We celebrated The Wictor’s birthday last Saturday.

On Sunday morning when he woke up, he was 4 years old! On the way to the store, he led his brother and sister in a game of finding all the number 4s in the world outside. Street signs, house numbers, advertising hoardings… isn’t it amazing how many number 4’s there are in the world? Number 4’s just like The Wictor!

Mommy? He said, Remember yesterday when I was three? And I had my party at the gymnastics club?

We had his party at the gymnastics club. The one where I have just very expensively enrolled all three of my children, despite the fact that one of them is very athletic but is more interested in having fun than in making precise movements with his limbs, one would fall off a couch if you sat her on it (and frequently, she does) and the other … has just turned 4. Oh well, they enjoy it.

The Wictor had specifically requested this venue for its inflatable train, and it was only after I had booked and paid for the thing that he announced he loved the train but was also too scared to go inside it. In the end he did, just the one time, with the wonderful Coach Matt. Then we watched while his friends went around again … and again … and again….

Coach Matt also led the children in bouncing and swinging and jumping their way through the place … and as an added bonus, all the serious gymnasts were away at a meet that day, so the little gymnasts got to go into the Big Gym!

(My photos get very blurry at this point as I was trying to hide some serious hurt, having just broken my little toe on a piece of gym equipment. The Show Must Go On! Unfortunately Coach Matt had made me sign a waiver, so I will get no compensation for Pain and Suffering for that one. And I was such a great actress, smiling heroically through the tears, that I didn’t even get any sympathy. Not even from the Daddy, who when I unwrapped it the next day and showed it to him all purple and swollen said “Oh, I thought you were just being overdramatic”).

This was actually The Wictor’s first ever real birthday party. Last year he didn’t have one partly because I didn’t have time to organize it, but also because his birthday falls two weeks into Summer Vacation. Although Summer Vacation lasts 10 weeks, everybody seems to leave during the first month. In the end six children turned up, which with my three was just enough to make a party. And The Wictor was delighted.

Mommy? He asked me this morning “Am I still four?”

On Sunday on the spur of the moment I decided to pressure wash our concrete patio. Usually this job falls to The Daddy but I am a little (cough) more detail oriented than he is, and I wanted to (cough) see if I could do a better job than he does. An experiment, if you will.

Could I do a better job at pressure washing the back patio than The Daddy? Well after two hours wearing jeans and boots in 90 degree heat, getting splashed with water and splattered with dirt, it turns out the answer is :

WHO CARES?????

My first introduction to the World Wide Web (as we then so quaintly called it) was in 1994. I remember The Daddy was very excited and I was … slightly less so. Apart from the Louvre web site which actually involved !! color photos !! it was essentially a load of documents which you couldn’t get at right away. He would click away for hours at hyperlinks and jump from greyish blue page to greyish blue page, all the while nattering on about how this was Our Future … while I sat waiting 25 minutes for Page 2 of The Louvre to load (well it was very bandwidth-intensive, those pictures were color, you know), picking at my cuticles and trying not to fall asleep.

Then in 1995 when we were out looking for our First Real Jobs, The Daddy badgered me to put “internet user since 1994″ on my CV. This would prove that I was technologically savvy and had been so for quite a while (and actually no, young people currently clutching their sides in mirth, I am not kidding). I scoffed and wriggled and tried to get out of it  and then thought What The Heck. So,  a week later I got a call for a job. They needed someone who knew what the Internet was (little people, get up off the floor, that was not a joke either), for a slightly technical role which also involved liaising with Blue Chip clients, which is why they would consider employing a girl.

Shortly after this that I stopped Assuming That The Daddy was Always Wrong, which is how we ended up in America. But that is another story, in fact one which has already been told, though I am too lazy to link to it right now.

Moving on. Our life from that point on was defined by computers, and mostly by the Internet. By this stage there were already a lot more color photos, this thing was becoming quite fun! Through the heady days of the 128K modem (we were ahead of the curve. That thing cost us £180), dialling up 50 or 100 times in the hope of getting a connection at the other end, the excitement of the first cable modem, DSL and almost immediate downloads, blogging, the iPhone… We first learned about, and followed the events of 9/11 on the CNN website, where it popped up before it hit any overseas news media. We transferred address books to Yahoo and categorized businesses by whether they had a web site (web site: yes!  No web site: no, you loser, you may be perfectly good at clipping hedges but no, no, no). If we were bored, we surfed aimlessly, hopping from site to site…

Surfing has taken a back seat lately. Unless you count inserting the DVD of Barbie In A Mermaid Tale for the one millionth time.

My life has changed a lot. The T-Bot is back at school, and I am devoting minimal time to internet businesses  and more time to doing stuff in the real world. Including rebuilding my IRL relationships, which suffered when I was putting one foot in front of the other. I actually consider myself lucky so many friends have stuck around. And tidying the mess hastily pushed into cupboards when I didn’t really have time to tidy. Calling in the relevant tradesmen to undertake much-needed facelifts around the place (No, not my face, thank you). Building furniture. And seeing to quite a lot of  DIY.

I mean, a back door isn’t a back door unless you can actually turn the handle to get out. In the absence of DIY it is just a piece of wall with a static handle. Luckily not also a fire hazard as for some reason there are three back doors in this house. But you know, it is nice to have the choice whether to go out of one door, or another 3 feet away.

And so, little by little, the computer has stopped being the default option. I no longer automatically sit down at my desk whenever I have 5 minutes to spare. My house is the tidiest it has ever been. My children have clean clothes to wear. I have all three of them home over summer vacation, and sometimes I just sit in the sun, watch them and relax.

That’s why you haven’t seen me around for a while. And really, that’s how life should be