Sebastian and Annabelle weren’t mad keen on watching the coronation today. I tried to persuade them, on the basis that ‘it’s history’ but they weren’t having any of it. I do think this is a shame; I’m convinced that by the next coronation they will have done away with all this pomp and ceremony so this will be the last chance to see something like this. But the lure of YouTube was too great.

Of course, they didn’t miss much. My best bits were Floella Benjamin (sadly they don’t know who she is) and Penny Mordaunt’s upper body strength (not that impressive to a young thing with all the energy in the world); but let’s face it the rest was a bit dull. I did call them through for the actual crown bit which they were greatly bemused by. When a gold cape was presented to the king Annie said, “Is that a blanket?” A minute later Hue Edwards said it was the robe of righteousness so I told her this and all she said was, “It looks uncomfortable”. Which, to be fair, it did. After it was done Sebastian said, “Do we have to watch the Queen get crowned too?” as if this would be the worst thing in the world. I said no, and they both scampered back to YouTube.

Should they have cared more? I dunno. They have done a lot of coronation things at school – they made crowns and had a picnic yesterday where apparently the Head Teacher dressed up as the King (?) and they watched a Newsround special – so maybe they have coronation fatigue. Or maybe this is a sign of the decreasing relevance of all this ceremony and formality. Or maybe they are just kids; not sure I would have been bothered about it at 10 or 11 either.

Annie just came back through. “Is that still on?”

It is 8.40pm. It was bedtime 40 minutes ago. There were stories and kisses and tucking-ins; and nightlights are glowing and audiobooks are merrily chirping in the kids’ bedrooms. There is, however, so far NO SLEEPING.

This is not an unusual state of affairs. Despite spending all day tearing round the house it seems that the children are never tired enough at bedtime to go to sleep sensibly. So there are invariably more kisses and more tuckings-up and trips to the bathroom and cries for water after actual bedtime.

And – not always, but often – the random Sebastianisms. Sometimes he starts wheeling off facts about dinosaurs. Sometimes his plan for the level he will make if he ever gets Mario Create (no, I don’t know what that is either). Something about ‘Beast Quest’ or dragons is also a popular choice (he tells me, with supreme self-assurance, that if I ever need to know anything about dragons then he’s the person to ask). Tonight’s contribution was about steam and water rising. We adore his clever little brain. But, honestly, sometimes we would rather he just went to sleep.

So we’ve moved house. Again. We have finally managed to buy somewhere after years of renting and obviously we are delighted.

But this exciting development comes with downsides. And the biggest one of all is packing. Four kids means we have A LOT of stuff. And although it was FOREVER between getting our offer accepted and getting confirmation it was all going through, once we got that green light suddenly it all started going very fast. We didn’t pack before then because obviously that would have jinxed it. So we were left with a ton of stuff and not much time in which to pack it. And that’s where the laps of the kitchen come in.

Picture the scene: it’s 10am on a Saturday and you’ve been up since 7. The objective for the day is to load all the already packed boxes into the van and then pack more. There is bubble wrap all over the floor, like a flood of plastic, and half-packed boxes are everywhere. The cats are freaking out. You’re already tired, and aching, and panicking about too-much-stuff-too-little-time-too-few-boxes. And then Sebastian starts running.

Sebastian rarely does anything slowly (unless, of course, it’s bedtime or you’re in a bona fide hurry) so the sight of him dashing about the place isn’t unusual. However he is usually going from one place to another; seeing him running in literal circles around me as I packed was bizarre to say the least.

“I’m just doing my laps of the kitchen,” he said when I asked him what he was doing.

My laps of the kitchen. In the same way I might say, I’m doing my marking, or someone having physio might say, I’m doing my exercises. As if this is a normal part of a routine. Except this was the first time he’d ever done it.

I managed to get him to stop. Sadly, the hyperactive behaviour has been a recurring feature of the move (so excited by having stairs, Sebastian and Annabelle were sledging down them while I was trying to clean inside the kitchen cupboards to unpack plates) and there may have been a lot of shouting.

We are in the new house now. With all the boxes now to unpack, a task almost as awful as packing them in the first place. But at least we know we won’t be doing it again until Sebastian is far too old to be doing laps of the kitchen.

We are SO into Harry Potter right now in our house. I mean, myself and things 1 and 2 have been into Harry Potter since forever – but now the smalls are getting into it too. We have watched all the films, listened to the first 5 audiobooks, and are almost finished The Philosopher’s Stone as a bedtime story book. They are collecting mini Funko Harry Potter figures, and even drew Hogwarts one morning of the Easter holidays (I was particularly impressed at the elements they included without being reminded of them, such as Crookshanks and the Beauxbatons carriage).

I am delighted by Sebastian and Annabelle talking about what their Patronuses would be (a giraffe and a fox, in case you were wondering). And I was most tickled by a Buzzfeed quiz putting Annabelle in Slytherin (like, duh).

However one aspect of the Pottermania I am LESS keen on is the fact that, as well as practising their ‘Expecto Patronum’ on the Dementors in the garden, the children are now blasting each other with the unforgivable curses. I tried to stop them properly hearing ‘Avada Kedavra’, I really did, but they eventually figured it out. And ‘Crucio’ required little committed listening on their part. So now instead of hearing cries of ‘Annie is a poo poo head’ and ‘Sebastian’s annoying’ from the back of the car, we hear exchanges of ‘Crucio’, accompanied by the pointing of pretend wands.

I would imagine it probably says a lot about me that I find this more upsetting than them just randomly insulting each other (What’s that you say? Me? Overly invested in a fictional world? Never…) but perhaps them being so captivated by a book character is a good thing, even if they are preparing for futures as Death Eaters.

Getting food into Sebastian is an ongoing struggle. Tonight, as a treat, I let him have a floor picnic in the sitting room to avoid the usual conflict over whether or not expecting him to sit on his bottom at a table is an unreasonable expectation. In hindsight this was a mistake.

I lovingly prepared fish finger sandwiches (ketchup on one slice of the bread and salad cream on the other, as requested) and placed them on trays on the floor. Initially all appeared well. The children were sitting down happily and no-one had said, “But I don’t LIKE IT!” Foolishly I turned my back (to go and fetch my own fish finger sandwich). Rookie error. Next thing I know there was a crash. Sebastian had stood up (no idea why), lost his balance and stood on his dinner so as not to fall.

I am not making him a second dinner (besides, there are no more fish fingers). His feet are clean, having had a bath only this lunchtime. This is still his dinner. But it seems that stood-on sandwiches are quite difficult to eat. You’d think that they’d be less likely to break, the two halves being squashed together. But no. They are in fact incredibly fragile and keep disintegrating. Even cutting the sandwiches into smaller pieces hasn’t helped. He has taken three bites and given up.

Another meal, another failure for mum.

“I left them at Nana and Grandad’s”.

Sebastian has come out with some very interesting responses to comments from his dad and I recently. I can’t decide whether he is deliberately upping the ante on the ‘cheeky response’ front or whether it is accidental. Either way, it is very amusing.

Today’s “I left them at Nana and Grandad’s” isn’t my favourite ‘Sebastianism’ from the summer though. That dubious honour goes to saying – in response to being told to calm down and behave himself – “But I’m overtired”. He undoubtedly was, so I suppose he could be congratulated on his self-awareness, but it is rather galling that he seems to rarely listen to anything that is said to him, and yet he is able to parrot back words and phrases at will.

Sebastian starts school a week today. I am hoping that he keeps his newfound list of cheeky excuses for home use only, otherwise I could see him getting some interesting comments from his teacher on his first parents’ evening.

I actually said this quite a while ago, but it has come back to haunt me. There are a few feeds I follow on Twitter and Facebook that poke fun at the whole British urban middle class liberal experience: among them, ‘Overheard in Waitrose’. They post – unsurprisingly – ridiculous things that have been heard in Waitrose: “No Tarquin, we prefer black olives on our artisan foccachia” sort of stuff. Real first world problems.

Well, Sebastian and Annabelle love brioche. Not the artisan kind. The kind that has chocolate chips and comes in bags of eight preschooler-hand-sized rolls. It is an easy, mess-free breakfast that generally ends up in their tummies rather than on the floor or in the bin. So we buy a lot of brioche. 

We also – a family of six goes through a lot of food – go to the supermarket quite frequently. And this is where it happened.

It was an evening after work so everyone was tired. We (stupidly) put Sebastian and Annabelle in the double-seat trolley and they were – as usual – treating each other as punchbags, with Sebastian being the ringleader. Finally, in the bread aisle, I had had enough. I snapped. I threatened Sebastian that if he didn’t stop hitting there would be no brioche. And – for once – it worked.

Later that night I posted my comment – “Sebastian, stop hitting your sister or you won’t get any brioche!” – to the Overheard in Waitrose page, and added something along the lines of, ‘I’m so ashamed, I sound like an awful middle class cliché like the ones you make fun of’. I was poking fun at myself, honestly. So imagine my horror when I saw this: 

They used my quotation. And not in a way that acknowledged my intention to self-mock. In a way that turned me into one of the people they were showing up as ludicrous. THE SHAME. And then, to compound my misery, other FB feeds – like The Poke – started to share the post, and it was all over my FB feed. 

The moral of the story? It could be not to bother mocking yourself on social media lest your comments end up being used in a way you had not intended. Or it could be to avoid threatening your children in supermarkets. Or it could be to not eat brioche unless you plan on making your own.

My children love minions. Actually that’s a lie. Thing 1, aged 18, has an inordinate amount of disdain for the obnoxious yellow Tic Tacs of doom. But the other three, they love minions, and somewhat predictably a cuddly example of the species has found its way into our home. Just one. And therein lies the problem. Admittedly it’s not a problem for Thing 2, who limits her minion admiration for liking memes on Facebook, just a problem for Sebastian and Annie. Sadly, it is the Sebastian-and-Annie problems that seem to generate the most chaos.

I’m sure you can guess what’s coming next. 1 minion + 2 preschoolers = arguments. Annie, being both dangerously insane and three years old, is quite unsubtle in her attempts to gain possession of the minion. This evening, for example, she divebombed out of her car seat before I’d had a chance to fasten her in to try and snatch it out of a bag. Sebastian is much more cunning.

This is how it goes. Annie has the minion. She puts it down for a second, distracted by a yearning for a biscuit, and poof! It’s gone. Then she wants the minion. Wants it so much she HOWLS. And where is the minion? Nowhere, it seems. So we look for it. It cannot be found. We ask her where she left it but predictably she does not know.  We ask Sebastian.

“I don’t know,” he says. He is lying.

Eventually the minion is found, stuffed under the sofa. It’s too big to have got there by itself, and too far in for Annie’s arms to have stuffed it in. 

“Sebastian, how did this get here?” we ask. 

“It was a ghost,” he says. A ghost? A ghost who likes stuffing minions under sofas (although frankly, it’s the best place for them)? I don’t think so. But he sticks to his story. “A ghost,” he says. “With ARMS.”

So we pull the minion out and give it to Annie. And no doubt the whole thing will kick off again in three…two…one…”MINION!”

In the new house, Sebastian has a new big-boy bed from Ikea, and Annie now has the toddler bed. Being a sentimental fool, I can’t bear to part with the cot they’ve both slept in; so I have turned it into a little sofa for reading bedtime stories. It’s lovely to snuggle with a toddler on each side and a Mr Men book in each hand. So far, so Pinterest. What I didn’t anticipate was Sebastian using this snuggle time as an opportunity to chew my clothes. Or, to be more specific, chew the button on my sleeve. It’s hard to concentrate on Mr Fussy when all you can hear is the sound of teeny toddler teeth biting on plastic, and you have slobber on your arm. Fortunately he did stop (on the fourth time of asking). Maybe he has had Mr Greedy read to him one too many times?

Sebastian is – somewhat bafflingly – nearly three. This means that we are testing the waters of such rites of passage as potty training, dummy weaning and sippy cup abandoning (all of which he does much better with at nursery than at home). This weekend, with meals, Sebastian has had a regular beaker cup rather than a sippy. And he’s done brilliantly – no spills! – apart from the fact he seems to want to use his beakers as shoes once they are empty. Hardly the last word in sartorial elegance or good table manners. But Sebastian is an innovator, who are we to argue?