasure chests); pond dipping (nothing to do with pirates whatsoever); scavenger hunting (ditto); making a plank to get fresh water beyond Shark lagoon (Grit cannot work it out, so cheats); fishing (with magnets, of course); making telescopes (no lenses); and doing the treasure trail in search of gold dubloons (painted stones which the particularly dumb kid from the detective trail in the woods last week probably nicked deliberately to confound the Grit family).

I had hoped to drop Sasha off with Shark, Squirrel and Tiger to do all this and get back to work for a couple of hours. But after yesterday, there's no chance of that, so I'm on supervisory duties. I'm keeping an eye on things to try and see what happens when Sasha's about and find out why the junior Grits are steadily going bonkers. Along with mummy Grit, actually.

OK then, call it spying.

The first thing I notice from my vantage point behind the sand pit is that Sasha does a lot of standing about staring into space, twiddling her hair with her fingers, looking uninterested in pirates while Shark gets on with making a porthole from two paper plates without staples.

The second thing I see while hovering behind the treasure box desk is that Sasha tells Tiger she cannot do that when making her treasure box. Tiger starts to shout and say everything is rubbish. Actually, Sasha is right, but some things are better left unsaid.

The third thing I eye-spy with my telescope without a lens is that Squirrel has a huge wee-shaped patch about her again. I go up and tell her off this time and say next time go behind a tree. Squirrel defends herself by saying she asked Sasha for help but Sasha couldn't find a tree. I say you are surrounded by trees. Then Shark doesn't help by saying everyone does it in the garden anyway.

On the way home my finely-tuned watchful pirate skills detect that Sasha shows no enthusiasm at all for being with us and may even probably rather wish she was in Heidelberg.

When everyone gets home I declare the parks department possibly the most tip-top wonderful and imaginative parks department in existence. Shark and Squirrel go off to squabble in the front room while I get out the Blackbeard book to read aloud. Tiger by now is in a fuming rage and has been ordered upstairs to smash her own room up and not my front room, thank you very much. I say I'll come up later to talk about strategies which Grit calls How We All Calm Down.

And Sasha goes off to her bedroom to hide. And probably to watch us, miserably, from a distance.

Rules

I'm going to put up rules again. And these are not for Squirrel, Tiger and Shark. Their rules, on the kitchen door, are for getting out the house. They go something like this:

1. Brush your teeth.
2. Put on your knickers.
3. Put on your shoes.
4. Go to the toilet.
5. Wait in the hall.

The next set of rules will be for Sasha. And they might read something like this:

1. When you have finished breakfast do not creep off to your room.

2. If you are in the front room with the children, try and engage with them. You could look at them. You can even talk to them, if you try. Do not ignore them and draw pictures on the computer using their kiddy art package while Squirrel leads an expedition over the back of the sofa to Back-in-Time land, clutching three jigsaw boxes in place of suitcases, incidentally full of dinosaurs. The jigsaw pieces have been dumped on the floor, of course.

3. If mummy Grit says 'Can we get ready to go out to the farm?' she is not inviting you to go downstairs and choose a new outfit.

4. As we are driving to the farm and mummy Grit cannot remember whether it's the second or third turn right, please do not watch her struggle with one hand trying to find the lead to plug in the sat nav system and moving only when you are explicitly told 'Find the lead that plugs in the sat nav, Sasha. It is black. You are sitting on it.'

5. When you get to the farm with us and we have spent 45 minutes picking raspberries and are completely dehydrated and starving thanks to mummy Grit leaving the water and sandwiches in the car, you could offer to go and get them.

6. When mummy Grit gets everyone to sit down in the shade and not stagger about falling into the prickly bushes, thus giving her a chance to leg it back to the car for refreshments, do not kick over the punnets of raspberries we have just put down next to us.

7. Do not say, before mummy Grit goes off to the car, 'I have some water' and then clearly have none and drink all Tiger's instead.

8. Please teach us some German. Actually, this is one of the big things we asked you to do. Consider it is all our failing, for being home educators. Now please tell us the word for cauliflower. We don't want to drag it out of you. But we will if necessary.

9. Please speak and move when you are on car journeys, whether we are going backwards or forwards to the farm or not. Having a passenger who stares straight ahead and never speaks is a bit like keeping a cardboard cut-out in the car. In fact, Sasha, I might well make a big cardboard cut-out and stick it in the kitchen.

Mummy Grit's now going to put up a rule of her own.

1. No more teenage girls from rule-based backgrounds.

Sasha does a lot of standing about

Fifteen minutes after breakfast, Sasha's starting to get on my nerves.

Now I'm not very good at telling people what to do. In fact Grit is possibly the most rubbish manager in the entire world, with the exception of Dig, who doesn't like telling people what to do either. If Dig wants someone to do something he'll say nothing at all. He probably hopes they pick up his brainwaves.

Well, this is why we arranged it so that Ermintrude could do it. Canny eh? We overlapped Ermintrude and Sasha so that Ermintrude could lead Sasha around the house and tell her everything to do, while me and Dig could hide. Well Ermintrude has gone. And it's Sasha's turn to have a go at being an au pair.

But Sasha does a lot of standing about waiting to be told exactly what to do. And this is clearly a problem.

Dig's solution to the awkward after-breakfast silence is to clear off, sharpish. Thanks, Dig. So I have a go. First I use action. I do a bit of clearing up and washing up, and say things like 'Gosh! What a lot of things to do! I must remember to take the laundry out!' This has no effect at all on Sasha, who moves a few bowls around on the table. Then I say, 'I must remember to take Squirrel's socks upstairs!' and 'It won't be long before we're clearing the table of breakfast things and putting out some crayons and paper so that Tiger can draw a picture!'

Nothing happens, except that Sasha moves the cornflakes packet about a bit. I try another tactic. I stop doing the washing up, leaving a lot of it in the sink. I go to the laundry, and take that out instead, tucking Dig's wet trousers under one arm. I rather hope that Sasha will take over the washing up. Nope. Nothing's happening in that direction.

I reckon it's my very presence that's causing the problem, since that sometimes happens. So I push off to look for Squirrel's socks.

A decent time later, I'm back, laundry under one arm, a bundle of Squirrel socks in my hand, and there's Sasha, standing in the kitchen, not moving. The cornflakes are still on the table, so I stuff the socks into my mouth and pick up the packet with the free hand and put it away. With one hand free now, I'm clearing up the kitchen at speed. I think I might have a go at the washing up, just to make a point, but one-handed washing up is pretty difficult and I think this may be a point too far.

Sasha does nothing. As she watches me rush about the kitchen doing the clearing up, she must think this is how things are done round here, which they are, actually. But Sasha, I think, that's why you're here. To help. Now bloody well help before I put you back on the train to Heidleberg.

Fortunately, with Squirrel's socks in my mouth, I can't say it.

Cultural experience number one

Well, here I am happily discussing with Dig what interesting English cultural experiences the Grit family can provide for our new German Sasha and she there she goes and provides one of her own.

Locking herself in her room and jamming the door shut so that she can't get out for twelve hours was not the cultural experience under discussion, however.

The first I hear of the lock-up is when a plaintive Sasha voice calls me from the cellar bedroom at 9.15 when all the little Grits are wondering where Sasha is for breakfast. So I go down to the bedroom; through the door I hear the sad voice say that last night the door was closed about ten o'clock and then about midnight, it wouldn't open. Sasha, I say, did you lock the door? I cannot believe she needs telling to turn a key in the lock, so think this one's unlikely, but I think that with Sasha, it's probably better to ask.

There's a lot of toing and froing at this point while all the junior Grits run up and down the stairs to look at Sasha's locked door and suggest not very useful things like pushing sliced bread under the door. Why would Sasha want a white slice under the door? I ask. She might be hungry, suggests Tiger. This is probable, I reckon. I wonder whether she's desperate for the toilet, and then remember that Sasha doesn't use the toilet, so we should have a few more hours to think it out before there might be anything resembling an emergency.

Then Dig gets involved. Dig is much more useful than the junior Grits. Dig suggests Sasha climbs out of the window.

This sounds straightforward. Sasha just has to open the window, Dig lowers down a ladder and up she comes. Sasha's bedroom is the converted cellar, and so the Velux windows are a little above ground level, opening into the yard.

Now the yard is a particularly horrible place to land. The yard is crammed full of junk that we can't move out to the tip because the gate fell off last month and we can't get the stuff out unless I carry it through the house. A disused kitchen bin full of rainwater, a broken toilet pump and cracked plastic garden furniture is just for starters. You can see why it's not been done. So first Dig does some yard clearance. Then we get the ladder out.

Sasha has managed to open a window in her prison cell but it's the window furthest away from us. Dig is confounded. 'This window!' he starts to shout. 'We are here! This window!' Clearly Sasha needs quite a few explicit instructions about this type of procedure. Perhaps she's not done it before. But, I reckon, she'll probably get used to this lifestyle after a few days.

Well, we do get Sasha out, stumbling into a yard filled with broken furniture and toilet parts. So I'm calling that cultural experience number one.

Welcome to the Grit and Dig household, Sasha.

Ermintrude

It's 10 o'clock in the morning and Dig says that the au pair is arriving on the train at 10.30, so get down to the station and pick her up, because he needs to get his trousers on. I say I'm not changing our day's plans, so there. It's a full day ahead for Shark, Squirrel and Tiger, what with the free curry and the music festival, so the au pair will just have to join in.

Actually, I've been up since 8, trying to make us look presentable. I've put out the rubbish, swept the schoolroom floor, changed a spare bed, done the washing up, redistributed the laundry and ejected a penguin and two dolphins from the kitchen. I found a dinosaur and a zebra under my chopping table. Squirrel's taken to stuffing her cuddly toys under there in the mistaken idea that she has found a new squirrelling hole.

This is not a new squirrelling hole, I tell her. This is a deeply irritating place to stuff them, so stop it. For a start, they don't fit, and when you've squeezed them under there, they squeeze themselves out again and I trip over them. And when they do come out they are covered in fluff and bits of chopped onion and celery because they are under my chopping table. Now make them disappear and do not stuff them, like last time, behind the curtains/ under the computer table/ down the sofa/ behind the bookcase/ in the oven/ in the place where I keep the big bowls/ in the fridge. Believe me, I will find them.

Well, by the time I do pick up the au pair, all I know, apart from the fact that she speaks French, is her name. It is a very pretty name. Like the au pair. She is also very pretty. Now Grit is a mature lady and not at all threatened by having a very pretty au pair in the house with a very pretty name, all suddenly dropped out of the sky on her by a husband who is barely here and when he is here, spends his life wrapped round his computer. No, I am not at all threatened. I will give the new au pair the blog name Ermintrude to do her justice. I'm sure you'll agree Ermintrude is a very pretty name.

The first thing we are booked for today is a hippy festival in one of our local parks. This happens every year, and the Buddhists mastermind it. The Buddhists make sure everyone is nice to each other. There is a bit of chanting and speeches, and afterwards we get a plate of curry and a cup of tea. We are definitely going. I can teach the children about how to be nice to each other. And the curry and cup of tea are free.

This is Ermintrude's first introduction to us. After picking her up, we all clamber in the car to get off to the Buddhists. Shark and Tiger start fighting and slapping and howling as usual. Squirrel is worried about missing the curry and keeps asking 'have we missed the curry?' I tell her to be quiet about that because the free curry is not the only reason why we are going. We are going because the Buddhists are nice and we might get some ideas from that. I have to shout this bit so I can be heard above the screaming and crying.

By the time we get out the car, Shark and Tiger have been given a very big talking to about being nice to each other all day long. And, after the Toddington incident, I have confiscated all the picnic baskets. Squirrel leaps out the car and starts running up the hill towards the Buddhists shouting 'Hurry mummy! We'll miss the curry!' I have to follow with my eyebrows raised like I do not know what she could possibly be talking about.

I sit Ermintrude down on the picnic blanket. I think with all that blonde hair and fair skin she possibly looks a bit peaky, so point her in the direction of the sun. Because my nose always catches the sun first and goes bright red, I make sure I slather on a lot of nose sunscreen. I apologise, Ermintrude, for forgetting to offer you sunscreen for your nose.

When we've all done a bit of chanting and had the free curry, we can leg it over to the next festival happening in another part of town. This is brilliant. It's a proper music festival with proper bands and it's free. We're there in fifteen minutes flat and immediately get down to the stage where we see The Hat cavorting about, dancing with lots of people just like I would expect The Hat to do. I get Ermintrude to take Squirrel and Shark off to do some serious jumping about while Tiger refuses to join in because she has seen a dog somewhere, so I have to stay out of the fun and dance on my own. I look at Ermintrude and think she's a little bit thin. I make a mental note to put four large packs of Green and Black's in her room. I am sure they will be a lovely welcome present.

By the time we get back home it's 7 in the evening. The children are all exhausted and shouty. Squirrel has a big weep. Shark has a big shout. Tiger growls and slams a few doors. Dig makes himself scarce. I suggest to Ermintrude that she might try out her 'I like children' skills. With six weeks au pairing to go for the Grit family, Ermintrude looks like she's wondering what she's let herself in for. And as I keep my eye on everyone, I'm wondering as well, what we've all let ourselves in for.

Sasha's granny

We must have been horrible to Sasha. She has not replied to our emails since I threw her out of the car at Suburban Airport on the way home from the Rodin workshop on clay at the end of April. Admittedly, the departure was not that good, with the fists flying in the background and Shark shouting 'Go away!', but I did tell Sasha that Shark wasn't talking to her as I removed her bags from the back of the car. Of course I had to be quick about it because they charge me at that car park if I'm there more than 10 minutes.

Anyway, Sasha has finally replied to us with an email.

Sasha apologises and says she would love to come and spend some time with us over summer and teach us German. She says she could not reply sooner because she has had exams. She said that she had to go to Magdeburg to pick things up. Then she says she was going to reply last week but her granny fell out of a train.

I think Sasha might fit into Grit's world quite nicely.

Clay

We are all off to a home ed workshop on clay.

So for about an hour beforehand I'm getting everyone ready. It's 'Sasha, comb Tiger's hair', then 'Sasha, bring Squirrel downstairs to put on her shoes', and 'Sasha help Shark get up from the floor where she is lying down screaming thanks to Tiger having trodden on her'. Honestly, this au pair thing is hard work and I may well have had a nose full.

Next on the agenda is actually getting to Middletown. There are no road closures or spilled liquid petroleum. I am wise and I have put petrol in the car. There is not a hurricane like the day we decided to visit Kenilworth castle. Sasha did not burst into tears and there were no fisticuffs in the back seats. Even better, when we arrive, we see Am and Jol in the playground. So everyone is excited and happy. Personally, I cannot believe our luck. We have got here early, without casualty, and Sasha might think this is normal.

We're not early enough. Within minutes we're all off inside to find out about Rodin but not the naughty bits. I get rid of Sasha. I say, 'Sasha you could walk into town for an hour, there's not much here apart from a lot of home educated children, some clay, and Rodin without the naughty bits. So off you go and enjoy the sunshine.' What I really want to say is 'Sasha, push off so I can have your seat and get in some tip-top quality chat time with Jol.' Of course I do not say that because even I am on my bestest behaviour with Sasha now.

The first downturned lips come where there is a bit of a fight over who gets to sit opposite Am. Jol is right on form and solves this thanks to incredibly quick thinking and rearranging people and furniture, so everyone gets sorted. Then Rodin and the clay work begin.

After looking at pictures of Rodin's work but no naughty bits, everyone's invited to do something interesting with clay. Shark immediately starts off making the stem of a rose. Unfortunately, it looks like a giant phallus and looks like we might have studied Rodin's naughty bits at home, which we haven't, but hey, this is the home ed world, and people expect anything. So I let it be known that it is a rose stem. That's a rose stem that Shark is making. A lovely stem for a rose. She's going to put the petals on later. See, she's making the petals now.

Apart from this minor difficulty, clay procedes quite well. Squirrel starts making a bird but its head keeps dropping off. Tiger makes a horse, because Tiger is into horses big time. She hasn't fallen off yet on the horseriding lessons, so we might see a change of heart when she does.

Then, disaster. I can see Shark wanting to scream. She goes all stiff and red in the face, her mouth clamps together in a thin hard line, and little tears pop onto her cheeks. I have told Shark not to scream in public because it is embarrassing and everyone stares. Shark has a long history of screaming in public places. I think her best screaming has been done on the corner of Winston Road and Gurney Lane when the residents came out to look at the five-year old rolling about in the gutter hanging onto a bicycle. I could choose that as the top scream, or it might be the lamp-post incident last week, or perhaps the library. Whatever, she's under caution. I have told her that if she screams again in public I will sell her for medical experiments.

Shark wants to scream because her petals won't stay on the phallus-rose-stem. In fact the phallus-rose-stem is starting to droop and will never hold the weight of twelve petals made from about a half kilo of air-hardening clay. Every time a new petal gets squished into the top, the phallus-rose-stem buckles a bit more and Shark becomes more despairing. But now Jol is involved and has her second most helpful moment of the day. 'Put a stick in it' she suggests. This is brilliant and I leg it into the garden to locate a real bit of rose stem to skewer down the centre of Shark's clay. Success! This works. The downside is that the phallus-rose-stem is bigger than ever and starting to command attention. I start to worry about the police and social services dropping by later and am very grateful when the clay teacher suggests lowering a plastic bag over it and putting it in the car for the drive home.

I think all the niceness of Sasha's visit and the creative tension from the artists at the Rodin workshop had to explode somewhere. And it did. On the way back to Smalltown there was a lot of screaming and a very big bout of fisticuffs in the back of the car, followed by a lot of shouting from mummy Grit, and a frozen smile from Sasha, who didn't object one bit when I suggested dropping her off at the airport two hours early.

But now we can go back to normal. Sasha's gone, there's a clay phallus in a plastic bag next to Tiger's clay horse, which she says she hates because it has a nose like a sheep, and here's Squirrel's headless bird. The head is rolling about on a plastic tray, and already I've promised we can fix it tomorrow, if we get time.

Sasha

Sasha has arrived. Sasha is aged 19, German, and very quiet. In fact she is so quiet that I have to lean towards her to hear what she is saying. Consequently she leans away from me and I lean towards her a bit further. Since this is not a good state of affairs and I suspect neither of us is comfortable with this posture, I have told her that I am a bit deaf and asked her to shout.

It would be rather interesting to have a shouty German teenager in the house, but even Sasha's shout is quiet, so now we have a quietly shouting German teenager in the house. Sasha also waits to be told to do anything, like sit down, or eat something, or put down luggage. So I am constantly saying 'Sasha, put your luggage down. Sasha, drink a glass of fruit juice. Sasha, take a bread roll. Sasha, chew the bread roll'. OK, not that last one, but I'm not counting it out just yet. There are two more days before she goes home.

I am sure she cannot be like this back in Heidelberg. I am sure at home she charges about the house, blundering into walls drunk at 2am, slamming the bathroom door shut, shouting 'I didn't ask to be born!' as she crashes upstairs, screaming 'You fat cow!' to her 15-year old sister and generally behaving very obnoxiously (all in German, obviously). I hope she is badly behaved in Heidelberg, because bad behaviour is what I'm anticipating will be the teenage interaction between Grit, Dig, Squirrel, Shark and Tiger, and if it's not, I'm going to think our offspring are not normal.

But Sasha is not only very quiet and very well behaved. Sasha does not even seem to need to use the toilet. I keep sending Squirrel to show Sasha various toilets around the house, because after seven hours I become worried that Sasha is either desparate for a wee, too polite to ask where the toilet is, or that Sasha is another-dimensional entity like one of David Icke's shape-shifting reptilians who perhaps still do not need to use the toilet after two glasses of mixed fruit juice and three cups of green tea.

All of this quiet demeanour and good behaviour has had a strange effect on Shark, Squirrel and Tiger. They've all been on best-presentation-mode all day long, full of 'pleases' and 'thank yous', and they have all said they would like to learn German, even though we do not know anything at all, except that I have asked Sasha to teach me the German for, 'Where is the bathplug?' and 'I have had a nose-full of this'.

By evening, we have all smiled so much our facial muscles hurt and we have had a non-shouty day full of niceness. So I am quite relieved that Sasha has decided to retire. I have had to say 'Sasha, would you like to go to bed now?' because I have been worried that unless I ask she might sit up all night on the sofa.

And this is all because we have invited Sasha over to see if she can cope with being in a house of screaming triplets enough to come back and be an au pair here in August when she is on her college holiday. Well, the Grit and Dig family is just not representative today. We will have to hope that tomorrow Squirrel wakes up in a bad mood and that Shark accuses Tiger of stealing her tiara. And then we'll throw squabbling triplets at Sasha while me and Dig leave the room to see if she can cope. As I close the door behind us, I could ask, 'Sasha, can you cope?' and that would probably help her decide about how she could spend her August vacation.

The fridge

The fridge is disgusting. I can barely describe it. So imagine this scenario.

Eighteen months ago the washing machine broke down. Dig went off and bought a new one and within a couple of weeks it was installed and working. Relatively problem-free for the inhabitants of The Pile, you might think.

There was just one problem. The front of the washing machine bows out, like a big curved letter C. Why it does this I do not know. It just does. But the consequence of the washing machine with a front shaped like a letter C is that we cannot open the fridge door. The fridge is adjacent to the washing machine; we cannot put it anywhere else because it is a specially long fridge and doesn't fit anywhere else. And for the last eighteen months we've not been able to open the door. Well, to be specific, we can open the fridge door to about a 30 degree angle; just enough to slip a hand in and out with a litre of milk.

Now, have you or your children ever put anything in the fridge, then knocked it over, and thought, 'Dash! I've just knocked over the yoghurt/ milk/ grated cheese/ orange juice/ pink sugar mice/ Hama beads/ pile of soil that mother is going to have a fit about when she finds it/ the bowl of soup that I thought I might eat later/ the tinned tomatoes that I opened on auto-cook and couldn't face/ half-bot of wine/ a snowman's head from the freezer/ the rest of the pasta that one day I might make into pasta salad/ clay fish/ etc etc?

In any normal fridge, of course you can spill it, curse, scoop out the contents and clean it up, promising to be more careful next time.

Well in this house, when any of the above gets knocked over in the fridge, there's nothing we can do about it because we can't open the door beyond a 30 degree angle. I can throw in some dishclothes to mop up the orange juice and soup, and I can scoop out a bit of the soil, but that's about it. I simply can't get in there to clean it all up. So it stays.

Now after childbirth I can take some disgusting sights, but the inside of our fridge isn't one of them.

The slight problem is that we are about to be exposed on this one. We have a visitor coming to stay on Saturday until Monday. This is Sasha, who is flying in from Germany to meet the children and decide whether she would like to be an au pair with us during August. And what if she opens the fridge? This would be a disaster. Dig has a reputation to maintain. What if she photographs the inside of the fridge and posts the horrific sight up on MySpace, or worse, provides a narration and sets up a video on YouTube? The national press would be alerted to Dig's fridge. I would be prosecuted. The children would go into care. All would be lost.

So today I have grabbed Tiger by the arm and marched her off to John Lewis to buy a fridge. Dig assured me you could go in, say 'I'll have that one' and they pop it round the next day.

Only it doesn't happen like that, Dig. Oh no, not at all. They pop it round in seven days time. Seven days. Sasha will have been and gone. She'll have her photo/video safe in her mobile phone and she'll be dialling the Daily Mail on Monday morning demanding counselling and compensation. So let's hope she's vegan, hates milk or never expresses interest in the fridge.

I could chain and padlock it, which will look normal, of course. Or I could stand in front of it for 48 hours shouting out 'Don't worry Sasha! I'll get the milk!' Or we could just let her get some milk for her cup of tea, and we pretend everything's normal and hope we get away with it.

Oh dear, oh dear. On the fridge front, all is lost.

Preparing the cellar

I've been in the cellar. I've taken a carving knife to the mattress that the children were using as a trampoline and I've cut it into bits so I can smuggle it out the house while they're occupied watching UK TV History, which they're obsessed with.

I've also collected a big bag of plastic toys which don't match and, if they're not misfits, then are probably broken. They're in the hall waiting for Emmie the freecycler who says I make the planet a nicer place to live in. She only knows me as an obsessive freecycler. Dig might give her a different opinion: Emmie hasn't been on the receiving end of Grit's acidic tongue-lashing and some heavyweight door slamming.

Anyway, I've boxed up the toys down in the cellar, and been down to the tip where I got two trendy metal framed chairs for a fiver. I've recovered the seat cushions and then gone back to Ikea. This time I've bought a table shaped like an egg. I wanted the one shaped like a peanut but they didn't have it because, Ahmed says, they are changing supplier and if I really wanted a peanut shaped table they could give me information in about a week.

Well, we need a table a lot quicker than that. Because when Nanjo comes again on Monday we want her to move into the bedroom-cellar, which has been the children's playroom; we want her to sleep in the Ikea bed I put up yesterday, and we want her to do some of her studying-studenty work at the table shaped like an egg. Then she can have a shower in the broken down shower that Dig has nearly mended but which still leaks a bit into the cupboard.

This is all part of a grand plan. Nanjo has very gamely agreed to be the equivalent of the experimental mouse in the cellar because soon I am picking up Sasha from the airport who's coming over from France to be grilled by Shark, Tiger and Squirrel for her potential qualities as an August holiday au pair. And she's destined for the cellar bedroom. So we want to know this room's shortcomings, benefits and possibilities for a homesick au pair who locks herself into her room with her MP3 player and refuses to come out. We want to know whether she'll still be happy there despite her misery.

I should say at this point, just in case Sasha is reading, that the cellar is not dark and dingy and manky (although thanks to Grit's non-cleaning routine, it is not presently cobweb-free). It is a lovely bright space with a tiled floor, a strange corridor that runs outside the main house and which provides sunlight through three wide Velux windows, an Ikea bed that looks like a sofa but is really a bed, two terribly trendy chairs, and a table shaped like an egg.

The au pair

We have a good idea. Now that we've moved all the bedrooms round in a complicated manner so that we are living across two separate flats on two different floors of our old Victorian house, we have a large room spare. For about a month it's been a playroom for Shark, Squirrel and Tiger. Their aeroplanes and castle are there, along with their dressing up clothes, and an old mattress for trampolining. But it would make a splendid room for an au pair during August. I can imagine it: there'd be space for a bed and study table and the en suite bathroom would help create a private space away from us all when we all become too much and au pair becomes home sick.

This isn't exactly a new idea. For the last few months Dig's been cruising about au pair websites and has even subscribed to a few. So now we have up our family profile and au pairs who may be interested send us links to their CVs. The theory is, we eye them up, make a judgement, interview and employ.

It sounds simple, huh?

The first judgement we made some time ago was that a good proportion of potential au pairs may be spammers in disguise, throwing out links to their CVs regardless of a family's profile. For example, in our profile we've written that an au pair would have to cope around triplets; please bring French, Spanish or Italian into the house; we'd prefer vegetarian, non-religious, and we don't want smokers. Because of visa requirements and our need to interview before appointment, we state we can take someone only from within Europe, and preferably within reach of an Easy jet flight. If it all goes horribly wrong they can be back home to mum within the day.

In the first batch of responses we get a half dozen links from au pairs in Mexico, three from the Philippines, a deluge from Eastern Europe, a scattering from Thailand and a ladyboy from Korea with a phobia about babies. When we get the ladyboy link I reckon someone's having a laugh. When I click through, I start to revise my opinion on that.

The second judgement we make is that a large proportion of potential au pairs do not see themselves as others do. We click through to Marlene in France who claims she's a non-smoker. There's her photograph, with a cigarette dangling from her fingertips. We click through to Angelina in Italy who claims she's a vegetarian in Section A and by Section B lists in her recent interests a meat cookery course.

Our third judgement, sadly, is that many of those who say they're interested in working with our family are simply unemployable by us. There's Beth, presently in the UK, who says she likes the sound of triplets and is an Evangelical Christian who believes it is her mission to bring all to Christ. I'm sorry? Are we likely to employ you, Beth?

Of course if we're going for unsuitable candidates we might choose Sylvia who says she's a practising nudist but for us not to worry because it doesn't get in the way of her doing the vacuuming. Or Elsie, who believes in discipline. Then there's 30-year Evie from Latvia who provides a photograph of herself wearing a Santa hat and writes 'I am in the police'. Alexia seems promising but says she'll only come over if we let her boyfriend stay. Or Clara, who wants a full salary with two zeroes at the end of each week, plus use of the family car at weekends and four days off a week to go to the gym. We could choose Stephan, of course, who says he wants to work in a family where there are no children. Or perhaps Augusta would get on well here. She says she's a perfectionist and a mess in the house gives her panic attacks.

But we've perservered. And today we're in negotiations with Sasha, who might come to see us for a day when her university exams are over. Sasha is a German native speaker who works 'in a centre where blind people help educate a dog'. So we need help with German, and she needs help with English. She may come over in April. If she does, I'll let you know. And you never know. She could be normal.