It's 3:15, we have aunts coming for tea at 4:00, and somewhere in the apartment there is a sock lying on someone's bedroom floor. That's enough to put Therese and me in drill-sergeant mode, and we scrub the entire apartment left, right and sideways. I do dishes. Therese vacuums. The three children whine about the unfairness of being made to do their 5%. Getting them to do it is more work than doing it myself (and they know that—it's part of their strategy), but at 3:58 the place is spotless, the dining room arrayed for a tea party Jane Austen could write about.
Our Austrian aunts are very aunt-like: cheerful, doting on the children, and of course bearing a two-ton chocolate cake, wrapped in a box with a ribbon. After cake and tea I politely excuse myself to go entertain the kids, whose interest in the conversation waned once their cake plate was scraped clean.
We play my patented "What Do You Want?" game, which has to be one of the dumbest games ever invented in the history of fatherhood, but the kids make me play it again and again. (It's basically an excuse to throw giggling children into a pile of pillows on the bed.) Even Cornelia, who's immersed in her paint-by-number, gets sucked in. "Hey guys, stop making me laugh, I'm trying to concentrate." To which I retort, "Stop making us concentrate, we're trying to laugh."
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