It’s has been a glorious sunny spring day here in Melbourne today.

I, for one, have been cursing all this rain (yeah, yeah, we need it, I know) for the past few weeks.   There is nothing quite so difficult to manage as two small boys with boundless energy cooped up inside the house for days on end…and a house more suited to a family of four than five, at that!  It’s even harder to get my ten month old daughter  to sleep with all their racket going on!

By eight o’clock this morning, determined to take full advantage of the weather (this is Melbourne remember-we never know how long it will last!)  we were all washed, fed, dressed and ready to get outside and dig in the sandpit, bounce on the trampoline and run and jump and skip and hop to our hearts content!  (My eldest son is a painfully early riser so I was feeling the benefit of two very large, very strong coffee’s by this time!)

As we played and laughed together I reflected on how sunshine can truly affect our mood and outlook.  Forget serotonin levels, and melotonin producing pineal gland’s (huh?) – anything that can not only  motivate me to strip off all the beds and do four loads of washing in one morning, but make me think I am actually enjoying it, is nothing short of miraculous!  My newly acquired motivation also saw me cleaning a few old and dusty and ever so slightly neglected corners of the house while the children napped.

(Oh all right…I admit it!  Only two slept.  I plonked the other one in front of the TV for an hour to watch Dora the Explorer while I scaled the far reaches of my kitchen cupboards perched on a wobbly chair).

Of course, I assured my husband that this newly found passion for domesticity will no doubt be very short lived.  In other words, don’t get your hopes up honey!  By the time summer hits and the temperatures rise…it’ll just be too hot and sticky to be bothered with fussing and cleaning and polishing and scrubbing and all that malarky.

Winter?  No I’m far too busy throwing logs on the fire and wiping my children’s snotty noses.  And Autumn, well…um…you know…there are always lots of pretty red leaves and pine cones on the ground to collect at the park with the kids.  I’m far too busy to wash windows or clean out my car.

Anyway…I console myself, thinking about all those mythological Super-mums who apparently carry out this kind of behaviour on a regular basis  (frankly, I prefer to believe in the tooth fairy or Santa)…that’s why it’s called ‘spring cleaning.’